in more classrooms more of the time. Therefore, once a team has agreed on an essential standard and how it will assess student learning, members may benefit from sharing ideas about how to best teach that standard.
I fully support this idea. I also, however, must offer a caveat. The best predictor for how a teacher will teach a unit is how he or she has taught it in the past. So conversations about different practices absent evidence of student learning can easily end up discussing, “I like to teach it this way,” or “I have always taught it this way.” As John Hattie (2009) warns, reflective teaching has the most power when it is collective (involving a teacher team rather than an individual) and based on actual evidence of student learning.
Marzano (2009) offers similar advice when he asserts that the ultimate criterion for successful teaching is student learning, rather than any particular teacher moves. He writes, “The lesson to be learned is that educators must always look to whether a particular strategy is producing the desired results as opposed to simply assuming that if a strategy is being used, positive results will ensue” (p. 35). So although team members may benefit from a discussion about possible instructional strategies prior to teaching a unit, that discussion should never replace collective analysis of the strategies’ effectiveness based on actual evidence of student learning during and after the unit.
I made the case earlier in this introduction that one of the most powerful ways a school can increase instructional competence is to have collaborative teams collectively analyze transparent results from common formative assessments. This is an important context to keep in mind when reading chapter 3.
How Will We Coordinate Our Efforts as a School?
I could not agree more with the significance of this critical question, which Marzano and colleagues (2016) have added to the HRS model of school improvement. In fact, my colleagues and I have made nondiscretionary, coordinated, schoolwide efforts a central tenet of our work. A high reliability school must address the arbitrary and capricious nature of practices that characterize too many schools and must insist that all staff honor coordinated systems and processes so that the school can strive for both excellence and equity.
It ultimately falls on school leaders to ensure the staff coordinate their collective efforts in a way that benefits students. Effective leaders can address this responsibility by establishing a simultaneously loose and tight school culture, or what Marzano and Timothy Waters (2009) have called “defined autonomy” (p. 8). Such a culture makes certain clearly understood priorities, processes, practices, and parameters are nondiscretionary. These elements of the culture are tight or defined, and effective leaders will confront those who violate or ignore the parameters. But within those few tight parameters, the culture is loose, which empowers individuals and teams to make decisions and enjoy a great deal of collective autonomy.
In our work with schools, my colleagues and I insist that the following three elements of the PLC process must be tight.
1. The fundamental structure of the school is the collaborative team, in which members work interdependently to achieve common goals and take collective responsibility for the learning of all students.
2. Each collaborative team does the following.
a. Creates a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit, that provides all students with access to essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions, regardless of their assigned teacher
b. Uses an assessment process that includes frequent team-developed common formative assessments to monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis
c. Applies a data-analysis protocol that uses transparent evidence of student learning to support, inform, and improve its members’ individual and collective practice
3. The school creates a schoolwide plan for intervention and extension that guarantees students who experience difficulty receive additional time and support for learning in a timely, directive, coordinated, and systematic way; and that gives those who are highly proficient additional time and support to extend their learning.
An emerging theme in educational leadership finds that no one individual has the expertise, energy, and influence to bring about substantive school change. School leaders, then, must from the start face the challenge of establishing a guiding coalition or leadership team that will help guide the school through the predictable turmoil that comes with substantive cultural change. Principals should select guiding coalition members on the basis of how other faculty members respect them. They should choose the people with social capital—the people Patterson et al. (2008) refer to as influencers because their colleagues so trust them that if they support an idea, others will likely support it as well.
Among the guiding coalition’s important tasks are the following.
• Building the shared foundation for the PLC process: Earlier in this introduction (page 4), I describe this task, which includes mission, vision, collective commitments, and goals. Focusing on the four pillars of mission, vision, collective commitments, and goals creates a strong foundation for the PLC process.
• Establishing a common language so people have a shared understanding of key terms: A principal who expects collaborative teams to develop shared norms, a guaranteed and viable curriculum, and common formative assessments will have little impact if those terms mean different things to different people throughout the faculty.
• Building shared knowledge: Once again, building shared knowledge together about the school’s current reality and the most promising, evidence-based practices for improving it is an essential aspect of decision making in a PLC.
• Establishing clarity about the right work: Collaboration is morally neutral. If ambiguity arises over the work that should take place or over quality indicators regarding the work, teams will almost certainly flounder.
• Forming systems to monitor collaborative teams’ progress: By monitoring its collaborative teams, a school can responsively help find solutions when a team struggles.
• Creating a celebratory culture: A celebratory culture should reinforce examples of the faculty’s collective commitments and progress toward the school’s shared vision.
Collaborative teams should not have sole accountability for students and their learning. Leaders should also have accountability—accountability for the teams that work with students to promote their success.
Reciprocal Accountability
Many definitions for the term leadership exist. My colleagues and I prefer this one: leadership is creating the conditions that allow others to succeed at what they are being asked to do (DuFour et al., 2016). This means that central office leaders, principals, and guiding coalition members must commit to reciprocal accountability. To hold teams accountable for engaging in certain processes and completing certain tasks, leaders at all levels must accept their own accountability. This way, they provide teams with the knowledge, resources, training, and ongoing support essential to their success. Effective leaders demonstrate reciprocal accountability when they do the following.
• Assign educators to meaningful teams
• Provide sufficient time to engage in meaningful collaboration
• Establish clarity regarding the work to be done and why it is important
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