This paper reports first findings from a collaborative teaching and school development project in Western Norway. This project has different objectives. With regard to students, it aims to make a measurable contribution to reducing educational inequality, further it aims to enable students to lead successful and satisfying lives (Nussbaum, 2011). In terms of teachers, the project is intended to develop local school cultures, where teachers actively care for and have solidarity with each other as collaborative and cooperating professionals (Hargreaves & O`Connor 2018, Werler 2018). In doing so, the teacher-researcher collaboration is strengthening teachers’ autonomy that was – surprisingly – documented as being rather weak compared to typical curriculum countries (Tahirsylaj, 2018).

The project

Currently, schools are considered by local and national governance systems as successful when students and schools can point to continuously increasing test results steaming from large scale assessments (Gunnulfsen, 2018). Both variables are seen as directly related to the success of governmental school development programmes building upon the use of correlational big data (Udir 2014). This is even true when the success of such programs has been empirically questioned (Seland, Vibe & Hovdhaugen 2013; Werler & Færevaag 2017). In order to develop and improve teachers pedagogical capacity a teacher-researcher project was developed.

In order to realize it, principals, teachers and researchers come together to build an shared vision of schooling and learning, capacity building, problem identification, learning about students, learning to identify related issues and debating problem solving strategies.

The core of the activities is guided by the idea of developing collaborative work between teachers and researchers. In our case we are focussing on replacing individual autonomy by collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves & O`Connor 2018). At the same time the wider aim of the initiative is to achieve a sustainable culture of school development enhancing student’s capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011).

To achieve this, teachers must be evaluation competent. Hence, teachers must learn about the nature of data, in order to learn how practice experiences can more than individual views. Teachers will learn to ask in a collaborative way relevant, systematic questions towards practice. Teachers will also learn to collect and analyse data for the use of practice development. The teacher-researcher team applies the concept of small data didaktik (Lindstrom &Heath 2016; Sahlberg, 2018). In contrary to big data this concept allows for place-based analysis of causal relationships. Small data is coming from collaborative classroom observations, discussions about the student’s world of living and the curriculum development initiatives. Small data is can be any kind of data that matters, that provides timely and meaningful insights and that is common to all teaching staff. Small data didaktik is a way to support the development of teachers' professional skills, it as a tool in the development of teachers' didactic rational way of approaching the classroom.

Further, teachers must be willingly to change their ways of working. Inspired by Hargreaves & O`Connor (2018), to work collaboratively means, that teachers are enabled to work embedded in the culture and life of the local school, where they care for and have solidarity with each other as fellow-professionals enhancing student’s capabilities to lead a satisfying life(Nussbaum, 2011).

The entire project consist of three phases. A first phase of systematic mapping of the participating schools is followed, by a period focussing on the development of a sustainable, place-based school development culture, based on teacher-researcher collaboration. The project is concluded with an evaluation phase. The paper reports from the initiation phase.

The first phase of the project was primarily initiated on request of the participating schools for an outsider view. By that, they allowed the researcher team to examine schools current state and conditions. However, the project is dependent from teacher’s data literacy, attitudes and understanding of the value of collaboration. International research has shown that teacher’s data literacy and culture to work collaboratively is only weakly developed (Helgøy & Homme, 2007; Czerniawski, 2013; Schildkamp et.al. 2014). In order to find out whether these findings are relevant to the local case, an investigation regarding those issues was conducted. On the background of research problem, the paper will report on two research questions. 1) Do teachers show the ability to use data to make informed pedagogical, capability enhancing decisions (pedagogical data literacy, see Werler & Færevaag 2017)? 2) What do teachers think about how they transform their teaching and learning together to work with all students to develop fulfilling lives (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018)? In order to map teacher’s pedagogical data literacy, which is framed as the ability to transform information (assessment, school climate, behavioural, snapshot and longitudinal, etc.) into actionable teaching concepts (Mandinach, Firedman & Gummer, 2015), the researcher team surveyed all teachers (n = 323) of the networking schools (primary and secondary, n = 22). Univariate and bivariate statistical analysis is applied. To understand how teachers organize in an evidence-informed, but not data-driven, way of rigorous planning, of critical dialogue and candid but constructive feedback, and to see how they do collaborative inquiry the researchers supplemented the data set with deductive group interviews on the aforementioned topics. In the analytical work, qualitative content analysis (QCA) (Kohlbacher, 2008, Mayring, 2002, 2015) is applied as a method for systematic analysis of transcript data.

The project is currently in the process of data collection. Due to the still pending analyses, no statements can be made regarding the research questions. However, it is to be expected that already existing knowledge about teacher collaboration and teachers data literacy will be confirmed, deepened and unravelled.

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