Читать книгу Taking Action - Austin Buffum - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

A Culture of Collective Responsibility

A small body of determined spirits, fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission, can alter the course of history.

—Mahatma Gandhi

RTI is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It is a tool. Consider that for a moment: a tool. You can use a hammer to help build a home for a family—what a positive, productive purpose. However, you can use the same hammer to tear a house down. A tool is only as effective as the hands that are guiding it and the purpose for which it is used.

We have seen many schools and districts approach RTI as an end in itself, viewing it as a mandate that must be implemented. When this happens, they see the critical elements of the process as steps on an implementation checklist—as actions to complete to achieve compliance. As the top-down legislation of No Child Left Behind proves, compliance-driven reform efforts rarely create the deep levels of commitment and ownership necessary to truly transform an organization.

Why should a school commit to the RTI process? What is the purpose of the RTI tool? The first big idea of the PLC at Work process captures the answer to these questions—a focus on learning. See the highlighted piece of the RTI at Work pyramid in figure 2.1 (page 34). Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas W. Many, and Mike Mattos (2016) state it this way:

A focus on learning is a PLC’s commitment to making student learning the fundamental purpose of the school or district. It means that schools assess every policy, practice, and procedure with these questions: Will doing this lead to higher levels of learning for our students? Are we willing to revise or discontinue actions that fail to increase student learning? (p. 7)

FIGURE 2.1: Focus on creating a culture of collective responsibility.

A school or district claiming that its mission is to ensure student learning is much more than a hopeful wish or a catchy motto on the organization’s letterhead. An organization’s mission:

► States its fundamental purpose

► Guides decisions and actions

► Provides a path, framework, and context that the organization uses to formulate strategies

In other words, a school or district’s mission serves as both a sacred promise to those it serves and the organization’s highest priority when making decisions. It represents what is non-negotiable—what the school will not compromise.

Because the purpose of RTI is to ensure high levels of learning for every student, then one would expect educators to enthusiastically embrace the RTI process. Would any educator be against proven practices that help all students succeed? Have some schools and districts adopted a mission statement in conflict with this goal? We have had the honor of working with schools across the globe, and we have never found mission statements that sound like the following.

► Our mission is to ensure that most students succeed.

► Our mission is to maintain a bell-shaped curve of student achievement.

► Our mission is to use students’ perceived genetic ability and home demographics to rank, sort, and track them.

Instead, what we see in school mission statements are the words each, every, and all, such as:

► We will focus on each student’s needs.

► We will maximize every student’s potential.

► We are committed to the success of all students.

When the mission ensures student success, RTI is the perfect tool to achieve this goal.

When the mission ensures student success, RTI is the perfect tool to achieve this goal.

Sadly, our experience is that many schools and districts struggle with implementing RTI because what they claim in their public mission statement conflicts with what they advocate for in the privacy of the staff lounge, faculty meeting, or district cabinet meeting. Propose to a school staff that they actually commit to practices aligned to their mission of ensuring that all students learn at high levels, and we find that many educators begin to hedge on two words: ensure and all. Some claim it is unfair to hold educators responsible for student learning when so many factors outside of school impact each student’s academic success. Others state that it is a teacher’s job to teach and a student’s job to learn. Still others assume that some students are incapable of learning rigorous academic outcomes. The underlining point in these concerns is this: some educators neither believe in, nor support, a mission that claims all students will succeed.

If the purpose of RTI is to ensure that all students learn at high levels, but a critical number of staff does not believe it is fair and reasonable to commit to this purpose, then it would be unrealistic to expect educators to embrace the practices required to achieve this outcome. Likewise, if the reason why PLC members collaborate is to ensure every student’s success, but a majority of the staff is unwilling to commit to this outcome, then team meetings are likely to digress and lose focus.

