specific responsibilities and includes the resources needed to meet these expectations. If teachers view RTI as a demand requiring them to work beyond their current contractual hours, they have a legitimate right to resist.
Most people become committed to a process once they see that it works, not before.
4. Build staff consensus: Most people become committed to a process once they see that it works, not before. This creates an interesting dilemma: Schools can’t start until they build consensus, but they never get true commitment until they start. Consequently, taking months and months planning for change and getting everyone to feel ownership in the process follows the law of diminishing returns. If schools wait for everyone to get on board before starting, the train never leaves the station. What it takes to start is consensus—everyone has had a say, the will of the group has emerged, and it is evident, even to those who disagree (DuFour et al., 2016).
To build consensus on the plan, people tend to come to the same conclusions when they base their decisions on the same facts. Regrettably, many schools average opinions to make decisions. Because every staff member enters the RTI discussion with different prior experiences, priorities, and perspectives, it is often difficult to reach consensus. More often than not, the loudest and most aggressive voices win, and those resistant to change are usually the most vocal in this debate process; Muhammad’s (2018) research finds that fundamentalists are usually the most aggressive at stating their beliefs.
By contrast, team members in a PLC build shared knowledge instead of averaging opinions to arrive at consensus on vital questions. They engage in collective inquiry into best practices (DuFour et al., 2016). The leadership team should serve as the lead learners. They must dig deeply into the areas of focus, identify powerful research and relevant information, and determine the best format for sharing this information with the staff.
Reaching true consensus begins with a shared understanding of what consensus actually represents. To get there requires time, trust building, structured conversations, and consistent monitoring along the way.
Helpful Tools
The following tools will help you accomplish the work for this essential action.
► Chapter 2 of Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2016), “Defining a Clear and Compelling Purpose”: This chapter focuses on the how to create the four pillars of the PLC process: common mission, vision, values, and goals.
► “Creating Consensus for a Culture of Collective Responsibility” (page 53): The leadership team can use this tool to help build consensus regarding a school mission to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
► “Creating Consensus Survey” (for the leadership team) (page 54): The leadership team can use this tool to self-assess its readiness to building consensus and leading change.
► “Forces at Work” (page 55): Once the leadership team has self-assessed its current readiness, it can use this tool to identify its strengths, areas of weakness, and specific action steps for moving forward.
► “Simplifying RTI Culture Survey” (for the entire staff) (page 56): All staff can use this tool to provide the leadership team with a more accurate picture of current cultural beliefs and norms.
► “Building Consensus for Change and Bell Schedule Chart” (page 57): This tool provides an example of how one school successfully surveyed and achieved consensus.
Coaching Tips
At its most fundamental level, the task of creating consensus for cultural change is all about building shared knowledge and understanding. As the leadership team works through and discusses the questions included on the reproducible “Creating Consensus for a Culture of Collective Responsibility” (page 53), it’s important to structure and facilitate the same discussions with the entire staff. Cultural change happens when all staff members reveal their beliefs and assumptions, read research, confront the current reality, explore the possibilities of a new vision for their work, and hear each other’s thoughts and opinions. It is not enough for the leadership team to have these powerful discussions only amongst its members.
Building shared knowledge takes time, consistency of message, and multiple opportunities for dialogue. Team members must pay attention to both written and verbal communication, including emails, bulletins, meeting notes, one-on-one conversations, team and department meetings, and whole-staff meetings. It is also important to ensure that all stakeholders are included—administrators, counselors, instructional staff, support staff, parents and, when appropriate, students.
As the leadership team engages in this work, it may choose to use the reproducible “Creating Consensus Survey” (page 54) to formatively assess its progress. The reproducible “Forces at Work” (page 55) is useful for ensuring discussions include evidence and data as their basis, not just opinions. It also helps the team develop a prioritized to-do list of next steps.
The most challenging steps in creating cultural change are those at the beginning and the end, in which team members explore assumptions and beliefs in a nonthreatening way and reach consensus about the proposed change.
Many tools are available for structuring and facilitating a discussion about assumptions and beliefs. The bottom line is that teams cannot ignore this step. The likelihood of reaching consensus on shared assumptions and beliefs is almost nil without first uncovering and discussing current beliefs.
As conversations take place, it is important for the leadership team to check progress toward consensus. A tool such as the reproducible “Simplifying RTI Culture Survey” (page 56) is one way to “dipstick” along the way. You can use it more than once, as long as enough time and conversation take place between uses to show change.
Lastly, a common obstacle to cultural change is a lack of common understanding of consensus and lack of a clear tool or strategy to demonstrate consensus. Sharing the example highlighted in the reproducible “Building Consensus for Change and Bell Schedule Chart” (page 57) is one way to ensure everyone has a common definition of consensus and a common vision of knowing how and when the school achieves it.
Beware! The work described in this section—Action 2: Build a Culture of Collective Responsibility—never ends! It is something that the schoolwide leadership team must attend to in its own meetings, as well as each and every day on an ongoing basis. Culture is a dynamic and amoeba-like social organism that requires constant nurturing and care.
Culture is a dynamic and amoeba-like social organism that requires constant nurturing and care.
Action 3
Form Collaborative Teacher Teams
Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.
—Helen Keller
Achieving a learning-focused mission requires
