Discussion 1: Building a Culture of Growth

Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

· Chapter 3, “Cultivating Collaborative Cultures” (pp. 47–76)

Chapter 3

Cultivating Collaborative Cultures

Men Wanted

For hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success. —Ernest Shackleton

The fate of leaders today may not be quite so dire as described in Shackleton’s alleged advertisement for his expedition to the South Pole, but the role is daunting nonetheless, as leaders need to engage and motivate others to collaborate on new solutions. The combination of rapid change, emerging technologies, and global complexity requires new processes for knowledge building. Charismatic heroes will not save the day. Rather, we need leaders who create a culture of growth; know how to engage the hearts and minds of everyone; and focus their collective intel- ligence, talent, and commitment to shaping a new path. They recognize that what pulls people in is meaningful work in collaboration with others. They use the group to change the group by building deep collaborative work horizontally and vertically across their organizations. They develop many leaders who, in turn, develop others, thereby contributing to the sustainability of the organization. It is this consistent, collective shaping and reshaping of ideas and solutions that forges deep coherence across the system.

Chapter 2 detailed the need to establish a focused direction that engages everyone with shared moral purpose, a small number of goals, a clear strategy for achieving them, and change leadership that mobilizes action. In this chapter, we examine the driver of collaborative culture as a dynamic force that uses relationships and shared expertise to turn complexities and fragmentation into a focused, coherent force for change. It’s not about just creating a place where people feel good but rather about cultivating the expertise of everyone to be focused on a collective purpose. We have identified four elements of cultivating collaborative cultures: culture of growth, learning leadership, capacity building, and collaborative work (see Figure 3.1). Leaders who master these four elements will leverage collaborative culture within and across their organizations and build coherence for impact.

Figure 3.1 Cultivating Collaborative Cultures

Note also that the nature of these collaborations is multifaceted. They focus on intraschool collaboration, increase schools–central office partnerships (see Johnson, Marietta, Higgins, Mapp, & Grossman, 2015), use lateral school-to-school networks within districts, and engage in district- to-district consortia and wider networks for teachers and educators.

Culture of Growth

Mind-set matters. Every action leaders take sends ripples through their organizations. The messages may be intended or unintended but can either build coherence and commitment or foster tension and frustration. Organizations that support learning, innovation, and action build a culture of growth. Leaders who possess a growth mind-set build capacity in others and help them achieve more than they expected of themselves. They see talent and potential and have strategies to unleash these qualities in others. Leaders who value a growth mind-set need to consider not just their words but also the messages they send as they pursue solutions to the challenges they face.

This mind-set of a culture of growth plays out in policy decisions and strategy. We consider two examples that convey strong messages to the organization—one that concerns leadership development and the other that focuses on planning. The first example centers on the policies and practices for developing leadership capacity. The stance a district takes in the development of its leaders has a strong impact on culture. Consider two popular TV shows as a metaphor and ask the following question: Is our organizational culture more like Survivor or The Voice? If you answered Survivor, the district likely selects leaders from a pool of volunteers; puts them through rigorous competition processes; places them in unfamiliar, hostile environments where competition and a win-at-all-costs mentality is fostered; and limits resources and trusting relationships. A negative culture of winners and losers emerges. Potential is overlooked, while individualistic and negative behaviors are reinforced.

Those who choose The Voice likely begin with volunteers but also cultivate those they feel have potential; use the selection process to enhance the natural talents of candidates by providing expert mentors, coaching and resources (backup singers, lighting, etc.); and incorporate authentic performance tasks. The result is that skills are enhanced, confidence is increased, and a culture of collaboration emerges.

Let’s translate this metaphor to districts and schools to consider how the culture of growth may be cultivated through the selection of leaders and teachers. When districts and schools believe that the solution will come from hiring external individuals, they send a message that the current staff is not up to the task. This creates a deficit culture that is apathetic at best, and demoralizing at worst, as everyone waits for someone to come in to save the day. We worked recently with a district that waited nine months for a principal they had hired from across the country to take up the post. In the interim, the school was stalled and the talent of the school leadership team was not realized. There were teacher-leaders inside the school who understood the dynamics, culture, and contexts of the staff and students. They had effective ideas about strategies to turn the school around but were kept in a holding pattern. This sent a strong message that “things are so bad here that only someone from 2,500 miles away can save the day and current staff are the problem, not part of the solution.” This was a missed opportunity to build the collective talent, intelligence, and expertise to leverage collaborative culture.

When the organization values the talent and expertise of its people, it creates leadership development strategies that grow internal capacity. Its primary selection pool is drawn from within and augmented by external hires as needed. It creates a stream of successive development opportunities to grow leaders at all levels; selects them based on proven performance of authentic tasks; and provides ongoing coaching, mentoring, and development. It intentionally builds collaboration and learning for formal and informal leaders at all levels. In other words, collaborative cultures develop the next generation of leaders (as well as do better in the immediate term).

