Collective leader efficacy is a school or district leadership team’s ability to develop a shared understanding and engage in joint work that includes evaluating the impact they have on the learning of adults and students in a school.

What this means is that leadership teams need to consider each member’s theory of learning. Cynthia Schubert-Irastorza, Ed. D., writes, “Learning theories help educators understand the process of learning. Understanding and application of these theories is essential for effective instruction and successful curriculum development.”

John Hattie says we often go directly to teaching strategies when we talk as a staff, but what is equally important is for leaders and staff to discuss their theories of learning as well. We recently facilitated a workshop for school leaders in Perth, Australia, and posed a question asking about a theory of learning. The responses were anywhere from we don’t have a defined one yet, to Rosenshine’s Principles to Cognitivist learning models.

What we wonder about is whether a theory of learning is also essential to helping teams develop a shared understanding around their greatest initiatives? Will understanding a theory of learning set them on a better path toward implementation of those initiatives? If teams understand how their members learn, wouldn’t they be able to incorporate strategies that better fit their mental models around the learning needed for initiatives? In Perth, we had robust conversations about the way students and adults learn, and participants discussed whether the evidence they collect to understand how their students learn matched up with the theories of learning from the adults in the room.

To some leaders and teachers, this may sound like common sense. To other leaders and teachers, this sounds like a far-fetched dream because they have so many initiatives to juggle that they don’t know where to begin or every meeting they attend seems to be disjointed and not connected to any coherent goal. The latter is something we wrote about recently.

Teams Don’t Always Set Themselves Up for Success

Here’s one story to illustrate why so many teachers and leaders may see collective leader efficacy as something that is somewhat unachievable.

We were facilitating a multiple-day workshop for school leadership teams in November. During each session, we provide plenty of time for teams to process their learning focused on the goals of their strategic plans because we know they often do not get the time to engage in deep learning around those plans when they are back at school.

One team in particular needed more time, which was not a big deal, until two comments were made. One teacher on the team called out, “I’m sorry, but this is the first time I’m seeing this plan.” Without missing a beat, the principal called out, “In my defense, I created this plan when they were on summer break in May.”

We always approach the sessions we facilitate with a nonjudgmental mindset because we do not know the issues that the teams are dealing with back at school. Our job as facilitators is to understand their needs, use that as an entry point, and move forward. For full disclosure, even this moment with the team challenged us. The questions circling in our heads were:

How can leaders create a strategic plan (sometimes called a school improvement plan or annual implementation plan) in isolation and expect teachers and their communities to understand the why and how of the work?

How can we, as facilitators, help workshop participants move forward successfully and help them break the cycle of working in isolation while expecting collaborative success?

That is where collective leader efficacy enters into the dynamic.

Shared Understanding

In schools, we often have a common language but not a common understanding. We are not naive to think leaders can ever arrive at common understanding with all stakeholders, but there are systems and strategies that can be put into place to strive toward the utopia of common understanding.

We frequently hear from teachers that they do not know what is going to be on the next staff meeting agenda. We also hear from principals that they wonder what should be on the next staff meeting agenda. The issue is that leaders and teachers often do not see their meetings as places to develop a shared understanding, and they definitely do not see their meetings as a place to learn from one another.

What if the learning agenda for the next staff meeting was created at the end of the current meeting? This simple strategy of building a schoolwide coherent learning system can directly lead to building shared understanding between the principal and his or her staff members.

Engaging in Joint Work

Judith Warren Little describes joint work as “encounters among teachers that rest on shared responsibility for the work of teaching (interdependence), collective conceptions of autonomy, support for teachers’ initiative and leadership with regard to professional practice, and group affiliations grounded in professional work.”

Even though we use the words “joint work” in our definition of collective leader efficacy as does Little, we do find that when there is a collective learning experience where impact for students is being made, the words “joint work” seem to shift to “joint purpose” or “joint calling.” When asking our workshop participants to describe this shift to us, they often say, “Our feeling about our work has moved to a joyful experience.”

What we often wonder is whether understanding the theory of learning among leadership team members strengthen their ability to engage in joint work? We believe that having conversations around theories of learning would deepen the learning among team members.

Evaluating Our Impact

Whenever Zaretta Hammond speaks, she frequently uses the word “students.” We recently interviewed her for our Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast. When taking her work on culturally responsive teaching to the next level in her new book Teaching for Instructional Equity and Justice, she vehemently states, “We must put students back at the center of our teaching, not strategies.” She describes that putting students at the center is about responsiveness, “how you respond when a child is confused and during that confusion is when we must teach the skills of learning.”

Evaluating our collective leadership impact is “about putting students at the center.” When we meet as leaders to build collective understanding about our joint work, our response to how our students are achieving is the key to evaluating our impact.

Earlier, we shared a short story of staff not knowing what was in their school improvement plan because the principal had completed it alone as it was a task and not part of the everyday work of the school. We believe it is the three core principles of our definition of collective leader efficacy: shared understanding, engaging in joint work, and evaluating our impact that will support schools in breaking out of isolation to build systems that are coherent for both students and staff.