Improving collaboration skills in public school teams Linking professional capital and facilitation

In 2013 the Danish government decided to expand task, focus and work condition for teachers in Danish schools. Among others this meant that teachers and pedagogical staff have to work together in teams to ensure a long list of tasks: Practical, didactical, pedagogical and social task. Beforehand teachers were more autonomous and the list of tasks was limited compared to today. A common method to take care of the task is by team organizing. However, the team spent time to deal with a variety of practical tasks with the consequence that challenging pedagogical tasks such as social inclusion of pupils with special needs is often not on the agenda. Limitation of time and a lot of other tasks are understandable reasons and moreover, practical tasks are always emergency tasks with narrow deadlines. Teachers and pedagogical staff find themselves challenged according to organizing team meetings and focus on non-practical problems.
The project ‘Public schools in change – collaboration as a resource’ has the purpose to strengthen professional capital in public schools, and as a part of this to strengthen collaboration within teams. Professional capital is a concept emphasising the importance of mutual interaction between social capital, human capital and decision capital in the development of high-quality educational organizations. The intervention is organized as a course consisting of four workshop sessions among 15-20 team coordinators from one school or school unit. The research group provide insight and methods to increase the team’s ability to manage tasks and to cooperate.
In this paper we concentrate on the approach of linking development of professional capital to development of team competence. We discuss the appropriateness of the methods used to fulfil the purpose and our tentative evaluation of the usefulness of our approach to link team competence and professional capital based on observations of team meetings.

Professional capital and facilitating skills improve teamwork to manage complex problems.

Teamsamarbejde om komplekse opgaver kræver sirlige kompetencer af såvel teamleder som teammedlemmer. Med begrebet professionel kapital sættes der fokus på human- social- og beslutnings-kapital som vigtige ressourcer i teamsamarbejdet, og faciiteringsmetoder styrker teamets evne til at behandle komplekse problemer, træffe beslutninger og skabe handling.