Stop Flying Solo: Why Teacher Collaboration Beats the Superhero Myth

Feeling inadequate when another teacher connects with your student in a way you couldn’t? You’re not alone. In this episode of “If Teachers Ruled the World,” we explore why teacher collaboration is essential for both student success and teacher wellness, and how the isolated classroom model is hurting everyone. Discover practical collaborative teaching strategies and learn why asking for help isn’t admitting defeat. It’s strategic teaching.

The Moment That Changed My Perspective on Teacher Collaboration

Last week during after-school tutorials, I watched another teacher sit down with one of my students and explain a concept I’d been struggling to help her understand. My initial reaction surprised me: a flash of territorial feeling, that voice saying “this is MY student, I should be the one helping her.”

But as I listened to their conversation, something shifted. He was getting through to her in a way I hadn’t been able to. And instead of viewing that as my failure, I realized it was exactly what she needed.

This moment made me confront an uncomfortable truth about teaching: we’ve been conditioned to believe we should be superheroes who can reach every student in every way. And that belief is exhausting us.

Why We Teach in Isolation (And Why It’s Not Working)

Teaching has historically been an isolated profession. For decades, the model has been one teacher, one classroom, closed door. When I started teaching 25 years ago, you were lucky if colleagues were willing to share resources or offer advice.

While professional learning communities (PLCs) are shifting this culture, there’s still significant resistance, and for understandable reasons. Teachers value autonomy. We want to do things our way.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the isolated classroom model serves teacher egos more than it serves students.

The Systemic Barriers to Collaborative Teaching

It’s not just pride that keeps teachers from collaborating more effectively. There are real systemic barriers:

Exhaustion and time constraints. After a full day of teaching, we’re tired. We want to go home. The time for joint tutorials or collaborative planning is usually after school hours.

Scheduling conflicts. Many teachers have coaching responsibilities or other commitments that make after-school collaboration difficult.

Data comparison culture. When schools break down student scores by individual teacher without considering context, like class composition, students with IEPs, or English language learners, it creates competition rather than collaboration. This is especially damaging for newer teachers who may not understand that different student populations will score differently.

These systemic issues make collaboration feel threatening instead of supportive.

What Teacher Collaboration Actually Looks Like

Early in my career, I was teaching grammar to middle schoolers and got completely confused while explaining verbals. I was turning my students around in circles.

So I picked up the classroom landline and called the ELA teacher down the hall. “I’ve got these kids confused,” I told her. “Can we switch rooms? You straighten my students out, and at lunch, you straighten me out.”

She came to my rescue.

Did it hurt my pride a little? Yes. But it was what the students needed. And those students learned something valuable: that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Reframing Collaboration as Strategic Teaching

Here’s the reframe we need: We all have different strengths and deficits as teachers. Maybe you have deeper content knowledge about the French Revolution. Maybe I’m better at teaching document analysis. Maybe another colleague excels at building relationships with reluctant students.

When we combine our strengths instead of competing, students get the best of all of us.

Collaboration isn’t admitting you can’t do your job. It’s using all available resources strategically to serve students well.

What Needs to Change in Our Schools

Imagine if schools built collaboration into the structure of the day. A study hall period taught collaboratively by PLC teams, where teachers could rotate students and leverage each other’s strengths in real-time.

I also think we need to restructure PLCs to focus less on data comparison that creates hierarchy and more on “let’s see what’s working and teach each other.” Less comparison, more collaborative learning.

Moving Forward: Permission to Not Be Everything

The most important permission we can give ourselves is this: you don’t have to be everything to every student.

That feeling of inadequacy when you can’t reach a student the way you think you should? It’s normal. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad teacher. It means you’re human with strengths and limitations, just like every other teacher.

This week, consider: Is there a colleague whose strength complements your weakness? Is there someone you could invite into your tutorial time? Someone you could ask for help?

You’re not admitting defeat. You’re being strategic, smart, and putting student learning above personal pride.

Key Takeaways: Teacher collaboration isn’t about admitting inadequacy. It’s about recognizing that combining our individual strengths creates better outcomes for students than any of us could achieve alone. Stop flying solo and start building the support systems that help both teachers and students thrive.

Key Moments:

1:15 – Introduction to teacher wellness and the challenge of maintaining boundaries while supporting students through after-school tutorials and office hours

3:26 – Confronting feelings of inadequacy and fear when another educator connects with your students, and how teacher mental health impacts our response to collaboration

5:37 – Breaking down the isolated classroom model and understanding why professional learning communities face resistance despite their benefits for reducing teacher isolation

7:04 – Examining systemic barriers to teacher collaboration including exhaustion, competitive data comparison, and the real threat of teacher burnout

9:45 – Reimagining school structures to support collaborative teaching through built-in collaboration periods and teacher support strategies that leverage collective strengths

11:11 – A personal story about asking for help with grammar instruction and what students learn when we model vulnerability and classroom collaboration

13:27 – Key takeaways: Reframing teacher collaboration as strategic teaching, restructuring PLCs for genuine learning, and advocating for co-teaching opportunities that prioritize student needs over ego

Resources and Links

Keeping the Door Open to Collaboration, Edutopia – Helpful suggestions to make teacher collaboration work.

