You Want Us to WHAT?!
June 22, 2021
I was trained as a music educator. I know how to sing the Do, Re, Mi’s, and to help others do the same. You need a major third? Or a tune to set the mood? I’m your man!
I can direct a choir like nobody’s business, and hearing a flat flute–well, I guess that’s not so tough for most anyone to hear…
Pardon my lack of humility and bluntness, but ANY music teacher knows their craft. Just like ANY teacher of [you-name-the-subject] knows their content. That’s what we’re trained to do.
What we’re NOT trained to do, music educator or any other educator, is to work with other teachers to get better. We are trained to do our thing, in our room, by ourselves, with our kids. End of story.
So don’t ask me to collaborate with others.
The Problem?
Here’s the problem: no one person can have all the knowledge, talents, and skills necessary to meet the needs of every student. It can’t be done.
We NEED each other to rise to the task of meeting every child’s needs.
And to work together, there are certain intangible resources that are needed: Trust between teachers, Training on protocols and procedures, Administrative support, and Access to new ideas and expertise.
Intangible Resources to Put the C in PLC
- Trust between teachers
- Training on protocols and procedures
- Administrative support
- Access to new ideas and expertise
Trust and Protocols
Trust is the currency of relationships. And relationships are the foundation of our work. Without this foundation, you can kiss the effectiveness of your collaborative teams good-bye.
Unfortunately, like other forms of currency, trust doesn’t grow on trees. It requires painstaking development and nurturing. And, in addition to the Three + One from a previous blog, the use of protocols can greatly assist in your trust-building endeavours. Here’s why:
In a New York Times Magazine article, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” Charles Duhigg (2016) summarized a multi-year study of some 180 teams at Google and found one thing above all else impacted the effectiveness of the group. This one thing wasn’t the education of the individuals, the personalities of those same individuals, how well they got along as a team, or any other factor attributed to what people typically think about in terms of individual or group dynamics. Instead,
The one thing that makes the difference between effective and less-than-effective teams is psychological safety.
Two Aspects to Psychological Safety
Google found that this psychological safety was based on two essential attributes that came to the forefront:
1) Equity of turn-taking and
2) Social sensitivity
(or the ability to tell how others feel based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues and then respond appropriately).
It was these two characteristics that were vital in creating an effective team and a climate of interpersonal trust and mutual respect that foster task success.
While social sensitivity is harder to develop in others, equity of turn-taking need not be so: this is where protocols come in handy, as this is precisely what protocols do. Simply put, protocols are a step-by-step process for doing something. The purpose of a protocol is to focus a group on a specific task and to provide for equitable opportunities for expressing one’s thinking.
Staff need to be trained on protocols to maximize their effectiveness—otherwise people default into their natural tendencies of interrupting, dominating, or sitting passively while others do the dominating. Protocols for examining student work and data analysis are particularly useful for educators.
An incredible, detailed listing of dozens of protocols is available for free on this link for the School Reform Initiative.
Administrative Support
Administrative support is also a key intangible resource, and there are many ways that a school leader can signal this. It may include a rearranging of staff meetings to become focused on staff learning and not management issues of the school (see this recent post for a fuller discussion). It may also include the reduction or even elimination of certain bureaucratic activities in which teachers are frequently required to engage. Maybe copies of detailed lesson plans are minimized. Maybe paperwork to request professional leave is reduced. No doubt you will identify places to reduce bureaucracy in your building if you take some time to think about it—or, even better, ask your staff for their ideas on what they spend significant time doing that has a minimal or no impact on student learning.
Access to New Ideas and Expertise
The final intangible resource is that of providing access to new ideas and expertise to teaching staff. I personally like to think of these as “instructional hand grenades” in the professional learning process. As teams work, outside expertise is vital.
As Fullan (2003) puts it, groups can be powerful. They can also be powerfully wrong! Hence, it is important to loft strategic and specific instructional grenades into our professional learning. This can be in the form of video or other conferences, webinars, book studies, outside experts on training days, workshops, and more.
Resources: Tangible and Intangible
Both tangible and intangible resources are necessary to create a collaborative environment (for a discussion of tangible resources, check this recent post out). We were never taught how to work together, and a few key intangible resources will go a long way in helping us get out of our own areas of expertise and access the expertise of others. Trust, Protocols, Administrative Support, and Access to New Ideas and Expertise are just those resources.
Questions for Reflection:
- To what extent is trust evident in your team(s)?
- What steps might you take to develop this trust?
Do you have a story you’d like to share?
Comment below
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Very good suggestions, you just gained a brand new reader. Do you have any feedback on your most recent post though?
Hmmmm…I guess I don’t understand the question.
Super informative post and this resonates with me after 25 years of participating and building teams – both effective and defective. Thanks for sharing.
So glad to hear that it’s helpful!
This is a very informative post with useful information and resources that can be applied and implemented right away . I would highly recommend this post to VAPA departments where teachers try to work together and and yet they are teaching different electives making it challenging to collaborate . This post can help to find strategies to use to find common grounds to collaborate . I am excited to share with my VAPA department . Thank you !
I’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! Thank you for letting me know and sharing with others.
Thank YOU!