Game Plan. Hector Garcia
leadership teams often assume that their well-prepared message or big-picture idea will be easily understood by a wide range of staff members who will intuitively rally around the same cause. Yet, the reality is that people interpret ideas and concepts very differently. Bringing strategic clarity and focus to the work of grade-level or content-area teams will infuse motivation and commitment into any organization. Leadership teams need to be cognizant of the fact that clarity in the mind of the coach or leadership team is worthless if they are not able to effectively communicate the idea to the larger team. Leaving the issue of school improvement to haphazard or partially developed school improvement plans does not result in more effective schools. As Richard Elmore (2010), educational leadership professor and the director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, describes, “You can have strong, well-informed leadership, teachers working in teams, external support and professional development, coherent curriculum, a school improvement plan, and everything the literature tells us we should have and yet not be getting the expected growth” (p. 3). Without a coherent and well-understood plan, a school will develop pockets of excellence or variance and then struggle to meet the rigorous demands that will impact growth. As Elmore (2004) explains, “Variability in practice produces variability in student learning.”
Leaders and staff need to share a common understanding of the mission and vision as well as all of the components of the central improvement effort or initiative and to work toward ensuring that every new teacher clearly understands and can live the school’s game plan. To achieve strategic clarity, organizations will need to move away from the question of How are we doing? toward focusing on What steps do we need to take? As 2001 National Teacher of the Year Michelle Forman (2009) writes:
Before schools can respond to external pressure for increased academic performance, they must transform themselves from atomized, incoherent organizations to ones in which faculty share an explicit set of norms and expectations about what good instructional practice looks like.
Leaders, teachers, and community members alike need to share in the collective responsibility to produce long-lasting transformation. Effective teachers must see themselves not as passive, dependent implementers of someone else’s script but as active members of research teams—or, as Michael Fullan describes them, “scientists who continuously develop their intellectual and investigative effectiveness” (as cited in Sparks, 2003, p. 57). Elmore (2002) asserts that “the practice of improvement is largely about moving whole organizations—teachers, administrators and schools—toward the culture, structure, norms and processes that support quality professional development in the service of student learning” (p. 15). This process starts with building a shared understanding around current realities while allowing team members to build trust, commitment, and accountability around a shared goal.
To that end, in this chapter, we present five coaching points:
1. Establishing clarity through a schoolwide template
2. Identifying and evaluating our current reality
3. Selecting the right team members
4. Building shared ownership and purpose
5. Ensuring effective communication throughout the organization
These points are dedicated to specific strategies that any leader can use to build clarity and a shared understanding among all stakeholders to ensure everyone is executing a uniform game plan.
Coaching Point 1.1: Establishing Clarity Through a Schoolwide Template
As leaders plan the implementation of the PLC practices, they need to ask themselves how this work will make a difference in the progress of their school. Leaders need to ensure that the answer to this question is clearly understood by all stakeholders because, as leadership consultant, coach, and author John Baldoni (2012) states, “Organizations that succeed are those that know where they are headed and why” (p. 2). A clearly communicated target will drive people toward the work and create meaning in what they do. This clarity will help everyone in the organization pull together and build the tools to create change.
Early in the implementation process, staff want to hear the three most important components of any initiative: (1) the why, (2) the what, and (3) the how. The template we provide in this coaching point assumes that the school already understands the why—the power behind focusing on learning versus teaching, collaboration versus isolation, and results versus intentions; the why is fairly easy to accept both emotionally and intellectually. Often, it can be more difficult for individuals in the early stages to understand the what and the how. This tool will steer teams in the process of developing the what and the how by clarifying the key elements and creating a guiding template for their PLC work as they engage the staff in the process of creating shared knowledge. It is meant to be a resource for leadership, grade-level, and content-area teams. Some teams may choose to use the resources as they are presented, while others may alter them to meet their more specific needs and goals.
The What
In 2013, the San Antonio Spurs were named the best-run professional sports organization in North America (Rishe, 2013). They were the first NBA team to win at least fifty games a season for fourteen consecutive years. How did this team create such championship talent? Their success appears to be attributed to their shared core values and a culture of trust throughout the organization. After all, multiple players have come and gone over the last five years, but the core values or philosophy as well as the results have not changed.
Whether it’s a championship sports team or leaders in education, clarity and purpose around the essential elements and tools will bring meaning to the work and spark action. The purpose and clarity template featured in figure 1.1 should be used when leadership teams are struggling to identify the key components of what they mean by the three big ideas of a PLC: a focus on learning, collaboration, and results. The goal of the tool is to develop both clarity and consensus around the big ideas of a PLC with all of the key stakeholders. Please note that this tool has all of the elements and artifacts filled in as an example only. The power of this tool is in teams establishing their own elements and artifacts that match their organization’s mission and vision. This collaborative process should not be overlooked, since—as noted previously—common terms and ideas mean different things to different people. This tool will help leaders and staff come to consensus on the essential elements, allowing all team members to begin taking action.
Figure 1.1: Purpose and clarity template.
Visit go.solution-tree.com/PLCbooks for a reproducible version of this figure.
The How
The following steps outline how a school can start to break down the three big ideas of a PLC into actionable steps in the form of key elements and artifacts. As a school starts its PLC journey or is simply trying to better define its PLC work, it is critical to clearly articulate what the three big ideas (a focus on learning, collaboration, and results) mean in terms of everyday life for the staff, thus continuously breaking down a powerful idea into more manageable parts. It is also important to note that this model can be used throughout the school year. While it would be most advantageous to engage the leadership team in the development of the key elements and artifacts at the start of the year, sometimes we can’t wait an entire school year to help staff to transition into a more effective team. Therefore, there is never a bad time to clarify key ideas and unify the focus of improvement.
Step 1
As a leadership team, work to establish what key elements will be the anchors of the PLC work within the organization. The elements are written underneath each of the three big ideas of a PLC in order to communicate the clear alignment. Leadership teams benefit from researching each element in order to more effectively support why that element was chosen and how it will be effective within the organization. As part of this step, leadership teams may