Taking Action. Austin Buffum
PLC process: common mission, vision, values, and goals.
► “Creating Consensus for a Culture of Collective Responsibility” (page 53): The leadership team can use this tool to help build consensus regarding a school mission to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
► “Creating Consensus Survey” (for the leadership team) (page 54): The leadership team can use this tool to self-assess its readiness to building consensus and leading change.
► “Forces at Work” (page 55): Once the leadership team has self-assessed its current readiness, it can use this tool to identify its strengths, areas of weakness, and specific action steps for moving forward.
► “Simplifying RTI Culture Survey” (for the entire staff) (page 56): All staff can use this tool to provide the leadership team with a more accurate picture of current cultural beliefs and norms.
► “Building Consensus for Change and Bell Schedule Chart” (page 57): This tool provides an example of how one school successfully surveyed and achieved consensus.
Coaching Tips
At its most fundamental level, the task of creating consensus for cultural change is all about building shared knowledge and understanding. As the leadership team works through and discusses the questions included on the reproducible “Creating Consensus for a Culture of Collective Responsibility” (page 53), it’s important to structure and facilitate the same discussions with the entire staff. Cultural change happens when all staff members reveal their beliefs and assumptions, read research, confront the current reality, explore the possibilities of a new vision for their work, and hear each other’s thoughts and opinions. It is not enough for the leadership team to have these powerful discussions only amongst its members.
Building shared knowledge takes time, consistency of message, and multiple opportunities for dialogue. Team members must pay attention to both written and verbal communication, including emails, bulletins, meeting notes, one-on-one conversations, team and department meetings, and whole-staff meetings. It is also important to ensure that all stakeholders are included—administrators, counselors, instructional staff, support staff, parents and, when appropriate, students.
As the leadership team engages in this work, it may choose to use the reproducible “Creating Consensus Survey” (page 54) to formatively assess its progress. The reproducible “Forces at Work” (page 55) is useful for ensuring discussions include evidence and data as their basis, not just opinions. It also helps the team develop a prioritized to-do list of next steps.
The most challenging steps in creating cultural change are those at the beginning and the end, in which team members explore assumptions and beliefs in a nonthreatening way and reach consensus about the proposed change.
Many tools are available for structuring and facilitating a discussion about assumptions and beliefs. The bottom line is that teams cannot ignore this step. The likelihood of reaching consensus on shared assumptions and beliefs is almost nil without first uncovering and discussing current beliefs.
As conversations take place, it is important for the leadership team to check progress toward consensus. A tool such as the reproducible “Simplifying RTI Culture Survey” (page 56) is one way to “dipstick” along the way. You can use it more than once, as long as enough time and conversation take place between uses to show change.
Lastly, a common obstacle to cultural change is a lack of common understanding of consensus and lack of a clear tool or strategy to demonstrate consensus. Sharing the example highlighted in the reproducible “Building Consensus for Change and Bell Schedule Chart” (page 57) is one way to ensure everyone has a common definition of consensus and a common vision of knowing how and when the school achieves it.
Beware! The work described in this section—Action 2: Build a Culture of Collective Responsibility—never ends! It is something that the schoolwide leadership team must attend to in its own meetings, as well as each and every day on an ongoing basis. Culture is a dynamic and amoeba-like social organism that requires constant nurturing and care.
Culture is a dynamic and amoeba-like social organism that requires constant nurturing and care.
Action 3
Form Collaborative Teacher Teams
Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.
—Helen Keller
Achieving a learning-focused mission requires more than the belief that all students can learn at high levels—it also requires collaborative structures and tools to achieve this goal. In addition to the school leadership team, collaborative teacher teams form the engine that drives a school’s PLC and RTI efforts. Collaborative teacher teams comprise educators who share essential curriculum and thus, take collective responsibility for students learning their common essential learning outcomes.
Because the uniting characteristic of teacher teams is shared learning outcomes, the most common and preferred structures would be grade-level teams at the elementary level and course-based teams at the secondary level. It is likely that every school has singleton educators, who are the only people teaching a specific grade, course, or subject. When this is the case, the following structures can be effective ways to form teams.
► Vertical teams: Vertical teams share common learning outcomes developed across consecutive years of school. Examples include a K–2 primary team at the elementary level or a high school language arts team at the secondary level. While grade-level standards are not identical from kindergarten to second grade, they have several essential skills in common, such as phonemic awareness and number sense, with increasing rigor over time. Students develop these skills across all three grades. Likewise, a high school language arts team does not share identical content standards but does share essential skills such as persuasive writing or analytical reading. Vertical teams can also ensure that prerequisite skills are taught in sequence. This team structure often works best at smaller schools, where there may only be one teacher who teaches a particular grade level, subject, or course.
► Interdisciplinary teams: Interdisciplinary teams are comprised of teachers who teach different subjects. While interdisciplinary teams do not share content standards, they can focus their team efforts on shared essential skills. For example, an interdisciplinary team can focus on the college-ready skills David Conley (2007) recommends, including:
► Performing analytical reading and discussion
► Demonstrating persuasive writing
► Drawing inferences and conclusions from texts
► Analyzing conflicting source documents
► Supporting arguments with evidence
► Solving complex problems with no obvious answer
These essential learning standards are not subject specific—instead, each teacher on the interdisciplinary team can use his or her unique subject content as the vehicle to teaching these higher-level-thinking skills. The team can clearly define these common learning outcomes, discuss effective Tier 1 core instruction, develop common rubrics to assess these skills, and respond collectively when students need additional help. This approach can work especially well at smaller secondary schools.
► Regional and electronic teams: It is possible that the previous