heart of any professional learning community lies in a high-performing team. Powerful collaborative teams should be designed to expand the pool of ideas, solutions, and methods that promote shifts in instructional practice to achieve desired results. These teams must have a shared responsibility and a common goal focused on improvement for all. Team design, therefore, should ensure the right members are included to provide critical insights. In professional baseball, managers carefully select team members to provide the best advantage for winning a national championship. All players understand this goal and are each selected for their individual strengths. These distinct individuals, however, need to support each other for the whole team to be successful. This interdependency allows each member to share his or her talents while achieving a common outcome.
Schools are far more complex organizations than a baseball team, but leaders might consider their lineups in a similar manner. Schools have multiple goals that need to be addressed for multiple audiences and with specific time constraints. The challenge for school leaders is that strategic team design is a must, and several teams are needed within a school. The talents of the staff should be leveraged to foster advocacy and inquiry processes for identified purposes. Leaders should resist the danger of being overly inclusive and adding too many people on a team. Business writer Patrick Lencioni (2012) asserts that “the only reason a person should be on a team is that she represents a key part of the organization or brings truly critical talent or insight to the table” (p. 24). Thus, teams should be small enough to be effective while also being large enough to include needed talent. Lencioni advocates for teams to range from three to twelve people to remain effective. Furthermore, a team member must have a natural connection to the task at hand. For example, a guidance counselor would be hard pressed to regularly contribute to a social studies team but would be outstanding on a student assistance team.
DuFour et al. (2008) remind us that “no single person has the expertise, influence, and energy to initiate and sustain a substantive change process” (p. 310). Teaming and reteaming will become a necessity to distribute the capacity of the building, especially for a few of your power players in the building. A power player is a staff member who holds significant expertise that many teams might need for a specific focus. Examples of power players would be ESL teachers, special education teachers, building specialists, and so on. For example, an ESL teacher being placed on a grade-level or departmental team would be charged with the responsibility of providing the team with the necessary strategies to make learning and assessments accessible to the EL students and assist the team in understanding how to review the data with a laser focus on language acquisition. A power player may rotate among several teams in a week to, as DuFour et al. (2008) explain, “assume the lead in the team’s collective inquiry into best practice” (p. 311) on certain issues while also allowing for different members to demonstrate leadership within the teams.
Once team design has been determined, leaders need to make sure a shared understanding is created for the purpose and goals of each team and the roles and responsibilities of individual members. The pitcher on a baseball team has a very clear understanding of what his job is for the whole team. That level of clarity is also needed for the members of a collaborative team. Simply placing the right players on the team won’t guarantee success. As DuFour et al. (2008) explain, leaders “have an obligation to create structures that make collaboration meaningful rather than artificial . . . [and] to establish clear priorities and parameters so that teachers focus on the right topics” (p. 312). Establishing clarity and focus for the team will be just as important as the team design itself.
The What
We have seen success occur when leaders who are considering possible team structures strategically assess the strengths of staff members and determine what value-add each brings to the organization. The following list of questions is centered on several aspects of team composition to help leaders design the right types of teams to work on critical issues, discover critical roles missing from certain teams, or identify members who are unnecessarily on a team when their talents could be used elsewhere. Each context and team focus will result in different answers. Priority teams (often grade-level or content-area teams) should be addressed first with a commitment to leveraging time for all teams to collaborate.
• What is the purpose of the team? What topics will this team cover?
• Which staff need to be on the team? What value-add will each member bring to the collective?
• How many times will this team need to meet to be effective and achieve its goals?
• What leadership involvement will there be, and how often might that person support the work?
Considering which power players to choose for each type of team is another important task. See table 1.1 for a guide that lists the possible team types and helps leaders ensure they are including the appropriate power players on each team.
Table 1.1: Power Players for Each Team Type
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