The same comparison can be made in the selection and development of teachers. Do we believe all teachers can perform at high levels, or are we trying to “fix” them with prepackaged program solutions? Do we rely on just hiring the best, or do we provide support for them to collaborate in meaningful ways? We know that doing work that has meaning is more motivating than any extrinsic rewards. People have an innate desire to belong and contribute—to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Our second example pertains to planning: using the example of the need to develop a district plan for 21st century education. All districts are grappling with the tension between implementing new standards and addressing emerging digital innovations. Consider two alternative district approaches for creating a plan and the impact of each approach on district culture:

• District A recognizes that the status quo will not allow them to sustain current levels of success, so they engage a prestigious consulting firm to recommend a plan. The firm audits their status through interviews with key groups within the district, interviews experts in the field, and prepares and presents to the board a 40-page blueprint for action.

• District B recognizes that the status quo will not allow them to sustain success so they select a task team of eight skilled principals plus four leaders from other levels of the district to form a task team. Their mandate is to provide a plan for moving the district forward. They are given time to engage in deep dialogue with each other and groups in the district; resources to connect with external experts and researchers; and the opportunity to visit external sites that have successful plans in action. They present a concise strategy for action.

Let’s consider the impact of each strategy on three dimensions: quality of the plan, commitment to implement the plan, and capacity of the organization. District A’s strategy sends messages to the organization that we don’t think our people have the expertise to find solutions, we think the best ideas are outside our organization, and we need experts to translate them for us. As a result, their external strategy affects the organization in three important ways:

• The quality of the plan may be valued by the public and elected officials because of the firm’s reputation but would likely not be as contextualized for internal audiences.

• Commitment to implementation would not be high since the shared meaning, ownership, and knowledge building reside with the external experts who did all the thinking and work.

• The capacity of the organization for solution finding for future issues would not be increased.

District B’s approach sends clear messages to the organization that we value our people and their expertise as professionals, are committed to growing solutions internally while learning from the best ideas, and foster purposeful collaboration around meaningful work. As a result, their strategy impacts the organization in three important ways:

• The quality of the plan is enhanced because it is tailored to the context and culture.

• Commitment to implementation is already initiated during the solution-finding process and enhanced by the credibility of the local designers.

• The capacity of the organization to approach future issues is increased.

The lesson here is to seek good ideas externally, but don’t rely on the external “experts” for solutions. Leaders at the school, district, and system levels are wise to evaluate policy and strategy decisions on the three dimensions of quality, commitment, and capacity to determine if the need for expediency is greater than the opportunity for growing the organization’s capacity as well as the messages their approach will send. They should cultivate a rich dialogue both inside and outside the school, district, or state that informs the local solution finding.

Think about a major challenge you are facing in your organization and consider the following:

1. What is our current challenge?

2. What is our current capacity for solution finding?

3. Who has the greatest expertise or potential to address this either internally or externally?

4. How important is it to find a quick solution or to build the capacity of the organization to implement and find its own solutions?

5. What intended and unintended messages will our approach send to the organization?

We see a correlation between this growth mind-set culture and strong performance in student achievement in districts such as Long Beach, California; Fort Wayne Community Schools, Indiana; Garden Grove Unified School District, California; and York Region District School Board, Ontario, Canada. In each case, they have blended sustained capacity building with reliance on growing talent from within.

The old saying “actions speak so loudly no one can hear my words” is very apt. Consider the culture you espouse publicly and the policies and practices you have in place to determine if the intended and unintended messages are consistent. We turn next to the concept of lead learners who are essential in cultivating the growth mind-set and in building capacity across the organization.

Learning Leadership aka Lead Learners

Leaders at system, district, and school levels need to influence the culture and processes that support learning and working together in purposeful ways at every level of the organization if they are to produce greater learning in students. Creating a culture of growth is a start, but leaders need to intentionally orchestrate the work of teachers, leaders, and peers and keep it focused on collaboratively improving student learning.

In The Principal (Fullan, 2014c), I (Fullan) identified a major mis- step that policy makers at state and district levels made in positioning the role of the principal as “instructional leader.” They overinterpreted the research that the principal was the second (to the teacher) most important source of learning for students and proceeded to position the principal as conducting classroom visits, performing teacher appraisals, and taking corresponding action to develop or get rid of teachers who did not improve. We see at least some of these actions as valuable for the principal’s own professional development in pedagogy but not as a way of moving the school. There are not enough hours in the week to micromanage teachers this way, and if one tries to do it diligently, it results in alienating principals and teachers from each other. Instead, principals have to become “lead learners,” influencing teachers indirectly but nonetheless explicitly by helping to develop the group.

One powerful role for leaders centers on fostering professional capital (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). The professional capital framework has three components:

• Human capital: Refers to the human resource or personnel dimension of the quality of teachers—the basic skills and credentials. Attracting and developing these abilities of individuals is essential but not sufficient for impressive gains.

• Social capital: Encompasses the quality and quantity of interactions and relationships within the group. In schools, this affects teachers’ access to knowledge and information; their sense of expectation, obligation, and trust; and their commitment to work together for a common purpose.