A successful journey does not begin with taking a first step but by facing the right direction (Buffum et al., 2012). Likewise, transforming a school or district does not start with implementing a sequence of tasks but with clarifying the organization’s direction—its fundamental purpose. This chapter focuses on how an organization builds agreement on a mission of collective responsibility and what foundational conditions must be in place to successfully build a multitiered system of supports to achieve this outcome. The five essential actions we discuss are:

1. Establish a guiding coalition.

2. Build a culture of collective responsibility.

3. Form collaborative teacher teams.

4. Create time for collaboration.

5. Commit to team norms.

In this chapter, we explore each of these essential actions required to build the right school culture and collaborative structures that serve as the foundation of an effective system of interventions.

Action 1

Establish a Guiding Coalition

Leading by example is perhaps the purest form of leadership and the one over which each of us has the most control. You can lead only where you will go.

—Roland Barth

Creating a culture built around the concept of every student succeeding represents a major shift in thinking for many schools. In his book Leading Change, John Kotter (1996) asserts that such shifts in thinking (cultural change) often fail due to the lack of what he calls a “guiding coalition” (p. 52).

We recommend that a school’s leadership team serve as the site’s guiding coalition. Because of this recommendation, we use two terms—(1) leadership team and (2) guiding coalition—which are interchangeable throughout this book. To achieve this goal, many schools need to redesign or repurpose their existing leadership team, as we find that most site leadership teams rarely function as a guiding coalition dedicated to ensuring high levels of learning for all students. Instead, traditional leadership teams, at the site or district level, often focus exclusively on managing the school’s day-to-day operations. RTI represents an almost overwhelming level of change compared to how schools have functioned for more than two hundred years. We know that even slight levels of change can be hard for people. Unless the right team leads the RTI process—a team that focuses its efforts on the right work—the anxiety and inevitable obstacles inherent in this level of change will overwhelm the best organization’s intentions.

Here’s Why

To transform an organization, Kotter (2007) states:

No one person, no matter how competent, is capable of single-handedly developing the right vision, communicating it to vast numbers of people, eliminating all the key obstacles, generating short-term wins, leading and managing dozens of change projects, and anchoring new approaches deep in an organization’s culture…. Putting together the right coalition of people to lead a change initiative is critical to its success.

In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, Jim Collins (2001) similarly asserts that the first step to implementing successful change is to “get the right people on the bus” (p. 41). Collins (2001) says, “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great” (p. 41). The right people don’t need to be closely managed or constantly fired up. Rather, they are capable, self-motivated, and eager to take responsibility for creating something great.

We find it both fascinating and tragic that many schools give more careful consideration to forming their varsity football coaching staff or school social committee than to forming the best possible school guiding coalition. Random practices, such as the following, often determine positions on the school leadership team.

► Seniority: “I should be department chair because I have been here the longest.”

► Novice: “Make the rookie do it. Pay your dues, kid!”

► Rotation: “It’s Sally’s turn to be grade-level leader.”

► Default: “Bill is the only person who applied.”

Forming an effective guiding coalition is unlikely to happen serendipitously. It takes carefully considering both the essential tasks that the leadership must accomplish and the research behind effective leadership.

Here’s How

In selecting the right people for an effective guiding coalition, it is important to consider the essential tasks that this team will take responsibility for in the RTI at Work process. They include:

• Build consensus for the school’s mission of collective responsibility.

• Create a master schedule that provides sufficient time for team collaboration, core instruction, supplemental interventions, and intensive interventions.

• Coordinate schoolwide human resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including the site counselor, psychologist, speech and language pathologist, special education teacher, librarian, health services staff, subject specialists, instructional aides, and another classified staff.

• Allocate the school’s fiscal resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including school categorical funding.

• Assist with articulating essential learning outcomes across grade levels and subjects.

• Lead the school’s universal screening efforts to identify students in need of Tier 3 intensive interventions before they fail.

• Lead the school’s efforts at Tier 1 for schoolwide behavior expectations, including attendance policies and awards and recognitions.

• Ensure all students have access to grade-level core instruction.

• Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 2 interventions for students in need of supplemental support in motivation, attendance, and behavior.

• Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 3 interventions for students in need of intensive support in the universal skills of reading, writing, number sense, English language, motivation, attendance, and behavior.

