Group or Team

I was talking with a teacher today who asked, “Is the principals job to focus on the adults or the kids and if it’s both, what percentage would you say for each?

A really thoughtful question. I appreciated the “both” option because as a principal friend of mine would say, “We are learner-centered…and we are all learners.”

Too often, we either or things in education. We tend to weaponize phrases like “best for kids” during disagreements as if we all didn’t go into education to grow student learning. It’s our core business after all.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over twenty years of experience in our profession is that not everyone does things the way I would do them but just because it’s different than how I would do it, doesn’t make it wrong. There are certainly exceptions. And certainly people whose actions we struggle to understand.

But at the end of the day, we all are here for students and tend to simply be coming at it from different points of view.

My why in this profession as I’ve mentioned in Legacy of Learning is to “take great care of educators and their learning, so they can take great care of students and their learning.” I care deeply about both. And yet, I realize that the more adults who I positively impact, the more kids I can positively impact because we cannot give to others that which we don’t have for ourselves.

Too often, we leap over adults and into decisions in service of what is best for kids. An investment in adult learning and systems to support the work, is an investment in every child.

Now more than ever, it’s important that we develop shared leadership models, growing the capacity of others to lead together on building and teacher teams. This is not just a dream or fluff, it’s science.

Collective efficacy is the shared belief that together we can reach a common goal. Not just any goal but one we’ve developed together and one that we believe can make a profound impact on student learning. Hattie’s research demonstrates that collective efficacy has an effect size of 1.34. A year’s worth of growth is .4. This is a big deal.

We should be treating teamwork and investing in it like it’s a big deal. Through the adults not around the adults.

I love this post from Allyson Apsey about collective teacher efficacy. Embedded in this is a video of Richard DuFour explaining the difference between a group and team. It’s not the goal that makes us a team. It’s the fact that our goal is so important and complex that it requires our interdependence.

You don’t reach student achievement goals by simply setting out to do so. You reach goals with effective adult implementation. So as you reflect upon your goals for the year, consider a goal that’s focused on what the adults will do differently. When establishing an implementation goal, we can demystify it by following this simple formula from The Four Disciplines of Execution: from X to Y by when.

As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of our systems.” So, let’s lean into that and consider goals focused on systems for implementation.

As Dr. Edward Deming says, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it does.”

Systems are made up of people. It’s not systems OR people. Systems of the people, by the people, for the people. Invest in people and their learning and build the systems together that transform student learning.