• Decisional capital: That which is required to make better decisions and results from the practical expertise across individuals and groups. When human and social capital are combined, decisional capital is enhanced.

Lead learners build professional capital across their organizations by modeling learning, shaping culture, and maximizing the impact on learning.

Modeling Learning

Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe (2008) conducted research on the impact of school principals on student achievement and found that the most significant factor—twice as powerful as any other—was the degree to which the principal participated as a learner with staff in helping to move the school forward. Such principals model lead learning. They establish a culture where all teachers are expected to be continuous learners, and they lead the way. Lead learners who make the biggest impact don’t send others to learn but actively participate with them as learning partners. In this way, principals learn what is specifically needed to stimulate ongoing organizational improvement. These principals make progress a collective endeavor—what we are calling collaborative work. Principals who do not take the “learner stance” for themselves do not keep ahead of the curve; they gain years of experience but not necessarily knowledge and skill about what is required to implement deeply. Principals who visibly struggle in learning about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or digital innovations along with teachers build credibility, trust, and knowledge of both the innovation and what is needed by the organization to move ahead. Most of all, they learn, thereby becoming more and more effective. Because they are immersed in action and tuned into learning, they recognize and mentor leadership in others. So, modeling is crucial for developing a learning culture.

Shaping Culture

A second key aspect involves shaping the culture to foster deeper relationships, trust, and engagement. Lead learners orchestrate structures and processes to create an environment that anticipates and works collaboratively on challenges and innovation. These principals don’t spend their time on checklists and attempts to change teachers one teacher at a time but instead put their efforts into creating mechanisms of support and processes that build teacher collaboration, inquiry, and teams of leaders.

Research by Helen Timperley, in Realizing the Power of Professional Learning (2011), noted that “coherence across professional learning environments was not achieved through the completion of checklists and scripted lessons but rather through creating learning situations that pro- moted inquiry habits of mind throughout the school.” Timperley offers the interesting metaphor for the principal “who is my class.” With this filter, principals can identify the groups and individuals who can provide leadership for change. The principal’s role becomes one of shaping the interactions and mechanisms while resourcing strategically those who propel collective learning. Lead learners support learning that is sustained and incorporate cycles of learning and application so that groups are learning from the work and engaging in solving authentic problems of implementation together.

Maximizing the Impact on Learning

Third, lead learners maximize the impact on student learning by relentlessly keeping the focus and conversation on quality learning for students and adults. They build precision by concentrating on a few goals and then developing a clear plan for achieving them. They build a collective under- standing and engagement around the priorities so that every teacher and leader can answer, with equal ease and precision, the following questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing this?

The importance of lead learners—as modelers, culture shapers, and pressers for maximizing impact—was underscored in longitudinal research conducted in 477 elementary schools in Chicago (Bryk, Bender Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010). Bryk and colleagues found that 100 of the 477 schools had been able to make and sustain significant progress compared to their peers and that the key explanation was “school leadership as the driver for change.” They noted four interrelated forces: the professional capacity of teachers, school climate, parent and community ties, and what they called the “instructional guidance system.”

Lead learners are always monitoring impact but seldom rely on tools of performance appraisal, which are generally cumbersome and individualistic. Rather, they work on the instructional focus by orchestrating the work of coaches, teacher-leaders, and central office personnel to support student learning; focusing on the key elements; using data to diagnose learning needs; cultivating precision in instructional practices; and learning collectively. They facilitate processes that build collaborative inquiry into what works and what is needed to refine the approach. This cycle of learning simultaneously builds knowledge and skill, while reinforcing the culture of growth and collaborative improvement.

Capacity Building

Capacity building is a key lever for developing coherence because as knowledge and skills are being developed, the collaborative culture is deepened, shared meaning is clarified, and commitment is reinforced.

Capacity refers to the capability of the individual or organization to make the changes required and involves the development of knowledge, skills, and commitments. Collective capacity building involves the increased ability of educators at all levels of the system to make the instructional changes required to raise the bar and close the gap for all students.

Our experience was powerfully reinforced in the recent findings by John Hattie, building on Eells’ (2011) work on “collective efficacy.” Hattie’s first books, Visible Learning (2009) and Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), identified that the highest instructional effect size on student learning was 1.44 (high expectations for each student). These findings came from an initial database of 800 meta studies. He has since added 400 or more studies, and the new winner is collective efficacy at 1.57 (although we should say that the depth of the knowledge base is not yet as established as with the other studies). As noted earlier, Hattie (2015) has now advanced this work under (what we would say is a more powerful concept) the idea of “collaborative expertise.” The long and the short of all this is that the leader who helps develop focused collective capacity will make the greatest contribution to student learning.

Professional development does neither a great job on individual efficacy (learning wanes during implementation) nor collective efficacy. A huge gap exists between the promises of professional learning and results in student achievement. While professional learning materials, workshops, presenters, and programs abound, we often see a fragmented approach, focused on fixing individuals. Current programs solicit participation from individual schools and educators and often do not include systematic and sustained follow-up. The result is an overwhelming range of solutions without coherence or sustainability.