Hidden barriers to teacher collaboration, Rod J. Naquin – Explores some barriers to teacher collaboration and offers suggestions to mitigate those barriers.

Some Cool Things That Have Come out of Collaboration at My School:

One Engaging Closing Activity: ‘Previously On’ for Contextualization in the Classroom

How To Spin the Old-Fashioned Lecture for Micro Attention Spans

Prefer Reading? I’ve Got You…

Teacher Wellness and Collaboration – Podcast Transcript

Show Transcript

1:15 Hey everyone, and welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. I’m Leah Cleary, and this month we’re kicking things off with a little talk about teacher wellness, specifically about something I experienced recently that made me confront some uncomfortable feelings about myself as a teacher. So let me paint you a picture. Last week I was running tutorials. That’s what I call my Wednesday afternoon office hours. Any student who wants to come can come between 3:45 and 5:00 p m, and I’m always trying to get students to show up because, you know, our class sizes have increased dramatically and this is a chance for them to get individual help, a chance for us to go back over content and skills that they’re struggling with now. Getting high schoolers to come to these things is always a challenge. They have games and clubs and part time jobs. Their school day is over and they just want to go home. And some of them don’t have a ride because the buses don’t run at 5 p m. They run at 3:45. So there are a lot of legitimate reasons why students might not show up.

2:31 But on this particular day, the room was pretty full. I was helping students through test corrections, going from one student to the next to the next, and the other AP world history teacher in my building was also in my room. And here’s where it gets, oh, I’m going to say interesting for me. I noticed that he sat down with one of my students. And yes, I’m emphasizing my on purpose because that possessiveness is part of what I need to talk about today. He sat down with one of my students and started explaining some content that she was grappling with, helping her understand why a particular answer on a test was correct. Because for test corrections, students have to explain why the right answer is correct. Write all about each question they missed. That whole thing.

3:26 So he’s sitting there with her, and I kind of drifted a little closer, started listening in, and I thought, okay, this is good. This is really, really good. But I also had this other thought, this initial gut reaction of, well, dang, this is my student. I want to be the one who helps her. And I know that’s weird. I know that might sound territorial or petty, but I did have that thought and it was real. Now, here’s the thing I want to talk about, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. My initial emotional response was fear. Fear of being seen as an inadequate. That immediate thought of, oh gosh, I should be able to explain this to her. If I can’t do that, what does that say about me? Am I even worth my paycheck? See, my initial feeling was inadequacy, pure and simple. But then, and this is the important part. I listened to what he was saying. I watched how she was responding, and I realized, he’s really getting through to her. This is making sense to her in a way that I wasn’t able to make it make sense.

4:51 And that realization shifted something for me. See, I think as teachers and maybe this is especially true for women. I don’t know, because a lot of us have the whole mommy syndrome where we think we have to be everything to everybody. I think we carry this expectation that we should be able to reach every single student in every single way, that if we can’t crack the code with a particular kid, we’re somehow failing. But watching my colleague help my student made me realize something important. We’re not superheroes. We were never supposed to be superheroes. And honestly, it’s a relief to stop pretending we are.

5:37 This made me think about the bigger pattern here. For whatever weird reason, teaching has historically been a very isolated profession. When I first started teaching, you were lucky if you had somebody in your department who was willing to share resources, who was willing to offer you advice, and I was lucky I did have that, thankfully. I don’t think I would have made it this long if I didn’t. But we have normalized the isolation classroom model. The teacher as solo performer or the teacher as performer at all. The closed door, the individual kingdom, the this is how I do things mentality. And that’s why now, as the educational landscape shifts more toward a collaborative model with PLCs, professional learning communities, you’re getting a lot of pushback from teachers, especially older teachers like me, who want to keep doing things their way. And I do want to keep doing things my way. There’s something about autonomy that feels essential to good teaching, but I also see the benefit in learning from my colleagues. It not only benefits me by spreading the work and taking some of the load off, because in our job we do carry a heavy load, but it’s also what’s best for my students.

7:04 So what stops teachers from doing joint tutorials more often? From collaborating after school, from tag teaming difficult concepts, from sharing the teaching load in practical ways? Well, pride. Definitely pride. That fear of looking inadequate that I just described. Lack of trust sometimes, especially in environments where teachers feel like they’re competing rather than collaborating. But I also want to be honest about the systemic barriers here, because it’s not just about teacher ego. We’re exhausted. Sometimes we just want to go home after school, and the time to do joint tutorials is generally after school hours. Some teachers coach. My colleague who teaches world geography with me is a coach, and he has a very strict after school commitments. Coaches do a lot outside of the classroom, so logistically it’s just not possible for us to run joint tutorials that often.

