Effective collaboration strategies for teachers and staff contribute to a stronger school community, a more positive workplace culture, and ultimately better student support. Teachers who share their knowledge and experience lift each other up. The professional and emotional benefits can profoundly impact any school or district’s goal of promoting better outcomes.
Staffing concerns top many HR teams’ priority lists these days. It’s no wonder with an ongoing teacher shortage and increasing difficulty in retaining teachers and staff. The National Center for Education Statistics recently reported historical teacher and staff shortages in public schools. As of January 2022, they found 44% of schools reported at least one teaching vacancy and 49% reported at least one non-teaching staff vacancy. Over 50% of those vacancies were due to resignations.
More troubling is the trend, with some education experts estimating a nearly three-fold teacher vacancy increase for the 2023-24 school year. Retention will prove vital for schools looking to beat the statistics. This calls for a focus on employee well-being, career satisfaction, and positive professional growth—direct benefits of better teacher and staff collaboration.
Meaningful teacher and staff collaboration happens organically—it can’t be forced. However, it can be promoted, supported, and nurtured by implementing proven strategies and facilitating peer-to-peer learning and growth conversations. Of course, technology can also play a role in helping school and district leaders improve collaboration. When you give teachers and staff more tools to facilitate working together, they’re more likely to deliver as a team.
How technology helps support collaboration strategies for teachers and staff
This blog post examines how LINQ Forms & Workflows supports proven collaboration strategies for teachers and staff. It can help your teams work together better, even across departments, by giving them a fully online, flexible way to create and fill out forms, streamline processes and workflows, and stay connected.
LINQ Forms & Workflows supports proven collaboration strategies for teachers and staff like:
- Aligning team goals with big-picture objectives
- Simplifying communication
- Focusing evaluations on growth discussions
Let’s take a look at how these tried-and-true ways of working together can be made easier with the right K‑12 operations software.
Collaboration strategy #1: Align team goals with big-picture objectives
Every team member pulls in the same direction in an effective team. That’s true for schools and districts, too. While everyone ultimately works to support student success, departments and individuals each have their own specific roles to play. Helping everyone set, track, and adapt their goals as needed helps them progress toward big-picture objectives.
How LINQ Forms & Workflows supports team alignment:
Create Teams for departments or groups of employees contributing to a common goal. This function in Forms & Workflows makes it easier to set and track vital goals while allowing the flexibility to adjust them as needed. Employees within each team get an easy way to see their goals and log progress and wins. At the same time, managers and directors get an intuitive dashboard for tracking everyone’s success.
Visualizing each team and its goals gives leaders a valuable tool for aligning everyone with big-picture objectives. They can more easily recognize each team’s effort and relate how it combines with other teams’ goals to bring high-level objectives within reach. For example, a Nutrition team organized around lunchtime efficiency can see how their success in reducing student wait times for a meal directly ladders up the financial health of the school nutrition program.
Collaboration strategy #2: Simplify team communication
Teams that work together succeed together. Being on the same page and effectively contributing ideas, thoughts, and support are crucial to team cohesiveness. That’s why improving communication can pay huge dividends in advancing collaboration.
How LINQ Forms & Workflows supports team communication:
Forms & Workflows gives everyone a single inbox for all team communications. Everyone can receive, manage, and respond to messages from one online location they can access from anywhere. They can even organize and manage message threads according to task, simplifying communication and goal alignment.
Teams using disjointed systems often find themselves checking multiple inboxes throughout the day. It’s easy for replies to get delayed or for messages to slip through the cracks. In some cases, not all inboxes are accessible on the go, further restricting teams’ ability to stay connected, collaborate, or pivot quickly when needed. Simplifying communications with a single, online-accessible inbox helps teams collaborate and thrive.
Collaboration Strategy #3: Focus evaluations on growth discussions, not paperwork
Teacher and staff evaluations often focus on what’s needed for compliance rather than meaningful collaboration between administrators, teachers, and staff. When evaluation forms and processes are cumbersome, it’s easy to understand why. It can be challenging to personalize evaluations feedback and incorporate career growth plans for each teacher and staff member. However, simplifying the compliance side of evaluations can give back valuable time to administrators so they can shift the focus to growth discussions and personalized support.
How LINQ Forms & Workflows Supports meaningful teacher and staff evaluations:
The Approvals and Workflows feature simplifies administrative processes, including teacher and staff evaluations. This gives administrators more time to provide thoughtful, personalized feedback, listen to teacher and staff concerns and questions, and prioritize growth conversations.
With automated workflows and digital forms and approvals, every step of the evaluation process gets expedited. No more waiting for paper forms to be delivered and returned. Evaluators can quickly move through compliance-required steps in the process while easily viewing who has completed their tasks and who needs a reminder.
With more time to discuss growth, administrators can nurture a more positive culture and even support better teacher and staff retention. Providing opportunities to map out career progression and develop a vision of the future gives teachers and staff a significant reason to stay. When they can see themselves working in your school or district into the future, they’ll be less driven to seek a professional future elsewhere.
Promote teacher and staff collaboration with these proven strategies
K‑12 teams that thrive on collaboration can better support student success. These strategies to help teachers and staff work better together can unlock hidden potential in your school or district. But you don’t have to go it alone. Technology can help with crucial support in simplifying workflows, opening communication lines, and ensuring compliance so administrators can focus more on people than process.
Support teacher and staff collaboration by untangling processes and workflows:
Learn how a simpler solution for school and district processes can help your team focus on collaboration. Lift the administrative burden to unleash everyone’s full potential.