The key to a capacity building approach lies in developing a common knowledge and skill base across all leaders and educators in the system, focusing on a few goals, and sustaining an intense effort over multiple years. A capacity building approach creates a foundation for sustainable improvement as it does the following:

• Mobilizes a growth mind-set at all levels of the system

• Sustains and cultivates improved student learning

• Builds a common knowledge base and set of skills at all levels of the system

• Focuses on collaborative learning

• Emphasizes collective capacity, which engages everyone in the system with clear goals

and commitment to the strategy for achievement

• Fosters cross-role learning or lateral capacity

• Incorporates a learning cycle of new learning, application on the job, reflection, and

dialogue with colleagues

Capacity building is effective because it combines knowledge building, collective action, and

consistent focus. When done well, it produces the following effects:

• Results in changed practices for leaders and in classrooms

• Provides a vehicle for learning from the work while doing the work

• Increases motivation and commitment because people have new skills and knowledge and

see results sooner

• Engages more people in working on the new solutions

• Increases momentum and buy-in because people are part of a greater purpose

• Fosters leadership at all levels

Capacity building impacts the organization because it develops the culture; accelerates the speed of change; fosters sustainability; and reinforces the strategy as people become involved in deeper learning, reflection, and problem solving across the organization.

People sometimes have trouble grasping the concept of capacity building because it is more abstract than having a standard or making an assessment. Capacity building is an approach, not a program. The underlying concepts are consistent, but it can take different forms depending on the context. Here is a concrete example from our current work with districts. In partnership with the district, we form capacity building teams that learn within groups and across groups. We work with multiple levels of the system simultaneously. Typically, this includes learning strands for district leaders, district capacity teams, principals, and school leadership teams.

The approach at every level is to create communities of learners who develop common language, knowledge, skills, and commitment by building vertical and horizontal learning opportunities:

• District leaders form learning partnerships across roles and departments to develop a common language, knowledge base, and skills to focus on sustained development. They explore case examples and current research applied to their context. As a team, they refine the focus to a few key goals, sharpen the strategy, and rethink the resources and practices needed to achieve the goals.

• A district capacity team is composed of consultants or teacher- leaders who provide support to schools often by subject or project but often initially from a silo configuration. In a capacity building approach, all support providers form a learning community, and as they develop their common knowledge and strategy, they begin to interact in a more consistent manner so that innovations are not experienced by schools as a series of discrete initiatives but rather as an integrated, coherent strategy for change.

• Principals are the key to change. They work with peers as learning partners to build the skills needed to support capacity building at the school level.

• School leadership teams are composed of the principal and two to five teachers with a focus on improving learning and teaching. They are engaged as learning teams with other schools from the district to develop a common language, knowledge base, and set of skills to apply back in the school and classrooms. The cycle of learning approach has them implement the new understandings in their school and return to subsequent sessions to share their results and insights with other schools. This ensures that all participants under- stand deep learning communities by being a member of one. Teams develop short-term 60- to 100-day plans for cycles of inquiry and application to maximize moving to action and learning from it.

The formats and content vary depending on the district focus, but three features of the capacity building approach have demonstrated a strong impact in both changing practices and increasing coherence:

• Learning partnerships within teams and laterally across the organization

• Sustained focus over multiple sessions

• Cycles of learning from the work, which are structured inquiry with intentional application in

roles and reflection on impact

The net effect is an increasing collective focus and corresponding capacities to learn together as well as make an impact on learning across the district.

Collaborative Work

Improving whole systems requires that everyone shift their practice. We saw in Chapter 2 that leaping from the current fishbowl to the new bowl of innovation requires new skills and knowledge (capacity building) but is accelerated when we combine it with deep collaborative work (finding other fish to learn and travel with on the journey). People are motivated to change through meaningful work done in collaboration with others. If we want to shift the organization, we need to pay attention to both the quality of the capacity building and the degree of collaborative learning. Figure 3.2 illustrates the relationship.

Figure 3.2 shifting Organizational Practice

Depth of Learning

Depth of Learning, on the vertical axis of Figure 3.2, measures the quality of the learning design. It uses four stages of increasing quality: awareness, understanding, practice, and sustained behavior. When the design focuses on levels of awareness and understanding only, participants are passive learners, and research indicates that only about 15 percent of participants are able to put the new skill into practice. This makes sense because they have no experience with applying the new skill. High-quality learning designs also incorporate opportunities for participants to use the new skills or knowledge in safe environments and then in their roles and to get feedback from peers or coaches (practice). Adding the levels of application and coaching increases the likelihood that the behavior will be sustained as a regular practice by 90 percent or more of the participants (Joyce & Calhoun, 2010). This has tremendous implications for the allocation of resources when we can choose a 90 percent–plus return on investment or just 15 percent, depending on the strength of the learning design.

Degree of Collaborative Learning

The horizontal axis measures the degree of collaborative work or learning together. It is described as a continuum from completely individual through a range of learning partnerships to integrated collaborative work. Hattie’s finding of a 1.57 impact for collective efficacy suggests that the horizontal axis can be a significant accelerator when done well.