• Continually monitor schoolwide evidence of student learning. (Buffum et al., 2012, p. 36)

In addition to administrative representation, the guiding coalition should have teacher representatives from each collaborative teacher team because many of the outcomes listed relate to supporting and monitoring these teams’ work. At the elementary level, this most likely will be grade-level leaders; at the secondary level, this mostly likely will be department or course-level leaders. Additionally, representation from classified and support staff will help the leadership team best allocate schoolwide resources to support the school’s system of interventions.

Traditionally, school leadership teams have included representation from administration, teachers, and support staff. But beyond just departmental representation, Kotter (1996) states a successful guiding coalition must comprise four essential types of power.

1. Positional power: These individuals have a certain level of defined authority because of their title or office. For example, schools afford the principal the ability to make certain decisions because of the defined responsibilities of this position. Kotter (1996) says that if a guiding coalition does not have enough positional power, it will not have the authority to carry out essential actions. In other words, are enough key players on board so those who disagree cannot easily block progress?

2. Expertise: When reviewing the previous list of essential tasks, what types of expertise must the leadership team possess to successfully achieve these outcomes? For example, because RTI requires coordinating data about specific students, we have found that having at least one member with a deep level of expertise in the school’s education technology can be very helpful.

3. Credibility: Anyone with expertise in an organization knows that some individuals influence and sway decision making more than others. Some of these individuals use this credibility to advocate for keeping the status quo, while others can use their influence to build support for a new change initiative. It is critical that a guiding coalition has sufficient levels of credibility with those it is trying to convince. An important question to ask is, Does our leadership team have enough people with credibility that its recommendations and decisions will be taken seriously, especially by those staff members who we most need to convince?

It is critical that a guiding coalition has sufficient levels of credibility with those it is trying to convince.

4. Leadership ability: Leaders have the ability to convincingly articulate a position, unite others toward a common goal, build trust with others, and respectfully confront actions that are not aligned to the school’s mission. If a guiding coalition lacks members with leadership ability, it is unlikely that the best-laid plans will be implemented successfully. Even if the school’s principal possesses leadership ability, it would be unwise to always make the principal the spokesperson for the leadership team. When administrators always introduce new ideas, staff members often view them as top-down directives. Identifying other members—especially teacher leaders—with leadership ability is a powerful asset for an effective guiding coalition. The right question to ask is, “Does the group include enough proven leaders to be able to drive the change process?”

So, an effective leadership team must be comprised of people who possess strong positional power, broad expertise, and high credibility with their peers. Moreover, it is important that the guiding coalition is comprised of people who have strong leadership skills and not just the ability to organize and manage programs. In other words, the guiding coalition, along with the school administration, acts as a change agent relative to the mission and vision of the school.

While the previous examples focus on creating a school leadership team, we should apply these same principles to forming a leadership team to guide districtwide RTI implementation. Building a broad base of expertise, including representation from each school, special and regular education, classified support staff, the teachers’ union, district and site administration, parents, and community resources, is important to the team’s success.

As important as getting the “right people on the bus” is to establishing an effective leadership team, it is equally important to establish a culture of collective responsibility within the team itself. In other words, each individual on the leadership team must see him- or herself as a leader whose role it is to participate in, model, and inspire a similar culture in the school as a whole. The team’s work, therefore, must consistently have a dual focus—internal attention to how members are working together and external attention to coaching and inspiring others.

To begin, the team must discuss and agree on its purpose—to unite and coordinate the school’s collective efforts to help every student succeed and to allocate the school’s resources to best achieve this goal. It is also important to identify any nonpurposes—topics that will be off limits during team meetings, such as complaining about students, parents, or staff members. Once the team clearly understands and agrees to its purpose, it is then essential to reach consensus on team tasks, desired outcomes for each meeting, team norms, and each team member’s roles and responsibilities. The following tools and tips can help in this process.

Helpful Tools

The following tools will help you accomplish the work for this essential action.

► “Building a School Leadership Team” (page 41): This activity is designed to help a principal or administrative team create an effective school leadership team.

► “Team Charter” (page 42): Use this form to organize and set norms for your leadership team.

