A tenet that appears to be accepted throughout the world is that effective teachers establish and maintain control over their students. This is an assertion that I challenge and deconstruct. In fact, for many teachers their well-intentioned efforts to establish and maintain control over students lead to their demise as teachers and for many more students, it opens pathways to failure. Emphasising control over rather than collaboration with is, simply put; a bad idea, and those in authority who offer control over as a recipe for success are giving bad advice. Furthermore, systems that build policies around hiring and rewarding teachers based on control over students may be producing forms of teaching and learning that reproduce failure and equity concerns based on categories such as ethnicity and native language. Categories like these are often referred to as meso structures and they are resources for agency within a field. However, structures do not determine culture and it is important not to stereotype based on any of these categories. For example, youth culture differs significantly from the culture of older educators, males and females have different cultural resources, and ethnicity and language often produce opportunities to create different forms of culture. In this paper I propose collaboration with as a referent for producing effective forms of teaching and learning. However, as is the case with many one-liners and short phrases, there is much more to creating and sustaining productive learning environments than collaborating with others. To be glib, collaboration is a necessary but insufficient condition for effective learning and teaching. (Contains 1 table and 6 footnotes.)