Four combinations of quality of the learning design and degree of collaboration are described next:

• Surface learning: Occurs when the experience is very individualized and the depth of the intervention is weak—predominantly telling, finding, or modeling. This may result from one-shot work- shops and random accessing of online resources without a linkage to broader goals or application. The result is surface learning with limited shift in sustainable behavior.

• Personal growth: Occurs when the experience is individualized but the learning design is strong and includes opportunity for feedback and application over time. The quadrant does not mean that individual learning is bad and collaborative is always good, but that individual learning can be weak when it is random, fragmented, and has little opportunity for feedback or application. Individual learning, with a strong learning design, can be highly effective when it is focused, provides feedback, and has opportunities for application in the role.

• Frustration: Occurs when people are putting a lot of effort into learning together, such as professional learning communities (PLCs) or networks, but the experience is not well designed or executed. There may be little or no opportunity to apply the learning in real situations with feedback or time is spent in a series of tasks or topics with little follow-up or application.

• Sustained and systemic shifts: Occur when there are strong collaborative work structures combined with good learning design. Learning is sustained and explored in depth with opportunities for application within roles. Coaches, mentors, and peers stimulate learning and provide timely feedback. Examples include focused use of collaborative inquiry models, institutes, learning labs, and work-based learning teams.

If one wants to shift school, district, or system practices, one needs to have a strong learning design and deeper collaborative work. Take, for example, implementation of the CCSS. When the learning design is limited to “unpacking” the standards and comparing them to previous standards, teachers have no opportunity to develop the new skills that will be needed to teach the new standards. Whether they work individually or in collaboration, the design is weak and the ability to make a difference for student learning is limited (what we call surface learning or frustration).

If, however, we have collaborative teams using the new standards to design learning for their students, teaching using the standards and the newly designed learning, and then reflecting with peers on the student work and observations resulting from the new approach, we begin to see real shifts in practice over a short period of time. Repeating cycles of collaborative design, teaching, and reflection is a powerful way to build understanding, skill, and commitment, moving the approach toward systemic and sustained.

When quality learning design and collaborative work combine, individuals learn new skills and build knowledge while the meaningful collaborative work deepens and refines their practice by giving opportunities for dialogue and feedback. This, in turn, reinforces and shapes the shared purpose and builds ownership. Shifting practice in organizations takes time, focus, and persistence. Facilitating strong collaborative work processes and structures is an example of using the group to change the group and greatly increases the likelihood of persistence until sustained and systemic shifts become part of “the way we do things around here.”

We have stated that collaborative work can be a powerful accelerator of change and learning, but not all collaborative work approaches are effective. The popularity of the concept of PLCs has been far greater than its consistent impact on student learning (see DuFour & Fullan, 2013).

A recent publication by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), com- missioned by the Gates Foundation, found that while PLCs are prevalent, teachers “are not satisfied with implementation to date” (BCG, 2014, p. 5). The good news in the study is that districts are recognizing the need to shift from one-shot workshops to more robust approaches, such as les- son study, coaching, and PLCs. The troubling news is that the implementation is weak. The most common form of professional learning is still workshops. While we see increasing examples of coaching, fewer than 50 percent of teachers had experienced a deep level of coaching in the last few months, and coaching time seems to be directed toward new and struggling teachers. The proliferation of PLCs has often evolved with the philosophy of let 1,000 flowers bloom. We see blocks of dedicated PLC time established across schools and districts that is often no more than time in search of a purpose or spent on a multitude of tasks that do not directly result in improved learning for students. We see teams spending countless hours analyzing data but seldom spending the same amount of time in designing more precise pedagogy to meet the identified needs. The concept of learning communities is not wrong, but the implementation has lacked depth. If we embrace the idea that our students should be critical thinkers grounded in metacognition, then we need to design learning experiences for adults that foster the same competencies because we cannot give to others what we do not possess ourselves. If we want our systems to be authentic—energizing environments for students—then we must create them for the adults as well. Deep collaborative experiences that are tied to daily work, spent designing and assessing learning, and built on teacher choice and input can dramatically energize teachers and increase results.

In short, effective collaborative work has key attributes that must be attended to.

We use the term collaborative work to connote deeper experiences that have the power to affect student learning. Collaborative work approaches must be intentionally designed and implemented to do the following:

• Incorporate whole systems so that everyone is learning.

• Focus on learning and pedagogical improvement.

• Build capacity to support implementation and innovation.

• Have a measurable impact with specific goals and indicators.

• Be flexible and dynamic to meet emerging needs.

• Be sustainable.

Meaningful collaborative work is more likely to flourish when the foundational conditions are in place. Essentially, these conditions are the four components of the Coherence Framework: focus and purpose, collaboration underpinned with specific capacities, deep learning, and internal accountability.

Collaborative Inquiry

Ontario Focused intervention Partnership

The Teaching-Learning Critical Pathway (TLCP) is a promising model used to organize actions for teaching and student learning. The basic idea of the pathway is that when classroom practice is examined collaboratively, it leads to increased student achievement for all. The Ontario approach is based on collaborative inquiry that involves new ways of working together (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007b).