► “Meeting Agenda Template” (page 44): Use this template to record the meeting agenda for your leadership team.

Coaching Tips

As stated previously, once the right people are on the schoolwide leadership team, it is essential for the team to embrace the importance of doing the work, not just leading the work. In other words, team members must establish and live a culture of collective responsibility among themselves in order to model, inform, and establish a similar culture in the school as a whole.

An effective way to get started is to create a team charter, a document that outlines the foundations on which to base all team interactions and work. All team members must participate in the dialogue and discussions that result in consensus on the document itself. Once they reach agreement, all members sign and date the charter. As work progresses, the team might need to revisit, revise, or supplement the charter to meet its needs.

The success of the leadership team goes hand in hand with the success of its meetings. Every time the leadership team meets, there must be a clear path to action (goals and tasks), attention to culture building (collaborative work, norms, and all members’ equal participation), exchange of information (structured conversations to ensure shared understanding), and tangible action steps.

A carefully planned and skillfully facilitated meeting agenda is the key to success. High-performance teams consistently use an agenda template, such as the “Meeting Agenda Template” (page 44). Using a consistent agenda template ensures that each meeting begins with an overview of purpose, desired outcomes, and tasks to be accomplished, along with team member roles and approximate time needed for each task. Remember, less is more. The most productive meetings often have fewer topics, which, in turn, allow for all members to have greater participation.

The most productive meetings often have fewer topics, which, in turn, allow for all members to have greater participation.

Each meeting must also conclude with consistency—reviewing tasks the team completed and decisions it made, clarifying team members’ responsibilities to accomplish before the next meeting, evaluating the meeting’s effectiveness, and brainstorming a list of topics to include on the next meeting agenda. Team members should compile and share notes after each meeting. This responsibility can be assigned to a specific team member or shared among team members. Assigning additional team member roles, such as facilitator, timer, or public recorder may also help team meetings run more smoothly.

Once the leadership team establishes the foundational steps outlined in this section, its work broadens to include ongoing attention to its own team culture and productivity as well as developing a similar culture in the school as a whole. Team members must model the purpose and beliefs of the leadership team both formally and informally. Daily conversations and interactions with colleagues, in addition to team and faculty meetings, are the most influential building blocks for changing culture. Gandhi (2017) said it best, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Teachers, staff, and leaders can also be the change they want to see in their schools.

Action 2

Build a Culture of Collective Responsibility

Our experience verifies that the possibilities are unlimited once a dedicated school staff goes in search of research and best practices to advance their shared vision of learning for all. However, until they embrace the possibility that all children can learn, the obstacles and barriers they will find are virtually endless and will seem insurmountable.

—Larry Lezotte

The schoolwide leadership team’s first and most important task is to establish what we refer to as a culture of collective responsibility. Kent Peterson and Terrence Deal define school culture as the norms, values, rituals, beliefs, symbols, and ceremonies that produce a school persona (Deal & Peterson, 1999).

Working from the premise that the purpose of establishing a system of interventions is to ensure all students learn at high levels, there must be consensus among and between staff on two fundamental assumptions.

1. Educators assume primary responsibility to ensure high levels of learning for every student: As Buffum et al. (2012) state, “While parental, societal, and economic forces impact student learning, the actions of the educators will ultimately determine each child’s mastery of the essential academic skills, knowledge, and behaviors needed for future success in school” (p. 16).

2. Educators assume that all students can learn at high levels: We define high levels of learning as “high school plus,” connoting every student will graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge to continue to learn. To compete in the 21st century global marketplace, “students must continue to learn beyond high school, and there are many paths for that learning, including trade schools, internships, community colleges, and universities. To achieve this outcome, students must master essential grade-level curriculum each year” (Buffum et al., 2012, p. 16).

