Demonstrate a willingness to confront individuals and groups who are not contributing to the collaborative team process
• Celebrate small successes along the way
Assign Educators to Meaningful Teams
We can structure educators into teams in a variety of ways. Vertical teams combine different grade levels, such as a K–2 primary team or a team of junior high and high school band directors. Interdisciplinary teams typically bring together teachers of different subjects for a particular grade level, such as seventh-grade language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies teachers. Access to technology means individuals can also link up with electronic teams, such as a team of all the art teachers in a district.
Research consistently cites that the most effective team structures for improving student achievement feature teachers of the same course or grade level, such as all the algebra teachers or second-grade teachers in a particular school (Gallimore, Ermeling, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2009; Little, 2006; Robinson et al., 2010; Saphier, King, & D’Auria, 2006; Stigler & Hiebert, 2009; Wei, Darling-Hammond, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). These structures suit the collective inquiry of collaborative teams because members share an inherent interest in addressing the six critical questions of the collaborative team process (see page 6).
Leaders who create artificial teams do damage to the PLC process. We have witnessed principals create the leftover team. For example, a principal may find that almost everyone on the staff fits easily into a course-specific team, but three singleton teachers—a dance instructor, an auto-repair teacher, and a band director—remain unassigned. So he or she asks those three faculty members to form a team, but it remains unclear to both the principal and the team members exactly what the three teachers should accomplish. Leaders should assign every member of a PLC to a team, but each team should serve a clear purpose—to improve student and adult learning. If the optimum team structure isn’t apparent, leaders should engage teachers in a dialogue about possible team structures and get their input on which structure will most benefit them.
Provide Sufficient Time to Engage in Meaningful Collaboration
As my colleagues and I write in Learning by Doing, Third Edition:
Reciprocal accountability demands that leaders who ask educators to work in collaborative teams provide those educators with time to meet during their contractual day. We believe it is insincere for any district or school leader to stress the importance of collaboration and then fail to provide time for it. One of the ways in which organizations demonstrate their priorities is allocation of resources, and in schools, one of the most precious resources is time. Thus, school and district leaders must provide teachers with time to do the things they are being asked to do. (DuFour et al., 2016, pp. 64–65)
Some school and district leaders continue to lament that they cannot find time for teachers to collaborate. No group of educators has ever found time to collaborate; they have to make time to collaborate because they consider meaningful collaboration an absolute priority. The professional literature effectively—and often—addresses the issue of finding time for collaboration, and that literature is readily available for those who have a sincere interest in exploring these alternatives. AllThingsPLC’s (n.d.b) “Tools and Resources” webpage (http://bit.ly/2g9JBLJ) provides different strategies for making time for educator collaboration that do not require additional resources. Readers can go to AllThingsPLC’s (n.d.a) “See the Evidence” webpage (www.allthingsplc.info/evidence) to read about hundreds of schools that have made time for educators to collaborate and have willingly shared their strategies and schedules for doing so.
These first two elements of reciprocal accountability—organizing people into meaningful teams and providing them with ample time to collaborate—are structural issues that effective school leaders can address. Other aspects of reciprocal accountability require more than managerial skill; they require leadership.
Establish Clarity Regarding the Work to Be Done and Why It Is Important
District and school leaders can support the collaborative team process in a PLC by ensuring all team members clearly understand both the nature of the work they need to do and why that work is important. Ineffective or unproductive team meetings create cynicism and only serve to sour teachers’ attitudes toward teaming up while simultaneously reinforcing the norms of isolation so prevalent in our schools (Boston Consulting Group, 2014).
As my colleagues and I write in Learning by Doing:
We have seen schools in which staff members are willing to collaborate about any number of things—dress codes, tardy policies, the appropriateness of Halloween parties—provided they can return to their classrooms and continue to do what they have always done. Yet in a PLC, the reason teachers are organized into teams, the reason they are provided with time to work together, the reason they are asked to focus on certain topics and complete specific tasks is so that when they return to their classrooms, they will possess and utilize an expanded repertoire of skills, strategies, materials, assessments, and ideas in order to impact student achievement in a more positive way.
Therefore, one of the most important elements of reciprocal accountability that district and school leaders must address is establishing clear parameters and priorities that guide teamwork toward the goal of improved student learning. (DuFour et al., 2016, pp. 67–68)
The guiding coalition can foster this clarity by working with teams to establish a timeline for completing certain tasks in the PLC process. This work should provide the rationale behind these important tasks and examples of what quality work looks like. For example, imagine a guiding coalition created the following timeline of four activities that guides the work of collaborative teams.
1. Use our professional development days prior to the start of the school year to create and present our team norms and SMART goals before students arrive at school.
2. By the second week of school, present our list of the essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions students should acquire throughout the school year.
3. By the third week of school, administer a collaborative team–developed common formative assessment.
4. By the fourth week of school, complete our first data analysis of the evidence of student learning from our team-developed common formative assessment.
Note that each activity should result in a product that flows from a collaborative team engaged in the right work. For each product the timeline asks the team to create, the guiding coalition would present both the rationale as to why the product is critical to the team’s work and high-quality examples of that product. My colleagues and I specifically designed Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2016) to provide collaborative teams with the rationale behind the different aspects of the PLC process and examples and rubrics to help guide their work. Educators can play an important role in their organization’s success when they not only know how to perform specific tasks but also understand how their work contributes to a larger purpose (DuFour & Fullan, 2013).
Monitor and Support Teams
What leaders pay attention to can powerfully communicate their priorities. Leaders who simply urge teams to “go collaborate,” and then have no process for monitoring the teams, send the message that they don’t really find the teams’ work that important. Furthermore, unless they have a process for monitoring
