Teacher Leadership Coaching and Team Development

It has been a little while sense my last post, re-committing to my commitments as Ken Blanchard says.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the successes we are experiencing through our work with teacher leaders and school leadership teams.  For whatever reason, other than budgetary, this has been a tough thing to get moving forward in schools.  I am not sure why professional coaching has not yet established itself as a viable PD option, but I'd love to know your thoughts on this.

That being said, we are having a great time working with a couple local districts here in the Rochester area.  The first district signed-on for teacher leadership training with one-to-one coaching follow-up as well as school leadership one-to-one coaching for their principals and assistants.  What makes this process even more powerful is that the whole instructional leadership team is participating together.  Combining team meetings and trainings with one-to-one coaching support to ensure implementation of action plans at the classroom level.  Team processes focused on connecting the team on an individual level - building trust and improving communication as well as a team level - dealing with conflict and resistance, have led to team-based instructional improvements and elevating the instructional leadership role of the teacher leader position.

The second district has created a new instructional coaching team, redefining the more traditional instructional specialist position.  Again, a combination of team building, team PD and coaching are making positive impacts.  A team mission, vision and values process combined with defining the new role has led to clarity around the instructional leadership expectations of the coaches.  The team has engaged administration as well as teachers to ensure consistency of their instructional practice across the district and pair-based coaching targets the instructional coaching teams at each school, allowing for coaching support to adapt to the unique needs of the individuals being coached, teachers, administrators and students that they are working with.  This is a new client district, so we will report back with some results mid 2010-11 school year.

So what?  The what is that we are realizing that coaching provides a unique complement to current educational PD, especially with instructional leaders (teacher leaders, admins, instructional coaches, etc.).  Coaching adapts to the unique needs of each individual being coached as well as to the needs of school, colleagues and students being impacted.  We also realized that purposely focusing on team building/development as part of your day-to-day activities pays powerful dividends to instructional leaders who more easily implement change and improve instruction.  Lastly, PD built around the needs of each instructional leader or leadership team improves results.  Coaches and team facilitators can partner and build customized solutions using practical and relevant situations from the teaching/learning environment.  The result, PD that improves performance.

There are plenty of PD tools and resources out there.  The key is what processes (coaching and team building) do you build around them to ensure results.  I'd love to hear your thoughts (success stories or challenges). 

Excellence for Learning (EFL) DISCertification Denver Next Month

What's been up with the use of EFLDISC?  A couple Colorado districts have put it to work with their administrative and lead school teams to promote better communication, teamwork, meeting productivity and coaching.  Local districts have used EFLDISC as a resource to support their lead teacher team development, principal coaching and instructional coaching.

Why?  EFLDISC is a simple and powerful tool that makes understanding human behavior and communication needs easy.  It provides realistic data that is validated and reliable that helps administrators, teachers and teacher leaders leverage their personal talents and adapt their behaviors to improve results.  It isn't the curriculum initiatives and instructional changes that are the barriers to improving student success, it is implementing these things through your people.  Learning more about human behavior allows you to tap the full potential of your team.

Take for instance, how do you effectively motivate a teacher described as patient, easy going, unemotional voice, reserved, deliberate and methodical?  Here are some EFLDISC-based suggestions:

• Provide warm and sincere compliments
• Express appreciation for loyalty and persistence (these are their things)
• Allow them to collaborate with others as much as possible
• Provide a plan and structure to activities being sure to link any changes with current activities (connect the new with the current)
• Provide clear expectations
• A moderate stable pace is best (with regards to communication and activities)
  
• Reward consistent, predictable work
  

Curious about how EFLDISC can complement your PD solutions?  Request a free online inventory today.  Specify the Administrative, Teacher or Student Version of the report that you would like to receive. 

MacGyverizing Teaching - How Did We Kill Creativity?

I am always amazed at my lovely wife's natural ability to create a speech lesson out of most anything, MacGyverizing (remember the show, he could fix a bulldozer with gum and duct tape).

As I work with educational teams and listen to the opportunities and challenges of continuously improving student success through instruction, it makes me wonder how we (society) have killed or at least wounded the creativity in our approach to teaching and learning. Research does say that 95% of our creativity is dead by the age of 13, how sad. For those folks attending college and starting new in a teaching career, I wonder how long it takes before the other 5% is squashed. I am playing devil's advocate a bit, there is still a ton of great teachers out there tapping their creativity to meet student needs, but I bet they work hard to do it.

As I worked with an educational team defining the schools values that resulted from a school culture values survey we completed, one of the teachers on the team challenged the reality of making creativity a priority value that would be defined and then action items would be incorporated into the school improvement plan to increase creativity as well as results. I knew he was a top-notch teacher (one reason he was on the team), so I asked him this:

If you life depended on making sure all your students pass the upcoming state exam and you were sent off with your class to live in the middle of the forest with no outside contact, no technology (blackberry stays at home), no text books, no worksheets, etc., could you make it happen?

You can guess, his answer was, "it would be a challenge but yes". I asked why do you say that? His response, "I would use what was available to me to help the kids learn - even if it is my own experience, sticks and stones". I said, you would get "wildly" creative in your approach to teaching.

So my question, how do we help make sure all educators embrace their creativity and put it to work for the students as well as for their own mental health? Creativity has the potential to eliminate excuses related to available resources, turf battles, teaching to tests, differentiated learning, etc. How can you and your teaching teams crank-up the creativity meter starting right now?

A quick exercise: the "walk about". At your next teaching team meeting, select your challenge/opportunity (for example literacy lesson -- new approach to instructing), then have everyone get up and take a 3min walk around the school. They should walk alone without talking with anyone else and simply note the things that catch their eye - maybe the one thing that resonates most upon their return. Have all team members write down what caught their eyes on a flip chart paper, get it all down. Then ask each person to individually select one item from the list and come up with an idea on how it applies to the challenge/opportunity. It may apply directly or it may have spurred an idea related to the challenge/opportunity. Have team members share their thoughts (be sure to make the ground rule that no ideas will be viewed as dumb ideas and everyone will respect everyone's input).

Remember if you are educating our young people, you may be someone's everyday hero as they share stories later in life. Have a great week! Coach Bob.

Maximize Team Effectivess by Keeping Structure in Place

As I worked with a great instructional leadership team yesterday including principals, assistants and teacher leaders (some central office admins too) it reminded me of the benefits of team structure when groups are asked to function as teams. If you have more than five members on your team, you will benefit from defining roles and following a structured approach to your meetings as well as projects.

It's not rocket science, but it does require a bit of discipline. More and more teams I work with (department, project or leadership) don't approach their team with any type of defined structure and act more as a group of individuals vs. a collaborative team. So what can you do with your team?

1. Create a team charter, a plan for your team that defines the following (usually done in a single meeting)

• Team mission - purpose for working together
• Team values - agreed upon and defined guidelines for working together (5-7 of these)
• Team roles - sponsor, leader, facilitator (internal/external and depend on the size of your team), members
  
• Team goal(s) - desired outcomes the team will be responsible for
• Resources needed by the team ($, materials, labor, people, etc.)

2. Don't skip the team building stuff that allows your team to connect as individuals

• Ensure you all understand each others' communication/behavioral styles, work tendencies and personal commitments to the team
• Professional and some level of personal trust must be in place
• Keep a focus on this element of team building throughout your work together
• Minimize the forming/storming phases and get to the norming/performing stages quickly
  

3. Use meeting plans that include the following information (request a sample plan from me)

• Meeting purpose
• Team members attending
• Agenda items with descriptions and or information needed by members for each item
• Time allotments
• Call to action for each agenda item including a "who" that will own it
• Practice good meeting process by sticking to agendas and "parking" side info

4. Team leaders, fulfill your leadership responsibilities

• Keep a "Eagle's Eye" view on things that includes a perspective on your team working within the entire department/organization (which is the bigger team)
  
• Keep the structure in place for the team and meetings
• Maintain a focus on the mission and values of the team
• Engage all members
• Secure support from your sponsor and the resources needed for success
  
• Hold members accountable for being prepared for meetings and taking action on their specified assignments
• Ensure measures are used and goals/objectives are being met
• Celebrate

I have the pleasure of working with a lot of great teams as well as individual team leaders and members. A simple structure/framework adds consistency to the team process and ensures team goals and objectives are met. Every team who participates in our team building exercises have agreed that they would have benefited from a few minutes of planning, selecting a leader to keep things in control and considering how they were defining "team" (their small group or the group as a whole when it came to resource allocation and best practice sharing).

How is does your team rate? Download our manual scoring Teams4Levels Assessment and Scoring sheet (we can set-up an online team survey for only $300/team that includes a feedback comments section and great reporting for use with your team).

Make it a great end of the week. Coach Bob.

Education in Action

Time flies when we are having fun (or at the very least, extremely busy). It is already the end of another school year. I can't believe how fast the year has gone. Now it is about wrapping things up and enjoying a little bit of summer.

Part of our summer fun will be getting together some teacher leadership teams for our July 22-23 Teacher Leadership in Action Conference. We will hold it here in Rochester at St. John Fisher College. If you have not heard about this PD event, I will be glad to put you in touch with previous attendees. The teams that have attended have really enjoyed themselves as well as taken away specific action plans to implement instructional change in their schools.

In addition to this session, we will kick-off our Principal Leadership in Action Coaching & Development process with registered principals and assistant principals for the 2009-2010 school year. This is a comprehensive one-to-one coaching program that includes a School Leadership Development 360 as well as school-based support. This year's participants shared that this process has been the best PD experience that they have ever had.

I will be happy to share the details on either of these programs with you, just contact me by phone or e-mail. Also, keep a look out for our new Education in Action E-News Letter that will be out shortly. Quick articles featuring strategies, links and resources that you can use to develop your leadership skills, team collaboration and school culture.