Many schools want to hedge on the word ensure, and instead commit to a mission that states it is their job to provide their students the opportunity to learn. It is virtually impossible for RTI to succeed within this school culture, as the very purpose of RTI is to provide students additional time and support when they don’t succeed after initial teaching. Buffum and colleagues (2012) write that an opportunity to learn school believes:

Its responsibility for student learning ends once the child has been given the chance to learn the first time. But a learning-focused school understands that the school was not built so that teachers have a place to teach—it was built so that the children of the community have a place to learn. Learning-focused schools embrace RTI, as it is a proven process to help them achieve their mission. (p. 18)

As referenced in the introduction, research proves that RTI is twice as powerful as any single environmental factor that can impact student success (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011; Hattie, 2009, 2012; Reardon, 2011). Until educators stop blaming factors outside of school for why failing students have not learned essential academic curriculum, and instead look internally at what they can control to ensure this outcome, it is unlikely they will fully commit to the RTI process.

The second essential assumption required to create a culture of collective responsibility is for educators to assume that all students can learn at high levels.

When we ask educators to commit to a mission of ensuring that all students learn at high levels, a reasonable concern is this: What about students with disabilities? Isn’t it unfair to commit to a mission of learning for all when some students lack the cognitive ability to achieve this outcome?

Research proves that RTI is twice as powerful as any single environmental factor that can impact student success.

Undeniably, there is a very small percentage of students with profound cognitive disabilities that make it impossible for them to learn the higher-level-thinking skills required for postsecondary education. In the United States, we understand their limitations and would not expect these individuals to become self-sufficient, independent adults. We are not suggesting that these students cannot learn or that schools do not have a responsibility for their education. While almost all students must transition to postsecondary education to succeed in the global economy, these students are not expected to compete in this environment, so their curriculum in school might not meet our criteria of high school plus.

So when we ask educators to assume all students can learn at high levels, we should define all as any student who can or might be an independent adult someday. This reasonable definition means that most students currently in special education must learn at high levels too. These students are not going to receive modified rent someday, accommodated bills, or an IEP at work. These students can and must leave the K–12 system with the skills needed to succeed in postsecondary education and in life.

Regardless of this reality, many educators refuse to assume that all students can learn at high levels because, beyond students with profound disabilities, they believe that some students lack the ability to learn rigorous curriculum. These educators often point to students with IQ scores that are above the threshold of profound disabilities but much lower than the average. Yet we know that IQ testing is an imperfect science that was not designed to definitively predict a child’s future academic limitations. Also, IQ testing has been legally determined to be culturally biased (Powers, Hagans-Murillo, & Restori, 2004).

Students can and must leave the K–12 system with the skills needed to succeed in postsecondary education and in life.

While working with schools, we hear some educators claim that the law of averages—the distribution of the bell-shaped curve—proves that we must always expect some students to be below average. We should not be surprised that many educators feel this way, since these assumptions are the foundation of our traditional school system. Because the traditional U.S. K–12 system was preparing students for a farm-and-factory-driven economy, people assumed that only a small percentage of students would learn beyond grammar school. Therefore, schools did not expect all students to learn at high levels. Instead, they ranked and sorted students on a bell-shaped curve, which identified those few expected to reach higher education. In this kind of system, it is reasonable to expect that “a few people will excel, most will be satisfactory or average, and a few will fail” (Fendler & Muzaffar, 2008, p. 63). Yet Benjamin Bloom (1971) states:

The normal curve is not sacred. It describes the outcome of a random process. Since education is a purposeful activity in which we seek to have the students learn what we teach, the achievement distribution should be very different from the normal curve if our instruction is effective. In fact, our educational efforts may be said to be unsuccessful to the extent that student achievement is normally distributed. (p. 49)

RTI is the purposeful activity that can flatten the bell-shaped curve and ensure all students succeed.

And most tragically, some educators tell us that a trained teacher can spot students who just don’t have it—the capacity to learn at high levels. Overwhelming evidence would prove otherwise. We know that a student’s ethnicity, native language, and economic status do not reduce his or her capacity for learning. Yet, across the United States, minority students, non-native language learners, and economically disadvantaged students are disproportionately represented in special education (Brantlinger, 2006; Ferri & Connor, 2006; Skiba et al., 2006, 2008) and underrepresented in gifted and honors programs (Donovan & Cross, 2002).

