to list names of individuals who possess the stated qualities. Some names may appear in more than one category. Eliminate anyone who does not possess any of these qualities. It’s possible that a current team leader or department chair may not be a good fit for the leadership team. Be aware that those on the leadership team are not always staff members who eagerly agree with one another or the principal. It is also important to include support staff representatives as a part of the leadership team. Everyone must be all in for student success!
It is not enough to simply create a leadership team; as DuFour et al. (2016) note, this team must engage in the right work. Its primary responsibility is to coordinate the school’s collective efforts across grade levels, departments, and subjects. The leadership team meetings focus primarily on these PLC tasks.
• Build and support the school’s mission of learning for all.
• Model the collaborative team process by using norms, agendas, meeting records, and so on.
• Create a master schedule that provides time for team collaboration, core instruction, intervention, and remediation.
• Coordinate staff and other resources to support core instruction and interventions.
• Articulate essential learning outcomes across grade levels and subjects.
• Ensure all students have access to grade-level or course-specific core instruction.
• Continually monitor schoolwide evidence of student learning.
• Support the work of collaborative grade-level and content teams.
• Problem solve school-improvement strategies to support increased student learning.
• Celebrate small wins along the journey with the entire staff.
The leadership team must operate as a model for all of the other collaborative teams in the school. The members should meet biweekly, or even more frequently, and provide meeting agendas and minutes to all staff members for their continued learning and understanding.
The first step in the modeling process is to set norms for adult behavior. Norms are the standards of behavior that members of the team agree to follow so that meetings are effective and efficient (Mattos et al., 2016). Team members can think of norms as the commitments they make to each other about how they will accomplish working together. As DuFour et al. (2016) note, there are procedural norms such as meeting times, attendance policies, punctuality expectations, shared responsibility for the work, and the need for follow through. In addition, there are behavioral expectations that address how a team will handle disagreements or make a team decision. The team must define, clarify, and describe a process for consensus decision making. The team should also establish an accountability norm that specifically states how the team will respond if any member violates the norms. The administrator is not the norm monitor; instead, the team designates a monitor and uses a nonverbal signal to indicate violations in an effort to monitor them. It is best for teams to handle norm violations themselves. Principals should meet with the entire team rather than individual members if norm violations are a persistent problem.
At the start and end of every meeting, the team reviews these norms, which describe how the team will function. Some typical team norms include but are not limited to the following.
• Procedural norms:
• Behavioral norms:
• Accountability norm:
Every member of the leadership team must model norms at the meetings he or she leads. This means collaborative teacher team meetings as well as faculty meetings. Norms help every group to function as a high-performing team rather than simply a collection or group of people.
Develop Urgency and a Collective Vision for Change
Every journey of improvement starts with the why before the how. This means that a school must examine the current reality and confront the brutal facts before it can take any meaningful action (Collins, 2001; DuFour et al., 2016). This is an especially difficult task for underperforming schools because they often have extremely negative or stagnant data. They must be willing to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
To determine each school’s urgent and targeted needs for improvement, we use a needs-assessment protocol (much like an audit) based on the work of DuFour et al. (2016). An unbiased coach from outside the school usually administers the assessment, taking a 360-degree view of all of the school’s policies, practices, procedures, and structures in light of their effect on student learning. The coach gathers evidence and summarizes the needs-assessment results. This protocol creates a safe environment for the coach, principal, and leadership team to engage in the difficult conversations that allow them to develop specific action steps for improvement. The protocol includes interviews with small focus groups of stakeholders and a review of all related data and information from which the coach, in collaboration with leadership, develops an actionable plan. The leader’s job is to frame the challenge or challenges that are getting in the way of improvement in student learning without placing blame. This process requires a fearless inventory of the entire organization that paints a data picture of the school landscape. See the data-collection and focus-group protocols in
