The Buddy System

Teachers at progressive schools are collaborating to improve their students learning—and their own.

By Tony Wagner

Imagine, for a moment, that you want to learn how to play a sport or a musical instrument, but you’ve never seen the sport or heard the instrument played well, and there are no coaches available. You can only practice in a room all by yourself, day in and day out. How good will you be?

Of course, athletes and musicians, even amateurs, have ample access to coaches and to examples of best practices, and they are constantly subjecting their performances to the judgments of others. But most of us who are educators have none of the benefits enjoyed by even serious amateurs in other fields. Good coaches for teaching and leadership, or even videotapes of excellent teaching, are virtually nonexistent, and our “performances” are rarely critiqued by others.

In many ways, teaching and leadership in schools and districts are still more like 19th-century “handicrafts”—which usually required skills that you learned on your own and practiced alone for most of your career. And as with handicrafts like weaving or pottery, how skillful you become may be more a matter of having an innate “gift” than learning how to improve. Some craftsmen are, indeed, artists, but many are not. Most of us in education are mediocre at what we do, despite our talents and good intentions, because we have too few opportunities to observe and be observed, to discuss “problems of practice” with colleagues—in a word, to be a part of what educational researcher Etienne Wenger...