RTI is the purposeful activity that can flatten the bell-shaped curve and ensure all students succeed.

Why are these students being over-identified as learning disabled? Some educators assume these students are less capable, and these inaccurate judgments often become a self-fulfilling prophecy for their students (Buffum et al., 2012). Educators typically view students who enter school with a head start from their home environment as being capable of learning at high levels, and they are subsequently placed in more rigorous coursework, taught at advanced levels, expected to achieve, and thus are much more likely to learn at this level. Conversely, students perceived as being incapable of learning at high levels are placed in below-grade-level curriculum, taught at remedial levels, expected to achieve at lower levels, and to no one’s surprise, most likely learn at low levels. These outcomes falsely confirm the school’s initial assumptions and reinforce the misgiving some educators have to committing to a mission of learning for all.

We could make a convincing argument that, regardless of how effective a school’s system of interventions, it is possible that some students might face cognitive challenges or environmental factors that prove beyond a school’s ability to overcome. But here is the critical point: to start the journey, we must accept primary responsibility for what we can control—student mastery of academic skills, knowledge, and dispositions—and assume that each student is capable of achieving these outcomes, regardless of his or her demographic background. Consider the alternative. If a school is unwilling to commit to the word all, then educators are, by default, accepting a mission that most students will succeed, but undoubtedly, some students are always going to fail. In other words, the school believes there will always be educational “collateral damage,” regardless of the school’s policies and practices. If staff are unwilling to commit to a mission that embraces the words ensure and all, they are unlikely to fully commit to the RTI at Work process.

Here’s Why

In his book Transforming School Culture, Anthony Muhammad (2018) describes two types of school-reform efforts: technical changes and cultural changes. Technical changes are made of tools such as a school’s master schedule, instructional materials, and policies. Obviously, creating a multitiered system of supports requires a significant amount of technical change. Cultural changes are shifts in the norms, values, assumptions, and collective beliefs of an organization. Substantial cultural change must precede technical change. Muhammad (2018) argues that technical changes “are definitely necessary to effect improvement in student performance, but they produce very few positive results when people who do not believe in the intended outcome of the change use them” (pp. 22–23). For the technical steps of RTI to work, we must execute them within a culture of high expectations for both educators and students.

To measure its organization’s current culture, the leadership team should consider what would happen at its school if an educator asks, “Our school mission says we are committed to all students learning at high levels. Currently, we know that some students are failing. What are we going to do to fix this problem?”

Will the faculty meet the question with resistance? Will it create a faculty debate? Will this person be ostracized, or will it be a rallying cry for self-reflection and improvement? If this question creates significant staff division, this indicates that the school’s culture misaligns to RTI’s goals. Change the setting for this question. What if someone raises this concern in a district cabinet meeting? How would central office leadership respond?

What they have to give, not what they expect to receive, is what attracts educators to this field.

Here’s How

Unfortunately, a learning-focused school culture is not a reality in most schools. Through our work at sites struggling to implement RTI, schools often acknowledge that they lack a shared commitment. But then they ask the wrong question: How do we get buy-in from our staff? We don’t care for the term buy-in because it conveys the wrong connotation. RTI helps students, and the concern that staff won’t buy into it suggests that educators are resisting because they want to know what is in it for them. But there is hardly an educator who does not work with the best interest of students in mind. What they have to give, not what they expect to receive, is what attracts educators to this field.

We suggest the correct term is ownership: how does a school create a sense of staff ownership of the RTI process, especially in light of the cultural hurdles this chapter describes? We cannot achieve cultural change through force or coercion (Muhammad, 2018). Rational adults resist change for many reasons, and experienced educators often raise legitimate concerns regarding the professional conditions and personal commitments needed to make RTI work. Complex problems require multiple solutions.

Establishing this kind of culture requires much thought and planning by the leadership team, beginning with discussing the critical questions outlined in the reproducible “Creating Consensus for a Culture of Collective Responsibility” (page 53). The leadership team’s initial work is also summarized in the following four steps. In considering the challenges of leading change, it is important to recognize that long-lasting and substantial change does not happen overnight. Rather, it is more of a one-thousand-step journey, with each step carefully and intentionally planned. As Michael Fullan (1994) points out, “Leading change is a planned journey into uncharted waters with a leaky boat and a mutinous crew.”