In Ontario, the critical learning instructional path was adapted and used with over 800 low-performing schools to provide targeted, nonpunitive, and transparent support called the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership (OFIP). The results were dramatic, with fewer than 100 schools designated as poor performing after three years of use.

The process involves four key steps (see Figure 3.3):

Figure 3.3 Collaborative Inquiry: Four Key steps

Assess: A group of teachers, usually a grade team, gathers evidence of current student achievement to identify areas of need. They identify curriculum standards related to that need and review current instructional practices. Together, they design a common assessment that will be administered at the conclusion of the six-week learning cycle.

Plan: The team develops a six-week learning block based on the standards and selects high-yield instructional strategies. If needed, they engage in professional learning targeted to the identified needs.

Act: The team implements the learning design in their classrooms. Teachers select students to watch as “markers” and will share their progress with the grade team. Teachers monitor both the appropriateness of the instruction and the progress of students. They provide scaffolding and adjustments as needed over the six weeks. They administer the common assessment as a culminat- ing task and collect samples of student work.

Reflect: In the final stage, the team conducts a teacher moderation cycle using the collected samples of work. Teachers collaboratively assess student work for the “marker” students and identify next steps needed in the student learning. These strategies can usually be applied to groups of students. Next, the team engages in reflection to determine the effectiveness of the learning design and the high-yield strategies chosen and the next steps needed to deepen learning. Ways to support students who were not yet successful are identified, and the data on the learning design and student learning feed into the next six-week cycle.

The power of this model has been to focus transparently on a clear target in a way that motivates and builds capacity across the school. The provincial support included training in the processes and facilitation and fostered a sense of partnership to achieve a common goal of increased student achievement. Teachers, superintendents, and teacher-leaders describe the process as highly challenging but also as the best professional experience they have had. This version of collaborative inquiry merges the best features of lesson study and examination of student work. It ensures that both the learning and teaching are thoughtfully designed and assessed and moves the conversation from simply analyzing data to robust discussion of ways to shift instruction to improve student learning.

This deep collaborative work requires new ways of working together, trust, shared leadership, sustained focus, and a commitment to collaborative inquiry. It works because reflection and collaborative examination of practice become part of the culture of the school and district. While the intervention was first piloted with underperforming schools, word spread quickly that it was having a strong impact on student learning. Other schools began asking for the capacity building in facilitation skills, and it has now become a widespread practice across the 4,000 schools in Ontario, thus increasing coherence at both the school and district levels.

Improvement Science

Anthony Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proposes using improvement science to accelerate learning and address problems of practice because “we need smarter systems, organizations capable of learning and improving, that see learning and change as what it means to be vital, to be alive” (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & Le Mahieu, 2014). Bryk et al. (2014) set out “six principles of improvement.” The authors describe improvement science as explicitly designed to accelerate learning-by-doing, utilizing a user-centered and problem-centered approach to improving teaching and learning. The overall goal is to develop the necessary know-how for a reform idea to spread faster and more effectively. A key component of their approach is a structure called networked improvement communities (NICs).

NICs are intentionally designed social organizations, each with a distinct problem-solving focus. These structured networks have norms of practice, roles, and responsibilities. NICs are scientific communities because they are focused on a well-specified common aim guided by a deep understanding of the problem, the system that produces it, and a shared working theory to improve it; disciplined by the methods of improvement research to develop, test, and refine interventions; organized to accelerate interventions into the field; and designed to effectively integrate them into varied educational contexts.

These communities use a 90-day cycle (Park & Takahashi, 2013), which includes three phases:

• Scan: The team reviews pertinent current and academic knowledge on the topic, then narrows to a specific issue and identifies a product or framework to be tested for 30 days.

• Focus: The participants use rapid, small-scale testing to assess the prototype or framework over 30 days.

• Summarize: The team refines its innovation and summarizes its work in a 90-day cycle report including what the cycle has produced.

At the conclusion of the cycle, a decision is made on how to use or share the findings. This improvement approach is a powerful way to bring precision to collaborative work as it incorporates rigor in the examination of the issue and requires an outcome based on authentic application and reflection.

Networks

Networks are proliferating in a variety of formats and attract both individuals and groups. Results can be dramatic or mediocre, depending on the design elements. Interest in collaborating across districts is evolving rapidly. Currently, we are working with 10 (mostly large) school districts in California, serving more than one million students. The districts have created vertical leadership teams representing levels within the district and are engaged in multiyear collaborative learning focused on rethinking, leadership, and increased coherence. In another project, we are working with three districts in California over a three-year period. Across the country, we are working with a cohort of 28 school districts in Connecticut on leader- ship to maximize coherence. This effort is supported by five professional organizations that are bringing vertical teams together to engage in cycles of learning and engagement in a multiyear experience. These are just three of many examples of districts that are seeing the value of deep collaborative work that engages new ideas and applies them in context. We next share two examples that are intentionally organized to shift practice in organizations across and within districts.

