Collaboration and contrived collegiality: Revisiting Hargreaves in the age of accountability

Andy Hargreaves is internationally renowned for his work on many topics related to educational change. His work on how educational change shapes teachers’ work, particularly with respect to teacher collaboration, is well exemplified in his award-winning 1994 volume, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. In this volume, he taught us the important difference between collaborative cultures and contrived collegiality. This article will bring Hargreaves’ ideas about teacher collaboration to bear as I investigate a current educational reform movement: data-driven decision making. I describe how two school systems integrated teacher collaboration as an important feature of their movements towards using data, and I explain the consequences of their efforts. I close by raising critical issues for educators and researchers to address as we consider the role of teacher collaboration in the age of accountability.