These same conversations can also be helpful to an experienced principal. When leaders help staff identify areas of concern regarding student performance and the operation of the school, admit they don’t have all the answers, solicit advice and feedback from others, and demonstrate a willingness to act on that advice and feedback, they build trust in their leadership (Kouzes & Posner, 2010). A survey could also be used to gather information on others’ perspectives; however, surveys are most effective when they are followed by dialogue that allows for further probing and clarification.
Those who study the leadership of both schools and organizations in general would offer very consistent advice to principals: no single person has all of the energy and expertise to effectively address all of the responsibilities of leadership. For example, one study identifies twenty-one different duties of principals and concludes that the best strategy for fulfilling those duties is for principals to promote widely dispersed leadership throughout the school (Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2005). One important step in fostering this shared leadership is creating a guiding coalition.
There are several different ways principals can structure a guiding coalition. In many elementary schools, grade-level team leaders work directly with the principal to oversee the school’s improvement effort. In middle schools, department chairs often serve this purpose. Some schools have created a school improvement committee of staff members. Others create short-term task forces that call on designated staff to address an identified problem, develop a recommended solution, and help build consensus for implementation of that solution. Although the format of the guiding coalition may vary, principals who lead PLCs never forget that they cannot do it alone, and so before attempting to persuade an entire faculty to support the PLC process, they identify and recruit highly respected, key staff members to help them champion that process.
Build Shared Knowledge With Staff by Learning Together
A defining characteristic of a PLC is that its members begin their decision-making process by learning together. One of the most-important duties of a principal is ensuring staff members are provided with the information and knowledge essential to make informed decisions. Effective principals are vigilant about ensuring people have ready access to the most relevant information and that the group has collectively studied the information before it is called on to make a decision. The assumption here is that when people of good faith have access to the same information, the likelihood of their arrival at similar conclusions increases exponentially. Access to information is the lifeblood of empowered groups.
Initially, this attention to learning together should focus on the school’s current reality and the existing knowledge base regarding effective practice. Working with the guiding coalition, principals provide staff members with an evidenced-based profile of the school that helps them surface the school’s present conditions with a particular focus on evidence of student learning. The guiding coalition then provides staff with a concise summary of evidence regarding the most promising practices for raising student achievement.
All Things PLC (www.allthingsplc.info) provides very useful tools and resources to assist principals in this important step. Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks to download the following reproducibles.
• See “A Data Picture of Our School” for a template to gather pertinent information on existing conditions in your school.
• See “Finding Common Ground in Education Reform” for a sampling of the research on PLCs.
• See “Cultural Shifts in a Professional Learning Community” for information on the cultural shifts that take place when a traditional school embraces the PLC process.
This information should be provided to all staff members. They should also be encouraged to identify additional data they feel are pertinent to understanding the school and to present any research they can find regarding promising practices.
It is important that this process engages the entire staff in reviewing all information. If the principal or guiding coalition does the analysis and merely reports findings to the faculty, staff members become passive recipients of someone else’s conclusions rather than active participants engaged in a process to build shared knowledge. If people are to feel ownership in a decision, they must be engaged in the decision-making process. As Stephen Covey (1989) admonishes: “Without involvement there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment” (p. 143, emphasis in original).
Too often schools make decisions on the basis of opinion, anecdotes, appeals to mindless precedent, or authority. In a profession, however, there is an obligation to seek out and apply the most promising practices. A principal in a PLC will ensure that decisions are made on the basis of evidence rather than whimsy and will engage the entire staff in the review of that evidence.
Build the Foundation of a Professional Learning Community
Building shared knowledge about the current reality in the school as well as the research on the most promising practices in school improvement is a prerequisite for establishing the foundation of a PLC. Think of this foundation as resting on four pillars—(1) mission, (2) vision, (3) collective commitments, and (4) goals, each of which staff members understand and endorse. The mission pillar articulates the school’s purpose, the vision pillar addresses what the school must become to fulfill that purpose, the collective commitments pillar clarifies how each person must act in order to move the school toward the shared vision, and the goals pillar establishes when certain specified benchmarks will be accomplished to mark progress on the journey toward the vision. Let’s examine those pillars in more detail.
Establish the Fundamental Purpose of the School
Although educators in many schools use the terms mission and vision interchangeably, those terms represent two different aspects of the PLC foundation. The mission establishes the very reason the school exists, and on this issue, principals of PLCs must be clear and unequivocal: “the purpose of this school is to ensure high levels of learning for all students.” When a staff embraces this purpose, every practice, policy, and procedure of the school is assessed on the basis of how it will impact student learning. Every aspect of the PLC process flows from this fundamental premise regarding why the school exists.
Help Staff Members Clarify the School They Are Attempting to Create
One of the intended outcomes of building shared knowledge during the early stages of the PLC process is the creation of a facultywide understanding of the indicators of the most-effective schooling practices. Based on that understanding, staff members are called on to describe what their school will become. Principals recognize that they must know and clearly articulate where they want to take their schools if they expect others to join them on the journey. So they work with the staff to develop a shared vision—a desirable and credible future for the school that vividly describes what people are working to create and what it will look like when they get there.
A vision, however, will influence a school only to the extent that it is shared. The process we have described thus far is specifically intended to result in a shared vision. Instead of saying, “Listen to me, I know what this school must become,” a principal is able to say, “I have listened to you, and I understand the school you hope to create. Let’s begin to examine all of our current and proposed practices, policies, and procedures to see if they align with our shared hopes for our school.”
See “Why Should We Describe the School