Behind the closed door
There is a buzz in the corridors as the children from across the school come indoors after break time. Amy’s Year 3 class files into their room, ready for the next lesson. As the children settle into their places for maths and begin a warm-up task on the board, Amy closes the classroom door.
The activity of teaching is an inherently isolated one. Classroom doors close, literally and figuratively, and teachers are largely insulated from adult interaction. Beyond the physical isolation, there may also be a sense of intellectual isolation, as opportunities to learn from others are often limited.
Isolation is nothing new. Five decades ago, Dan Lortie’s (1975) classic study of the lives of teachers referred to structurally embedded working relationships ‘marked more by separation than interdependence’ and ‘intellectual narrowness induced by mutual isolation’. Fast forward to 2026 and we find Jordan Laidlaw, in an item for The Conversation, for example, citing research showing how ‘school infrastructures constrain collegial practices and contribute to teacher isolation.’
This matters because professional collaboration is an important ingredient in teachers’ ongoing professional learning. This point is underlined in a September 2026 publication from Rob Coe and Stuart Kime calling for a ‘revolution in professional learning’. To this end, they pinpoint building teacher expertise, as opposed to short-term interventions, as ‘the best long-term bet’ and part of this involves ‘colleagues working together on shared problems of practice.’
But when we think of ‘colleagues’, who is it we are we thinking of?
Part of the isolation potentially experienced by teachers is the insularity of individual schools or even trusts in the context of budgetary constraints and a trend towards ‘in-house’, or within-trust, professional learning. As a primary teacher I interviewed in 2024 about professional collaborations put it:
People in schools more than ever look inwards. I feel like, back in the day, I used to get out and about quite a lot…but more than ever people don’t get that opportunity.
Shared problems of practice often cross the boundaries not only within schools but also between and beyond schools so I am interested in ways we can open not only the classroom door, but the school door and find a wider community of colleagues in the locality. The ideas of local landscapes and inquiry-as-stance are helpful in thinking this through.
Local landscapes
Toby Greany and colleagues have argued that increasingly complex ‘local learning landscapes’ offer opportunities for professional learning but often lack coherence and can be hard to navigate.
At the heart of this navigation, they suggest paying attention to the roles of both place (in a world of non-place-based trusts) and teachers’ informal learning (in a world of formal professional development programmes).
One aspect of making connections beyond one’s immediate setting is the opportunity to move beyond insular approaches to broaden horizons in a space where assumptions can be constructively but safely questioned.
Inquiry as stance
Another relevant idea when considering community and collaboration in a coherent way is that of inquiry as stance, as introduced by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle (2009). ‘Inquiry’ here refers not to a specific project or procedure, but a collective commitment to questioning and acting on problems of everyday practice as a matter of habit. There are four interlocking principles at the heart of this idea.
- The transformative power of local knowledge. Practitioners, as ‘insiders’, are knowledgeable. All practice is local at its heart (while often connected to wider, global issues) and has value in its own right.
- A broad view of practice. Practice is not separated from theory. It is not simply what teachers do or say, day-to-day. Practice includes all the ways teachers co-construct, make sense of and theorise their work.
- Professional communities as catalysts for action. Teacher communities are not just about accountability and applying ‘what works’. They are creative, safe spaces where practitioners uncover, articulate and explore problems of practice.
- Social justice as an ultimate purpose. Inquiry means working both within and against the system. Pupils’ learning and life chances are enhanced through the questioning of assumptions and raising of difficult questions.
In this light, it seems that new types of professional community, focused on exploration and inquiry with a distinctly local focus might be particularly powerful. In what follows, I outline one such example, but with a view to distilling its essential features for wider relevance.
An example: the Community of Education, Inquiry and Practice (CEIP)
At the University of Nottingham, we have recently launched the CEIP which we describe as:
A collaborative space where participants can engage in dialogue, share experiences and expertise from different contexts, and co-create new understandings to collectively respond to educational opportunities and challenges in the region
Practitioners from schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings, such as museums, come together to explore common interests relating to young people in the region. The hope is that, from termly meetings, new collaborations will emerge that can develop independently of the university and in an inclusive and non-hierarchical way. While collaboration might develop into structured forms of inquiry or the co-creation of resources, it might equally involve simply a new form of dialogue between educators from diverse educational phases and settings.
Our activity so far has involved discussion and liaison over topics ranging over subjects, pedagogies and current educational issues and it has led to the formation of mutual interest groups crossing everyday boundaries between age phases and educational settings. For example, an HE lecturer has made visits to local museums to exchange ideas on promoting social justice and working with primary-aged pupils. Meanwhile, a group spanning primary, secondary, FE and HE has begun to discuss the ‘transition shock’ of entry to the teaching professional and how we might prepare newcomers both to be authentically themselves and to feel a sense of belonging in a new environment.
In all of this, we have been influenced by the idea of boundary crossing and working in the in-between spaces that exist around different practices. Etienne Wenger, for example, claims that boundaries are:
Areas of unusual learning, places where perspectives meet and new possibilities arise. Radically new insights often arise at the boundaries between communities.
Meanwhile, Sanne Akkerman and Arthur Bakker outline four mechanisms commonly associated with boundary crossing. One has been especially relevant. Identification is about clarifying our position, role and experience in relation to potential collaborators. More specifically, it involves:
- Defining and clarifying our practice in relation to others’ by exploring what we have in common and what is different
- Accepting and making sense of our co-existence and participation in different, sometimes very contrasting communities
With its focus on a diverse group of practitioners coming together as a community to explore questions of practice and make a difference to young people’s prospects in a given locality, it is easy to see in the CEIP the hallmarks of inquiry as stance.
This, however, is just one vivid example. How might primary practitioners take some of the elements and principles at work here and apply them in other contexts?
Opening the classroom door
Perhaps our fictional teacher, Amy, might think of building community in a local and informal way at three levels, within, between and beyond schools:
The concept of identification as a first step to crossing habitual boundaries raises questions such as these:
Within school
- Among your colleagues, who has similar and educational experiences and interests and whose are dissimilar? What might you learn from both groups?
- Who are the newcomers and who are the ‘old-timers’? What dos each group offer and how might their perspectives differ?
- What are the distinctive characteristics of each year group’s teachers this year?
- What are the recurrent issues currently in staffroom conversations and who shares and contrasts with your stance?
- What might teachers from one age phase learn from those in another?
Between schools
- What are the pressing local issues of shared concern and who might have a different perspective on them?
- Which schools are known for their work with groups within your local community?
- Which local school networks are you already part of but could connect with more (e.g. subject coordinators; local secondary schools; trust-level teams)?
- What three questions would you really like to ask your counterpart at a nearby school?
Beyond schools
- What local problem could your school contribute to solving, even in a small way?
- Which other local educators does your school cross already paths with (e.g. from museums; sports clubs; charities) and could you collaborate on something new?
- What initiatives exist that connect schools to the wider community? Schools of Sanctuary is one example but there are many around the country centred on the arts, environmental issues, etc.
- How could your school get involved more informally with a community organisation and who would you need to talk to?
At all of these levels, who are the neighbours and potential collaborators in your local landscape and how might they help you to keep the door ajar this year?
References
Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. Teachers College Press.
Lortie, D. C. (1975, 2020). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. University of Chicago press.