System Transformation Collaborative

Three school districts in Northern California—Pittsburg Unified, San Lorenzo Unified, and Napa Valley Unified—are engaged in a three-year collaborative with us, focused on sustainable system improvement and enhanced cross-school and cross-district collaboration.

The three district leadership teams attend joint learning sessions quarterly to increase their skills as change leaders, develop clarity about system goals and strategy, and enhance collaborative cultures. Between sessions, they apply the new learning in their roles and return to share evidence of impact. This is an example of using the group to change the group as the peer connections across districts both raise the bar and stimulate new thinking about common issues.

School leadership teams composed of principals and three to eight teachers attend quarterly sessions to deepen instructional coherence and improve student learning. They engage in within-school and cross-school examination of cases and simulations during the sessions and design 60-day learning cycles to apply the new ideas in their schools. They return to subsequent sessions to share evidence of impact on other staff and student learning. The collaborative learning cycle is a key lever for inquiry into practices that work in the local context. After 18 months, participants describe the impact in three areas: they are developing a common language and knowledge base across the districts, the design is building both vertical and lateral capacity, and they articulate and act with greater clarity of focus and strategy. Patrick Sweeney, superintendent of Napa, stated recently, “We are getting traction now.” Teachers and principals talk about the way the new skills and knowledge are helping them navigate the implementation of the CCSS and new assessments by providing a focus on quality learning for both the adults and the students. Learning fairs are held each year for schools and districts to reflect on the achievements and insights gleaned from the work and to collate evidence of impact.

This system transformation collaborative is building coherence and impact because it increases clarity of goals and strategy; provides sustained learning experiences with cycles of application and reflection; increases both vertical and lateral capacity building; and fosters relentless focus on student learning.

Ontario Networked Learning Community

Across the province of Ontario, examples of networked learning communities for teachers and school leaders are on the rise. Groups form with a specific purpose, establish norms, and use protocols to keep focused. Using a collaborative inquiry model, they access research, examine questions, serve as critical friends, and focus on ways to use best practice as well as to learn new practices. A question format promotes thoughtful reflection and encourages team members to dig deeply into the why of the inquiry.

A recent report on effective learning teams and networks with school leaders (Leskiw-Janvary, Oakes, & Waler, 2013) identified six key factors that increased the impact of these networks:

• Collaborative inquiry: Collective learning and understanding encourages innovation and meaning while practices are analyzed, leading to purposeful, effective action.

• Leadership: All members share flexible, emergent leadership by asking effective, timely questions to create the compelling disturbances that generate new ideas and questions.

• Relationships: All members take risks within a trusting environment and operate in interdependent ways.

• Instructional focus: A continuous process with evidence of new, quality thinking and intentional changes in practice is embedded. Groups are established based on explicit needs, and meaningful, relevant, appropriate data are strategically collected.

• Reflection: Ongoing focused reflection leads to integration of learning and deeper understanding. Theories of action are refined based on new learning that results in a change in practice.

• Accountability: As a result of collective learning, changes in teacher instructional practice lead to improved student outcomes.

School leaders in the networks point out that they always begin with the needs of the school. Trust and relationships are key, and they note that the variety of experience levels in the network means they learn with one another and on behalf of one another. They see this as building capacity that is leading to sustainability across the district and the province.

Harnessing the Power of Personal learning Networks 2.0

A new form of collaborative interaction is spreading through social net- working, online communities, and collaboration platforms. Early use has been somewhat random, with varied levels of engagement and impact, but our lean start-up philosophy suggests that future iterations will be increasingly more powerful if we harness the power of virtual connections and connect it to focused purpose.

Two forces are combining to propel the use of virtual networks: time and global reach. Educators feel universally overwhelmed with demands on their time, and virtual connections allow them freedom to connect any- time, anywhere to share learning designs, strategies, and collaboration across grades, departments, or schools. Second, virtual tools allow users to connect with leaders and teachers from anywhere who may be working on common interests or give new perspectives to the work.

Formats for connection are expanding rapidly from e-mail and Twitter to blogs, social bookmarking, groups, forums, and collaborative plat- forms. One downside for users is finding a way to keep track of the deluge of information and to avoid the distraction of interesting but not necessar- ily relevant information.

We highlight one attempt at a state level to utilize the power of technology and virtual networks to address core issues.

The New Hampshire Network Strategy

New Hampshire wanted a system that would fundamentally change how they support districts with a goal of moving from a compliance-oriented culture to one of greater support that better serves the needs of students. Their strategy is founded on a belief in the power of networks to promote change and deepen adult learning, and that success will be defined by moving students to true college and career readiness. This requires the building of capacity of educators as they note the following:

The strategy’s focus is to build and support relationships by connecting educators and districts across our state to one another, to high quality information resources and professional learning supports, as well as to promote greater alignment between and among statewide initiatives. (New Hampshire Department of Education, 2013, p. 4)

The strategy comprises two features: professional learning networks based on district needs and state goals, and the New Hampshire Network Platform, which is a virtual space for educators to collaborate and learn.