8:11 And here’s another systemic issue that I think actually works against collaboration. The way we break down student scores by teacher, by classroom. Now I understand the practice. I get it when we look at benchmark data by teacher, we can see which teacher might be doing a better job teaching a particular standard. That information can be useful for collaboration. But here’s what’s also true. Teachers have very different students. It’s not fair to compare my scores in a general world history class to my colleague’s scores down the hall who has a collaborative class with fifteen students with IEPs and six students who are English language learners. When you put my scores and his scores side by side, that is really unfair because a lot of times administrators don’t understand that context. Central office certainly doesn’t understand that context. And it looks like you’ve got one teacher who’s just really stellar and one who’s subpar. When actually they just have completely different student populations. This kind of data comparison, when it’s not contextualized, makes collaboration feel threatening, to be honest. It creates a competitive environment rather than a supportive one. And I think that’s especially hard on newer teachers who don’t yet have the experience to push back on unfair comparisons.

9:45 So what would it look like if schools actually structured collaboration into the school day? See, I have this dream and I don’t know if it’s even logistically possible, but hear me out. What if every school had a study hall period, a full class length study hall period where you could rotate students and maybe even have the study hall taught collaboratively with your PLC, so that students could get assistance from diverse teachers. I know there would need to be systemic changes for this. Maybe cutting down on credit requirements just a little, or making the study hall count for a very specific credit. But imagine having built in time where teachers could work together with students who need extra support, where you could leverage each other’s strengths in real time? Because here’s what I’ve learned. We all have different strengths, and we all have deficits. Let’s just go ahead and recognize that. Maybe one teacher has deeper content knowledge about a particular topic. Maybe another teacher is just really good at teaching a specific skill. Maybe another teacher is incredible at building relationships with reluctant students. We’re all good at different things. But if we combine those strengths, then we can be great. We can really make an impact.

11:11 Let me tell you a story from early in my career that illustrates this. I’d been teaching for a couple of years, maybe three, and I had gone from teaching reading instruction to grammar instruction between school years. And I thought, grammar. Grammar is so easy. I’ve got this. Well, I was teaching verbals to my middle school students, and I just got so turned around and twisted and just completely confused that I didn’t know how to get us back on track. And this was when we had landlines in our classrooms. So I literally stopped the class and said, look, guys, I got us confused here. I’m really sorry. And I picked up the landline, and I called the ELA teacher down the hall. She was on another team. We were middle school teachers that taught in teams. And I said, look, I have got these kids so confused. What are you doing right now? She told me her students were working on a project she was supervising, and I said, listen, I will owe you huge. If you come down here, let’s just switch rooms. You go to my room, I come to your room, please straighten my students out. And then at lunch, please straighten me out. And you know what she did? She came to my rescue. Now, did that hurt my pride a little bit? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Not gonna lie. It did. Because you’re supposed to be the expert in your classroom. You’re supposed to have all the answers.

12:44 But it was also what the students needed at that point. Because I wasn’t getting through to them. I was actively confusing them because the distinction among different types of verbals wasn’t as clear to me as I thought it was. And this teacher down the hall. She really did help my students. And then she turned around and helped me. And you know what? Those students learned that you don’t have to pretend to know everything. That asking for help is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. At least I hope that’s what they got out of it. Maybe they just thought their teacher was incompetent. Who knows?

13:27 So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. First, that feeling of inadequacy when you can’t reach a student the way you think you should. That’s normal. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad teacher. It means you’re a human being with strengths and limitations just like every other human being. Second, reframe collaboration. It’s not about defeat. It’s not a sign that you can’t do your job. It’s strategic teaching. It’s using all available resources to serve our students well. When I called that teacher down the hall to help with verbals, I wasn’t being unprofessional. I feel like I was being smart. I feel like I was prioritizing student learning over my own ego. When I watched my colleague connect with my students in a way I hadn’t, I wasn’t witnessing my failure. I was watching collaboration in action. Third, we need to change how we structure PLCs. Right now, they’re too often about data comparison, about making one teacher look superior to another teacher. And that’s disheartening, especially for newer teachers, when it’s not recognized that different student populations are going to score differently. What if PLCs were structured more around, let’s see what’s working and teach each other? And I get that we’re trying to use data for that. It just doesn’t play out that way. So I’m calling for less comparison, more collaboration, less hierarchy, more learning together. And finally, advocate for structures that support collaboration, whether that’s joint tutorial time, co-teaching opportunities, or built in collaboration periods during the school day. Because here’s the truth, the isolated classroom model serves teacher egos more than it serves students. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather set my ego aside and actually help kids learn.

15:43 Look, I know this is vulnerable territory. Admitting that we can’t be everything to every student feels like admitting failure in a profession that constantly tells us that we should be superheroes. But maybe the important thing we can model for our students and for each other is that we’re not supposed to be superheroes. We’re supposed to be human beings doing really hard work together. So this week I want to challenge you. Is there a colleague you could invite into your tutorial time? Is there a teacher down the hall whose strengths complement your weaknesses? Is there someone you could ask for help without feeling like you’re admitting defeat? Because you’re not admitting defeat. You’re being strategic. You’re being smart. You’re being the kind of teacher who puts student learning above personal pride. And honestly, that’s the kind of teacher I want to be. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. I’ll see you next time with some practical tips for the classroom. Until then, take care of yourselves, and remember, you do not have to be everything to everyone.

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