How Schools Thrive. Susan K. Sparks

guide and pathways tool is the focus of How Schools Thrive.

      This book is divided into three parts. The first two chapters make up part I, “Making a Commitment to Coaching Teams.”

      Chapter 1, “Coaching to Create Habits of Professional Practice,” explains how coaching helps collaborative teams identify specific tasks, create effective and efficient routines, and develop effective and efficient habits of professional practice.

      Chapter 2, “Identifying How the Essential Elements of a PLC Thrive in a Coaching Culture,” describes the impact that a healthy and resilient coaching culture has on collaborative teams in a PLC and explores what the essential elements of a PLC represent and provides a working definition for collective inquiry, continuous improvement, action orientation, and a focus on results.

      In part II, “Understanding the Essential Elements of Highly Effective Teams in a PLC at Work,” we focus on drilling deeper within four essential elements of a PLC: collective inquiry, continuous improvement, action orientation, and focus on results.

      Chapter 3, “Learning Together—The Power of Collective Inquiry,” defines collective inquiry and provides some pragmatic suggestions coaches should consider when promoting the idea that in a PLC, teachers begin the process by learning together.

      Chapter 4, “Staying Restless—The Impact of Continuous Improvement,” defines continuous improvement and presents a number of specific strategies coaches can employ to highlight the importance of using a systematic approach when helping teams improve.

      Chapter 5, “Being Urgent—The Value of an Action Orientation,” defines action orientation and offers several practical approaches coaches can use to help collaborative teams balance the right amounts of action and urgency.

      Chapter 6, “Getting Better—The Significance of a Results Orientation,” supplies coaches with a series of concrete steps to help teams understand that an authentic results orientation is more than test scores, dashboards, and scorecards.

      The final chapters make up part III, “Coaching Collaborative Teams in PLCs at Work.”

      Chapter 7, “Assessing a Team’s Current Reality,” describes how those in coaching roles can assess the progress and development of collaborative teams with ways that coaches can use to differentiate clarity, feedback, and support based on the unique needs of individual teams.

      Chapter 8, “Creating Collective Efficacy,” describes the important impact of collective efficacy and explores how coaches can use the four sources of efficacy in their work with collaborative teams.

      Chapter 9, “Creating an Action Plan for Coaching Collaborative Teams,” presents a six-stage process school leaders can use to plan their coaching efforts.

      The appendices present reproducible tools leaders can use to guide their coaching work with teams. Appendix A presents the stages of learning and essential elements of a highly effective PLC. Appendix B is an action planning template, and appendix C is a guide for communicating the action plan.

Moving Forward

      Air travel has become a common experience for those visiting family, taking a vacation, or travelling for work; most of us have flown on a commercial airplane at one time or another. We enter the aircraft to a smiling crew member welcoming us aboard as we scan the row numbers and shuffle down the aisle. We squeeze into our seats, buckle up, and put our lives into the pilot’s hands as we take off down the runway. Although most of us don’t realize it, this experience is similar to what students go through every day. As we welcome them into the classroom with a smile and encouraging word, students also put their lives into our hands as we usher them onto a runway toward learning. It is our responsibility as educators to ensure that they arrive safely.

      We believe if those in coaching roles will encourage mastery of the essential elements of a PLC, the result will be the development of highly effective collaborative teams in their schools. In How Schools Thrive, we provide concrete and specific ways that teams can dig deeper into their practice and foster advanced levels of PLC practice.

      PART I

      MAKING A COMMITMENT TO COACHING TEAMS

      CHAPTER 1

      Creating Habits of Professional Practice

      The question is not do our teams have habits; the question is, “Do our teams’ habits of professional practice promote high levels of learning for all?”

       —THOMAS W. MANY

      If the goal is to improve teaching and learning in our schools, and if the PLC process is the strategy school and district leaders choose to reach that goal, then leaders must help teacher teams improve their PLC practices. Highly effective collaborative teams have been called the foundation, the fundamental building block, and the engine that drives a PLC (Eaker & Dillard, 2017). Bob Eaker and Heather Dillard (2017) suggest that, “Just as it is generally recognized that districts must work to close learning gaps between subgroups of students, it is also district leaders’ responsibility to close the effectiveness gap between collaborative teams within each school” (p. 47). Collaboration is not a new idea in schools; The PLC process—“an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve” (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 10)—creates learning environments in which learning is constant, and innovation and experimentation flourish.

      Likewise, research has established that coaching is the most effective way to deliver job-embedded professional development to teachers. Matthew Kraft, David Blazer, and Dylan Hogan (2017) believe coaching is a “key lever for improving teachers’ classroom instruction and for translating knowledge into classroom practices” (p. 7). The combination of coaching and collaboration represents our best opportunity to improve schools.

      To ensure that collaborative teams within PLCs are functioning at the highest level, we contend that schools should commit to coaching collaborative teams. It may sound simple, but, to paraphrase Senge (1990), a school’s commitment to, and capacity for, coaching can be no greater than that of its members. So, before deciding coaching is the way to go, principals, coaches, and teacher leaders should pause, reflect, and determine if they are truly ready to make such a significant commitment.

      • Commitment is a big deal. It means going all in, no excuses or half-hearted efforts. Being committed means that you are willing to do whatever it takes. It means taking personal responsibility, and it requires looking in the mirror.

      • Commitment is long term. It is pushing through the occasional ups and downs that are part of any improvement effort and choosing to create a vision for the future. It necessitates a persistent and ongoing effort to achieve a goal.

      • Commitment is emotional. It is about engaging in the work with your head and heart; it compels us to care about each other both