The design began by understanding district needs, which ranged from implementation of CCSS to use of data by school-based teams. The identified needs were used to establish learning objectives for the professional learning networks. Launched in November 2012, over 1,800 educators participated in workshops, conferences, and webinars in the first seven months.

As they continue to refine the strategy, they plan to capture broader evidence of impact, but comments from participants are positive.

We are engaging many more people now. . . . We are casting a broader net, which is probably the largest change, in terms of district growth. Instead of picking the five or ten all star teachers we have a lot of people who are aware and encourage others. (New Hampshire Department of Education, 2013, p. 24) (referring to the Gilford School District)

“Coming together with other cohorts and with fidelity and in a collaborative fashion so people own it has not been the practice,” but the network strategy helps propel us in that direction. “More and more we are looking at community and looking forward.” (New Hampshire Department of Education, 2013, p. 26) (refer- ring to the Keen School District [SAU29], p. 26)

The change strategy incorporated a prototyping for the first six months and then revisions based on early data. Four lessons emerged:

Lesson One: This is complex work. Shifting from compliance to capacity support is challenging. They noted a tension between balancing the requirements of being a regulatory body and what is needed to support transformation in and meet current expectations of users for support.

Lesson Two: Clear communication is key. Designers needed to be clearer about goals and connections as well as integrating the components of the strategy into a stronger whole.

Lesson Three: Formalize the structure. While participants reported a good experience, feedback revealed areas for refinement and greater timeliness in providing options.

Lesson Four: Changing behaviors takes time. Technology was not the driver of collaboration or problem solving—that requires a shift in changing perceptions and actions from within the New Hampshire Department of Education as well as in districts, which means shifting from a focus on the initiative to cultivating relationships.

New Hampshire’s end game is to grow a marketplace where high- quality professional learning supports are offered and to shift the relationships from compliance to support. We see promise in this effort as it has avoided the simple allure of technology as a panacea and has focused on building relationships and two-way communication. Their design incorporates rapid prototyping informed by feedback cycles from the field; combining virtual connection with focused, meaningful purpose and protocols to maximize involvement and depth of learning; and recognizing that coherence will only emerge from an integrated effort. We look forward to seeing the results of this combination.

Final Thoughts

Collaborative work is a key driver in shifting behavior. It is the social glue that moves the organization toward coherence. We see from the previously given examples that there is no one way to build a culture of growth or to learn collaboratively, but every success works on the same focused collaborative agenda relative to system goals.

The reflections of astronaut Chris Hadfield, as he built his photography skills to capture images of Earth while orbiting in space, capture the essence of the learning journey leaders must take.

Every chance we have we float over to see what’s changed since we last went around the earth. There’s always something new to see because the planet itself is rotating, so each orbit takes us over different parts of it. . . . Over time, my ability to understand what I was seeing improved. I started to look forward to certain places and lighting conditions, in the way you love to hear a piece of music. . . . I became more adept at noticing and interpreting the secrets Earth was discretely revealing. My ability to photograph what I was seeing also improved. I started to figure out how to compose a shot in a way that draws attention to particular features and textures. (Hadfield, 2014)

As leaders, we must hone our skills in recognizing the particular features and textures of our contexts, noting the nuances of building relationships, and engaging others in this challenging work. These developments are especially critical as we experience the rapid change of what we call “the Stratosphere agenda” (Fullan, 2013c). Traditional schooling is increasingly generating bored and alienated students and teachers. The allure of digital and better engaging pedagogy is combining to disrupt existing classrooms. There was never a time when collaborative power was more needed to work through absolutely rapid change dynamics aimed at deep learning (see Chapter 4). Only the purposefully collaborative will survive!

Collaborating is turning out to be a powerful but complex strategy. There is a whole body of research that indicates that much—indeed, we would say most—collaboration is problematic. Sunstein and Hastie (2015), in their book Wiser, devote the first five chapters to “How Groups Fail”: individuals go along with the crowd (groupthink), groups amplify errors, they take polarized positions, and so on. In another publication, Freedom to Change, Fullan (2015) makes the case that it is essential that individuals maintain both their autonomy and their collaboration.

But for our purposes, we are on safe ground with our Coherence Framework.

Within the collaborating component in this chapter, we showed that collaborating must include four key ingredients: the need to build a culture of growth through not only our words but our actions; the role that lead learners play to model, shape, and maximize learning for all; strategies for capacity building; and approaches for fostering deep collaborative work. Leaders who are able to combine these four elements build a culture horizontally and vertically across their organizations that is resilient because purpose and meaning are internalized, sustainable because it is owned and coherent because they are working on it day in day out, and it becomes the way “we do things around here.”

We also stress that the four components of our model serve as cross- cutting reinforcements. For example, collaborating—this chapter—plays itself out in relation to focused direction, deep learning, and securing accountability. These inherent checks and balances increase the integrity of the model as a whole. As part of understanding the full model, it’s time to go deeper into learning.

Before turning to Chapter 4, review Cultivating Collaborative Cultures in Infographic 3.

infographic 3 Cultivating Collaborative Cultures