• Accountability norm:
Every member of the leadership team must model norms at the meetings he or she leads. This means collaborative teacher team meetings as well as faculty meetings. Norms help every group to function as a high-performing team rather than simply a collection or group of people.
Develop Urgency and a Collective Vision for Change
Every journey of improvement starts with the why before the how. This means that a school must examine the current reality and confront the brutal facts before it can take any meaningful action (Collins, 2001; DuFour et al., 2016). This is an especially difficult task for underperforming schools because they often have extremely negative or stagnant data. They must be willing to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
To determine each school’s urgent and targeted needs for improvement, we use a needs-assessment protocol (much like an audit) based on the work of DuFour et al. (2016). An unbiased coach from outside the school usually administers the assessment, taking a 360-degree view of all of the school’s policies, practices, procedures, and structures in light of their effect on student learning. The coach gathers evidence and summarizes the needs-assessment results. This protocol creates a safe environment for the coach, principal, and leadership team to engage in the difficult conversations that allow them to develop specific action steps for improvement. The protocol includes interviews with small focus groups of stakeholders and a review of all related data and information from which the coach, in collaboration with leadership, develops an actionable plan. The leader’s job is to frame the challenge or challenges that are getting in the way of improvement in student learning without placing blame. This process requires a fearless inventory of the entire organization that paints a data picture of the school landscape. See the data-collection and focus-group protocols in figures 1.2 and 1.3 (pages 12–16).
Figure 1.2: Data-collection protocol.
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Figure 1.3: Focus-group protocol.
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Leadership consists of both pressure and support. A leader must create more pressure for change than there is resistance to change or nothing will change. Second-order or lasting change will only occur if the leader is willing to frame the challenges that block improvement efforts. When schools try to improve without a clear understanding of the root causes of the issues and problems they face, their progress is slow and minimal. A school cannot continue to treat the symptoms of the problem without understanding the underlying causes. The audit or needs assessment helps teams analyze these root causes and leads to actionable steps to improvement. A graphic organizer for determining root causes and solutions appears in chapter 2 (page 27). The end result of the collaborative conversations within the assessment is a shared definition of the current reality as advocated by DuFour et al. (2016). It answers the why of school improvement before the how.
Once teams understand the current reality, the next step is to create a shared vision for change. A shared vision answers the question, What do we want to become? (DuFour et al., 2016). Without a clear and compelling vision, organizations have no direction. To use a navigational system for directions, we must first decide on the destination—otherwise the GPS just tells us the current location. If a school does not have a clear understanding of where it is headed, it may vaguely hope for better results year after year, but has no clear goal.
A school’s vision describes a compelling picture of a preferred future that inspires action throughout an organization (DuFour et al., 2016). The process for creating a shared vision for change asks each staff member to envision the ideal school in just a few sentences. Leaders can accomplish this by asking staff to write a headline that will appear in the newspaper five years from now about their school. What will they write on the front page of the newspaper? (See figure 1.4.) The leadership team collects these headlines to look for commonalities and themes. The team then drafts a vision statement to share with the entire staff for input and revision. After all voices have weighed in, the team reaches consensus for final approval of the vision.
Figure 1.4: Shared-vision protocol.
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Develop Collective Commitments That Lead to Action
Unfortunately, creating a vision statement does nothing to improve learning. Each staff member in the school must commit to action. Without cohesive, focused effort to further the vision, the statement is nothing more than a picture on the wall. Every staff member asks, “How must we behave to reach our vision? What must I do to ensure we will get there? What must happen to make the words and phrases in the vision come alive? How will we live our vision every day?” In other words, What if we really meant it?
Truly living the vision for improvement requires collective commitments: “the specific attitudes and behaviors people within the organization pledge to demonstrate” (Mattos et al., 2016, p. 24). These statements begin with the words, We will …. The process of developing collective commitments begins by the principal asking each staff member to answer the question, What actions, if we collectively committed to them, would lead our school closer to achieving our vision than anything else? The learning team collects and reviews these statements to determine commonalities and themes and then sends them to the entire staff for a final consensus. Figure 1.5 (page 18) is an example of collective commitments