1. Assess the current reality: It is difficult to map a successful journey if team members are unsure of the school’s current location. In this case, it is critical to determine the staff’s current culture to ensure all students learn. Muhammad (2018) recommends using data to create a catalyst for change in an inspirational way. We have found that many successful schools don’t look solely at data such as the percentage of students below proficient on state assessments or the number of students reading below grade level. Instead, these schools connect data to individual students—instead of telling teachers that 12 percent of the school’s students are below proficient in reading, they connect those numbers with a list of specific students who make up the 12 percent. These connections resonate with why we joined the profession—to help children.

2. Provide a compelling case for change: Too often, we describe what needs to be done without first providing a compelling reason why the alteration is necessary to introduce change initiatives. In his study of educational fundamentalists—members who actively fight change, Muhammad (2018) finds that many resist because no one provides them with a clear rationale for change. If school leadership cannot provide a compelling why, the staff won’t care about the what. Agreeing on the need for change results from assessing and confronting current reality, celebrating what is right, identifying areas for growth, and learning together about new possibilities through research and dialogue.

Mike Mattos created a video titled Timebomb (2017), which offers a vision of what happens to students who don’t succeed in school. It can be helpful at building a sense of urgency regarding committing to systematic interventions. (Visit www.solutiontree.com/products/timebomb.html to find out more information about the video.)

3. Create a doable plan: The most compelling reason for change is irrelevant if the staff view the goal as impossible. It is critical that staff receive a doable plan that defines 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 more than the belief that all students can learn at high levels—it also requires collaborative structures and tools to achieve this goal. In addition to the school leadership team, collaborative teacher teams form the engine that drives a school’s PLC and RTI efforts. Collaborative teacher teams comprise educators who share essential curriculum and thus, take collective responsibility for students learning their common essential learning outcomes.

Because the uniting characteristic of teacher teams is shared learning outcomes, the most common and preferred structures would be grade-level teams at the elementary level and course-based teams at the secondary level. It is likely that every school has singleton educators, who are the only people teaching a specific grade, course, or subject. When this is the case, the following structures can be effective ways to form teams.

► Vertical teams: Vertical teams share common learning outcomes developed across consecutive years of school. Examples include a K–2 primary team at the elementary level or a high school language arts team at the secondary level. While grade-level standards are not identical from kindergarten to second grade, they have several essential skills in common, such as phonemic awareness and number sense, with increasing rigor over time. Students develop these skills across all three grades. Likewise, a high school language arts team does not share identical content standards but does share essential skills such as persuasive writing or analytical reading. Vertical teams can also ensure that prerequisite skills are taught in sequence. This team structure often works best at smaller schools, where there may only be one teacher who teaches a particular grade level, subject, or course.

► Interdisciplinary teams: Interdisciplinary teams are comprised of teachers who teach different subjects. While interdisciplinary teams do not share content standards, they can focus their team efforts on shared essential skills. For example, an interdisciplinary team can focus on the college-ready skills David Conley (2007) recommends, including:

► Performing analytical reading and discussion

► Demonstrating persuasive writing

► Drawing inferences and conclusions from texts

► Analyzing conflicting source documents

► Supporting arguments with evidence

► Solving complex problems with no obvious answer

These essential learning standards are not subject specific—instead, each teacher on the interdisciplinary team can use his or her unique subject content as the vehicle to teaching these higher-level-thinking skills. The team can clearly define these common learning outcomes, discuss effective Tier 1 core instruction, develop common rubrics to assess these skills, and respond collectively when students need additional help. This approach can work especially well at smaller secondary schools.

► Regional and electronic teams: It is possible that the previous teaming options might not work for a specific faculty member. When this is the case, it is unlikely that this educator is the only person in the district, county, region, state or province, or country who teaches that curriculum content. Forming collaborative teams beyond the site is an option. This collaboration most likely requires virtual team meetings.