Managing Unstoppable Learning. Tom Hierck

results are “good,” that person may find it difficult to accept that others have something else to offer. When I first started teaching, most teachers operated as independent contractors. They showed little desire to share best practice or to engage in cross-grade or cross-content conversations. I truly entered the profession being expected to figure things out for myself, and I suspect I am not alone in that experience. Unfortunately, this leads to a school of independent contractors whose only commonalities are the parking lot and the faculty lounge refrigerator. It creates districts of independent schools instead of coherent school districts, resulting in entirely different approaches to learning within the same jurisdiction.

      It is simply impossible for any one staff member to be as smart, proficient, and effective as the collective staff. I can look back over my career and state unequivocally that anything we did was vastly superior to anything I did. Autonomy should reside in your method of delivery, not in what you deliver. Further, the strong desire to function as a team facilitates the move to talking about our students instead of my students. A strong, committed team will overcome challenges that a loose affiliation of individual talent will never surmount. Healthy and productive relationships among staff facilitate a positive school climate and learning environment and build healthy relationships among students and between students and staff. The strength of a team is that it becomes an unstoppable force, but an uncommitted individual can sink any team. All members of a team must buy into the analysis of the current reality and be part of the commitment to take the next step.

Assessing Your Current Reality

      Clinical professor of educational leadership Marsha Speck (1996) has identified some key questions that I like to refer to as a test to see where schools would currently place themselves in terms of their collective commitments, especially those schools or individuals who have used the “lack of time” defense to stop progress. Following are some of the questions.

      • What is the school vision?

      • What are the skills or capacities needed to change?

      • What are the incentives or motivations to change?

      • What are the resources available to change?

      • What is the action plan for change?

      • What modifications need to be made during the change process or implementation of the action plan?

      • How will the action plan for change be reviewed, evaluated, and revised?

      These questions serve as a good assessment for educators to gauge their progress individually and collectively. If you ask the same questions and give the same answers as you did twenty years ago, it might be time to change how you assess your reality.

      While beginning the change process will always require time, the adults in a school will realize that effort (and more) when they align their work in service of all students’ learning. Schools exist as learning centers for children, not employment centers for adults. We cannot spend our time on proving why students can’t learn or living on past glory. We must spend it on ensuring all students learn and we hold the keys to making that a reality.

Aligning the Classroom Culture

      While every team member needs to be on board with the work ahead, it is equally important that every team member shares a common understanding of the team goals and aligns his or her practice to have consistency with all other team members. However, achieving consistency across your school or district seems to become a bigger challenge the larger a team is. It stands to reason that it is harder to get forty people to agree than it is to get four to. While this may be true, it should not deter schools or districts from pursuing this ultimate goal. What’s at risk if you don’t? Jennifer Medbery, founder and chief product officer for Kickboard, and Tom Hierck (2017) suggest that in the absence of a schoolwide commitment with individual classrooms aligned to a broader purpose, silos of excellence will emerge:

      A consistent, student-centered, and restorative approach is essential for the effective implementation of a positive school culture initiative. Individual, classroom-based approaches are more likely to result in inconsistent expectations for students, a lack of teacher-to-teacher conversations about successful methods, and unnecessary escalation in student discipline, leading to silos of excellence rather than overall excellence. (p. 1)