planning has always been associated with sports, yet today the phrase has become ubiquitous with being well prepared and having a strategic plan for success. In every level of athletic competition, highly effective coaches synthesize their philosophy and expectations into a game plan. In essence, they solidify the most critical components into something tangible and easy to follow. Just as with any sports team, a winning season for schools also starts with the development of a game plan and a playbook.
Many leaders ponder the question of what holds teams back, and, as a Professional Learning Communities (PLC) at Work™ consultant who speaks across the country and has been a part of nationally recognized schools, Héctor García has found an interesting pattern. The schools that struggle to move forward are unable to translate their enthusiasm into a systematic plan of action with a process for monitoring their progress along the journey, and they quickly become distracted by a new initiative or concept. Schools that consistently make progress are not only enthusiastic about the work but are also methodical about developing a game plan, ensuring that it is deeply embedded in the culture and behaviors of the staff, and guaranteeing that everyone has the necessary guidance to implement the new vision.
The concept of winning is pervasive and highly celebrated both in sports and in a PLC culture. To further illustrate our position, we provide the following brief examples of how the characteristics and actions of successful sports teams are similarly aligned to those of PLCs.
• In sports, like in education, individuals can operate in quasi-isolation pursuing different goals, or they can work interdependently and focus on a compelling task or vision. The teams that are purposeful and deliberate about establishing and executing a plan of action seem to win much more often than those who believe in stumbling upon success.
• Focusing on developing and coaching all players results in higher achievements than investing only in star players or waiting until the top recruits come to campus all at once.
• While individual superstars on a team have tried many times to win championships, few success stories come to mind. Yet, there is a litany of average players who have come together and won championships even against overwhelming odds.
• A clear commitment to collaboration, respect, and hard work will start to produce the sort of culture that is needed to become a champion.
• Coaching requires insightful and deliberate leadership, not just an expectation that great players will intuitively know how to become a championship team.
• Game plans are never developed overnight or quickly put together. A winning strategy must evolve from guided discussions, various perspectives, deliberate action, and most importantly a guiding coalition.
It is our hope that this book will help leadership teams at both ends of the spectrum prepare a game plan to develop the level of clarity and focus that is essential in schools, whether their schools are well organized and poised to become elite educational systems with one or two additional elements of effectiveness or just starting the journey of becoming a professional learning community and need a more comprehensive approach. We know that some readers will utilize the resources we have provided simply as they are presented, while more seasoned veterans might use them to challenge their current practices and assumptions. In either case, the book is meant to offer guidance and spur meaningful discussions on the journey to success.
We look forward to contributing to your game plan for success!
Foreword
By Richard DuFour
Early in my career as a high school principal, I was often struck by the very different ways in which the same person would approach his or her coaching versus teaching assignments. The best head coaches realized that to create a consistently strong program, they needed to have all of the members of their coaching staff working in unison as a team. They wanted the junior high school, freshman, sophomore, and junior varsity coaches to be clear on the goals of the program and the process to be used in achieving those goals. The same offensive and defensive principles would be taught at each level. The staff would work collectively to solve problems that were occurring at any level. These programs typically provided the best examples of team-work in the entire school because the coaches worked interdependently to achieve common goals for which each member was mutually accountable.
These coaching staffs were big on goals. They would set long-term goals at the outset of the season: “We will make the state playoffs,” or “We will win the conference,” or “We will demonstrate improvement in key indicators every week.” They were equally attentive to short-term goals that helped clarify their game plan. “In this game, special teams will not allow a kickoff return beyond the thirty-yard line, we will gain over one hundred fifty yards in rushing offense, we will hold our opponent to fewer than seventeen points, and we will control possession of the ball for at least 60 percent of the game.”
Members of these staffs learned everything they could about the challenges they would be facing in the coming week. Advanced scouts were sent to determine the tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses of an upcoming opponent. Practices were purposefully designed to prepare students for the test they would face when they stepped onto the court, field, or pitch later in the week.
The best coaching staffs were fanatics about formative assessment. They were constantly—in practice and in games—gathering evidence of their players’ achievement. They would give specific, diagnostic, formative feedback to individual athletes: “This is what we need you to work on to get better at your position so the team can get better at achieving its goals.” They would check for understanding until they were certain their athletes were clear on what was being asked of them. They would pore over sheets of statistics during the game or at halftime and make adjustments accordingly: “We are being badly outrebounded. One of our goals in the second half is to outrebound our opponents, but to achieve that goal everyone must contribute. Our guards must stop releasing and get to the boards, and our front court needs to do a better job of getting a body on the opponent on every shot.”
These same individuals who were so committed to collaboration, goal setting, focused preparation, and formative assessments often abandoned these principles when entering their classrooms where they insisted on teaching in isolation. They didn’t set either short-term or long-term goals based on student learning. Many never bothered to even review the high-stakes assessments their students would take to determine if they would be eligible for admission to college. They used assessments to assign grades to students rather than as feedback regarding the effectiveness of their instruction or to identify the needs of individual students.
Their very different approach in the classroom was not a reflection of disinterest in teaching. Many of these coaches were excellent instructors and took pride in their relationships with their students. The stark contrast between how they approached their work with athletes versus their work with students spoke instead to the very different cultures of two different worlds—coaching and teaching. The culture of coaching has always supported the principle of people working interdependently to achieve shared goals for which they were mutually accountable. No self-respecting coach would be inattentive to setting goals, advance preparation, or making adjustments in their coaching based on evidence of what was working and what was not.
The culture of teaching, on the other hand, has been characterized by isolation. For too long in our profession, teaching has been regarded as closing one’s classroom door and serving as the autonomous ruler of one’s kingdom. Studies dating from the 1970s and continuing to the present have cited this tradition of working in isolation as the major obstacle to substantive school improvement.
Game Plan makes clear that what we know about the most successful athletic programs transfers perfectly to what we know about the most effective
