Developing Collective Classroom Efficacy: The Teacher’s Role as Community Organizer

Collective efficacy reveals how well group members relate to one another while working toward common goals. It also reveals group resilience and the willingness of group members to continue working through difficult situations. The purpose of this study is to explore collective efficacy at the classroom level, using Vygotsky’s view of individual and collective development to examine how it could be developed and facilitated by fifth-grade classroom participants. By examining collective efficacy in this way, the authors offer a sense of what teachers can do to promote collective classroom efficacy through their instructional practice. Results indicate that the sense of collective classroom efficacy developed by the fifth graders was initiated and nurtured by the teacher in the role of classroom community organizer.