What this means

Real teams and partnerships consist of individuals - and organisations - with different yet complementary knowledge or skills. They create something together that could not have been developed by any one person or organisation.

Real teams also bring together teachers', parents' and students' knowledge and insights, which is the main way to add value.

The idea of complementarity in real teams and partnerships may become a core idea in education. It refers to:

• How the knowledge and insights of parents can complement those of teachers, and vice versa, and how the limitations of one may be matched by the strengths and insights of the other
• How an educator or school with an academic focus can complement the work of another with an applied learning focus. Students ultimately benefit from the mix
• How real-world and abstract learning tasks complement each other and are part of what Professor David Clarke calls “an integrative theory of classroom practice and learning”
• How primary and secondary school teachers complement each other by sharing their expertise and developing a unified P-12 approach to schooling.

These complementarities obviously require system thinking and system action from educational leaders.

As schools (and clusters and networks of schools) build on past complementarities and identify and build new complementarities, only real teams and partnerships can tap the immense power of complementarities!

How do schools do this? It always begins with genuine dialogue! Dialogue is a structured process that draws on various voices among staff and within a school community or cluster. As modelled in many schools, it can be a rich source of innovative ideas and mutual understanding and respect.

case study

To be developed.

ACTION CHECKLIST

To be developed.