A Case Study of Collaborative Behavior in an Australian Parish Catholic School

Abstract

This dissertation investigated that if staff in the workplace became aware of their joint professional practices would there be an increase in collaborative behaviour. The research was a case study undertaken at a local parish Catholic primary school which was a small rural school with an attendance of approximately 150 pupils. About 50% of the pupils were not of Catholic background. Catholic Education and the school agreed for the research to proceed. Nine of the twenty staff volunteered to be research participants. Six were involved in planning pupils outcomes, assessing pupils' needs and abilities, moderating results, report writing etc. They were asked to answer a benchmarking questionnaire. Only four of the research participants felt capable of completing the questionnaire and their results showed a severe lack of development of both individual and collaborative professional practices in these areas. As an individual case study no attempt will therefore be made to generalize the implications of the results to other school environments. The investigation was based on a pragmatic approach using a mixed method/mixed model research design. The quantitative methodology chosen to examine the perceptions of the staff in relation to collaboration utilized Repertory Grid dendritic multivariate analysis and is based on Kelly's Personal Construct Theory (1991) as interpreted by Enquire Within (Stewart, 2004) which is an interactive Windows based software enabling one to complete a rigorous cognitive map of someone's perceptions and judgments about a topic such as collaboration in the workplace. In this instance, as with semi-structured in-depth interviews, data was quantized, interpreted and thus requalitized in the process which was an integral part of the interviews with the research participants. Other support statistical information was gained through frequency counts, percentages of occurrence, rank ordering of data, strength scores and Pearson bivariate correlations. The written transcriptions of the digitally recorded semi-structured in-depth interviews were obviously critical qualitative data for the investigation. Traditionally through the transfer system of the hierarchical administration in state public schools there is much greater mobility of staff in such a school than with a small parish primary school similar to the one involved in the investigation. The local Catholic parish has, therefore, a very strong influence on the enculturalization of staff within the workplace which brings with it community joint intentionality.