Which individual and institutional factors facilitate collaboration between teachers in primary schools?

Abstract

Collaboration between teachers is seen as having great potential for dealing with the complex everyday challenges that arise in schools. But collaboration is not something that is necessarily implemented in schools. In a cross-sectional study, this paper investigates collaboration among colleagues in German schools, based on a questionnaire of N = 489 primary school teachers. Using a linear regression allowing for the multilevel structure of the data, we explored the extent to which different demographic, competence-related, and institutional characteristics make the implementation of specific forms of collaboration more likely. The results show that the teachers experienced the collaboration forms “exchange” and “co-construction” at different levels, with “exchange” being more prevalent. There are similarities, but also differences, in the predictive factors for each form of collaboration. While the perception of collective self-efficacy and the interplay of organisational framework and the set-up of working spaces proved to be predictive for both forms, enthusiasm only played a role in “exchange” and teaching experience was only predictive for “co-construction”.