1. Form a team capable of leading change.
2. Develop urgency and a collective vision for change.
3. Develop collective commitments that lead to action.
4. Clarify and communicate expectations for collaborative teams.
Form a Team Capable of Leading Change
To be a leader is not a position or a title; it means one takes action and models behaviors. The most powerful and effective role the principal assumes is that of lead learner, not expert or “all-knowing one.” Leadership that gets real results is collaborative; it’s a process that involves building a school leadership team, a guiding coalition (DuFour et al., 2016), to lead the school-improvement transformation in what we can almost guarantee to be tumultuous work. The role of the leadership team is not the same as traditional leadership teams. Traditional leadership teams operate as communication vehicles between teachers and administration. The teachers typically bring up concerns or issues that they have heard about or are experiencing and want the principal to address. The principal uses this time to communicate information most often related to the operation of the building. The team rarely, if ever, spends this time discussing data or related topics. In contrast, the leadership team has the responsibility of leading the change process by focusing on learning. The members of this team are cheerleaders and problem solvers who are hungry for data that fuel school improvement.
The single most important task a principal can do to ensure high levels of learning for students and adults is to build a leadership team. We use the term school learning team because in schools in need of improvement, this team works to gain a deeper learning and understanding of the work. This team comprises administrators and team leaders from every teacher team. The group functions as a collaborative team and models the teaming process for the entire school. Leaders should never delegate selection of leadership team members to the teachers themselves or choose membership based on seniority. This is the leader’s opportunity to grow the leadership in his or her school. The leader’s responsibility is to create a strong team with members who have complementary strengths. It should include a balance of individuals who possess one or more of the following qualities.
• An eagerness to promote change
• Expertise relevant to the tasks at hand
• High credibility with all stakeholders
• Proven leadership skills
Use figure 1.1 (page 10) as a protocol to determine which teachers have these characteristics.
Source: Adapted from Buffum, Mattos, and Weber (2014) and Kotter (1996).
Figure 1.1: Leadership team selection protocol.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks for a free reproducible version of this figure.
These characteristics positively impact how the team will engage in the work and ultimately how much progress it will make along the way. Use the chart to list names of individuals who possess the stated qualities. Some names may appear in more than one category. Eliminate anyone who does not possess any of these qualities. It’s possible that a current team leader or department chair may not be a good fit for the leadership team. Be aware that those on the leadership team are not always staff members who eagerly agree with one another or the principal. It is also important to include support staff representatives as a part of the leadership team. Everyone must be all in for student success!
It is not enough to simply create a leadership team; as DuFour et al. (2016) note, this team must engage in the right work. Its primary responsibility is to coordinate the school’s collective efforts across grade levels, departments, and subjects. The leadership team meetings focus primarily on these PLC tasks.
• Build and support the school’s mission of learning for all.
• Model the collaborative team process by using norms, agendas, meeting records, and so on.
• Create a master schedule that provides time for team collaboration, core instruction, intervention, and remediation.
• Coordinate staff and other resources to support core instruction and interventions.
• Articulate essential learning outcomes across grade levels and subjects.
• Ensure all students have access to grade-level or course-specific core instruction.
• Continually monitor schoolwide evidence of student learning.
• Support the work of collaborative grade-level and content teams.
• Problem solve school-improvement strategies to support increased student learning.
• Celebrate small wins along the journey with the entire staff.
The leadership team must operate as a model for all of the other collaborative teams in the school. The members should meet biweekly, or even more frequently, and provide meeting agendas and minutes to all staff members for their continued learning and understanding.
The first step in the modeling process is to set norms for adult behavior. Norms are the standards of behavior that members of the team agree to follow so that meetings are effective and efficient (Mattos et al., 2016). Team members can think of norms as the commitments they make to each other about how they will accomplish working together. As DuFour et al. (2016) note, there are procedural norms such as meeting times, attendance policies, punctuality expectations, shared responsibility for the work, and the need for follow through. In addition, there are behavioral expectations that address how a team will handle disagreements or make a team decision. The team must define, clarify, and describe a process for consensus decision making. The team should also establish an accountability norm that specifically states how the team will respond if any member violates the norms. The administrator is not the norm monitor; instead, the team designates a monitor and uses a nonverbal signal to indicate violations in an effort to monitor them. It is best for teams to handle norm violations themselves. Principals should meet with the entire team rather than individual members if norm violations are a persistent problem.
At the start and end of every meeting, the team reviews these norms, which describe how the team will function. Some typical team norms include but are not limited to the following.
• Procedural norms:
• Behavioral norms: