He waka eke noa

A canoe which we are all in with no exception

Strength Building

How is a team greater than the sum total of each individual part? This is the magic ingredient that defines good teams from the great ones. It is this key ingredient which is the pre-requisite to building and leading a high performing team.

Although high-performing teams have many things in common, there is one clear question that can determine whether you are building and leading a high-performing or low-performing team:

At work, do your people have the opportunity to use their strengths every day?

If people feel that they are using their strengths more often – contributing their unique talent out into the world – they will be more respected, more productive, more willing to sacrifice, more likely to stay at your school, less likely to have accidents at work, and have many, many more positive outcomes.

If you are a leader, the difference between a low-performing team and a high-performing team comes from you (the leader) having the emotional intelligence: knowing oneself and knowing the strengths of your colleagues, and asking them to contribute those strengths every day. This is the single most important driver of team performance.

Collaborating

It is vital that we collaborate in schools to meet the needs of learners. Schools have many complex problems that need to be solved on a day-to-day basis, from a classroom level to a school-wide leadership and governance level. No one mind can solve all these complex problems, so we need to harness the power of collaboration – 

“The smartest person in the room, is the room” – David Weinberger.

We also know that teachers working together to improve outcomes for students has an enormous impact on student achievement. John Hattie’s research indicates that “Collective Teacher Efficacy” has a huge effect size; 1.57 and defines this as “the collective belief of the staff…. in their ability to positively affect students.” (www.visiblelearningplus.com)

Ensuring Quality Teaching

Remembering your team’s core business is important – teaching and learning. Your role as a leader is to ensure your team keeps this at the heart and remains focused on ensuring the teaching and learning in the team is ‘top notch’ and continues to be developed. Even the highest performing teams and teachers can become even more effective!

It’s an old saying but remains true – your team is only as good as its weakest link. Any expertise and knowledge must be shared as the learners in your team are your collective responsibility. It is no good having one ‘shining star.’

It is likely an important part of your role to lead inquiry into practice, which involves encouragement and building excitement and engagement, as well as rigorous inquiry into effectiveness of initiatives and learning from the team’s successes and failures.

Your role, therefore, is to prioritise your time to ensure you have oversight of the teaching and learning in your team. You will also need to ensure that you have a thorough and evidence based understanding of teaching and learning. You will use this understanding to help grow others’ knowledge and practice, and to help you measure the impact of the teaching practices employed by the team on individual learners. This may feed into target setting, teaching inquiries, problem solving, diagnosing and resolving issues in teacher practice and goal setting. You will also use your knowledge of teaching and learning, coupled with observations (formal and informal) to initiate conversations about teaching practices that, ultimately, improve outcomes for learners.

The resources below explore two aspects of collaborative practice and building effective teams:

• The process of creating teams.
• The characteristics of effective teams.

Note: You will need to explore the resources below prior to completing the task.

Task:

• Where in the process of team creation is your team at the moment? What do you see as key next steps to move the team to a more highly performing state? (See resource 2)
• Which of the Ten Tenets of Collaboration do you see as strengths and weaknesses of your team? What might you do to capitalise on the strengths and work on the weaknesses? (See resource 1)

Please post your reflections on the forum in 150 words or less.

Resources:

• “Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together Means Learning for All” Andy Hargraves and Michael T. O’Connor – Chapter 4 LINK.
• Tuckman’s model of “Norming, Storming and Performing.” Summarised here – https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_86.htm
• Collective Teacher Efficacy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCMV692itfg and https://visible-learning.org/2018/03/collective-teacher-efficacy-hattie/