Assessing Unstoppable Learning. Tom Hierck
honesty. Honesty does not mean always agreeing and being a ray of sunshine in every situation. It does mean having a willingness to confront realities and to share those openly and honestly with all team members—not just those among whom a strong connection might exist. Hoy and Tschannen-Moran (2003) describe honesty as “the character, integrity, and authenticity of the trusted party” (p. 186). In order to be trusted, the leader must be trustworthy.
Openness
Following honesty, openness implies equal treatment of all members of the team. We stress to teachers that they must build positive, caring relationships with every one of their students, even those who challenge them the most. We equally stress to leaders they must build positive, caring relationships with all teachers, even those who challenge them the most. Honesty is a complementary component to openness, which is driven by “the extent to which there is no withholding of information from others” (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003, p. 186).
The absence of any of these facets has the ability to derail progress and take away from building the trust necessary for great teams to function. If the only commonality a group of educators share is the school parking lot, the chances of true progress on the issue of assessment occurring will remain fleeting. This is hard work; it is messy work. It requires letting go of some things and embracing other things. All of this is possible with a collaborative team.
Defining Collaboration
The power of collaboration will not be a foreign concept to readers of this book. It simply makes sense that the power of we is superior to the power of me. As DuFour et al. (2016) write, “It is difficult to overstate the importance of collaborative teams in the improvement process” (p. 12). Despite that notion, collaboration is not always evident in every school or district. Ken Williams and Tom Hierck (2015) note this struggle when describing the dialogue that has occurred in some faculty meetings:
Heated debates arose on whether collaboration really was possible and a desirable way to achieve the stated goals of a school. Detractors vehemently defended the practice of teaching in isolation—not because of any research that supports it, but because it is easier than collaboration. It’s true: working together is a lot more challenging than working alone. Focusing on what we as teachers can do instead of on what we don’t have requires a collective commitment. (p. 1)
Collaborative teams use data to reflect on teaching practices, monitor progress, and celebrate successes. They share the progress and the pitfalls and lean on each other to manage both. In a deeply intentional collaborative approach, everything is up for discussion as educators work to find ways to ensure all students attain the desired proficiency—not through lowering the bar but through elevating their teaching. This is not always easy and requires a high level of trust. As Fisher and Frey (2015) note, “The conversations in collaborative team meetings can scrape up against one’s sense of self-efficacy, especially when presenting evidence about a lesson that failed to result in student learning” (p. 164). The absence of collaboration simply means educators don’t have to confront such challenges with anyone but themselves, which often leads them to believe that the solution to these challenges lies in their students (or their students’ parents or the system) needing to change.
Although collaboration is difficult, educators need to have collaborative conversations regarding assessment as they shift to what Tom Schimmer (2016) describes as “realigning the teaching and reporting processes to create a natural flow between assessments used to advance learning and assessments used to report it” (p. 18). They need to focus on collaborating to add to the teaching toolbox rather than to replace one tool with another. In order to manage these conversations, teams must establish norms and structures that drive how educators communicate.
Establishing Norms and Guidelines
A school team that functions effectively and supports high levels of learning for all students traces its success to the norms established through collective accountability. Effective teams must hold each other accountable to their norms in order to find success. Team norms are worthless if a team only writes them on paper and the entire team does not adhere to them. On teams composed of systems thinking educators, if someone arrives late to a meeting, doesn’t honor the focus on student growth and success, or breaks any team norm, the rest of the team is willing to address that action by referring back to the agreed-on norms and ensuring that they are still desirable and will be followed. This responsibility can’t fall to an external person (for example, the principal); it is something the group must manage. This action reflects the necessary collective accountability. Healthy teams effectively employ both gentleness and respect in their approach in order to promote the change in behavior they seek. Norms help the team define its levels of tolerance and how it will approach moments when those levels may be compromised. The end results for such teams are higher levels of learning, healthier team interactions, and strengthened relationships.
The purpose behind having a set of norms for a group to follow is to encourage behaviors that help the group do its work and discourage behaviors that interfere with a group’s productivity. We can think of norms as the unwritten rules for how educators will act and what they will do. These rules govern how educators interact with each other, how they conduct the business of meetings, how they make decisions, and how they communicate these decisions. Here’s the reality—whether or not educators take the time to establish norms, they are a part of every school’s culture. These norms exist whether or not you acknowledge them or formalize them, and they may run contrary to any desired outcomes, as we will illustrate in the scenario later in this section.
It is also critical that each group of educators (based on department, grade level, role, and so on) creates its own set of guidelines. The guidelines are practical applications of the norms (behaviors), and the group must also discuss and develop these. If team members do not generate such guidelines, the behaviors described in the imposed norms may not align with what actually occurs. For example, a set of norms imposed on a team may include a guideline such as, “Electronic devices may be present during the meeting but only for the purposes of note taking.” This guideline may quickly deflate the team’s ability to most effectively and efficiently collaborate, as the team has much of its collective work shared among the team members via Google Docs (https://docs.google.com) and Google Sheets (www.google.com/sheets).
As such, each team member must take part in the norm development process to ensure that the norms align with the team’s ability to do its best work. Furthermore, if team members feel unhappy with the norms they have received, violations may result in members feeling disgruntled with the idea of team norms rather than simply the display of unproductive adult behaviors. When healthy teams create their own norms, they can more swiftly and readily name violations. If a team does not create its own norms, however, then it will establish a de facto second (or third) set of norms. For example, a common norm is expecting everyone to arrive on time. If the team does not address violations, or only addresses them for some members, the message is clear—arriving on time is just a hope, not a norm. The team passively develops a second set of unspoken norms implying that they do not actually enforce the norms equally for everyone: we say one thing, but we all know we actually do another.
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