Collaborative Classrooms: Unlocking Student Success Through Teacher Collaboration

Erin Grubbs:

All right. We’re going to get started. Hello and welcome to our webinar today. We’re thrilled to have you joining us and hope that you enjoy the presentation and can walk away prepared to help teachers work more collaboratively. I’m Erin Grubbs, head of marketing here at GoReact, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. For those of you not familiar with GoReact and why this topic is so important to us, GoReact is a video feedback solution that’s taken our 10 years of experience in helping higher ed institutions with student skill development to now helping school districts support teacher growth. Before we begin, I’m going to run through a few points of housekeeping. Today’s event should last about 45 minutes or so, and that includes about 30 minutes for the discussion and about 10 or 15 minutes for Q&A. We are recording today’s presentation, so if you need to hop off before we finish or you want to share the recording with a colleague, we’ll be emailing the recording out following the webinar.

We do want today’s presentation to be as interactive as possible. So throughout the webinar, please share your questions. To do that, please use the Q&A function and we’ll answer as many questions as we can in today’s session. You’ll also see that chat function. Please use this to introduce yourselves and tell us what school you’re with, and if you have any links or relevant resources to share with other attendees, please do so in that chat section and make sure you set your visibility to everyone. If you experience any technical difficulties throughout the time, please use the chat to reach out. I am happy today to be joined by our panelists, Wendy Anderson, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for the Baxter and Colfax-Mingo Community school districts and Carrie Leana, the George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management at the University of Pittsburgh. But I’m going to let our panelists dig in a little bit more and introduce themselves. So without further ado, I’m going to hand it over to Wendy to introduce herself.

Wendy Anderson:

Happy Wednesday everyone. I’m Wendy Anderson and my two school districts are in central Iowa. They’re small school districts. I’ve been in the educational field for about 30 years now, so I’ve had plenty of chances to be a part of collaborative teams and to lead those teams as well so I’m happy to be here today.

Erin Grubbs:

Thank you, Carrie, do you mind introducing yourself?

Carrie Leana:

No, no. I’m Carrie Leana and I’m at the University of Pittsburgh, and I wear a lot of different hats there. I have appointments in the School of Business, the School of Medicine, the School of Public Affairs, and the Learning Research and Development Center, and the latter is how I got interested in doing work in schools.

Erin Grubbs:

Thank you. We’re going to get started. So Carrie, you’ve done some research on this topic. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and your findings around teacher collaboration and student outcomes?

Carrie Leana:

Sure. And I’m going to share my screen. I have a couple of slides here. And again, I see this as an introduction to the bigger issues here and the on the ground implementation that Wendy will talk about. I am having … Let’s see. Okay. I’m having some problems moving my slides forward. Sorry about that. Let’s do that. Okay. So anyway, that’s who I am. Let me give you the punch line of what I’m going to talk about. And again, I’m going to talk for about 10 minutes or so about some of the research. I do work in schools and education, but also in healthcare. And what struck me quite a while ago is how education and healthcare are really so similar in the United States. That they have similar kinds of problems and the solutions that we’ve come up with to solve those problems tend to be quite similar as well.

My main point though today is I want to talk about something that we call social capital, which is an important tool for improving public schools and all schools really that has the advantage of being beneficial for everyone. For students, for teachers, policymakers, administrators. And I’ll talk about some of the research there. Let me begin though by talking about capital. Again, I don’t necessarily sit in a school of education most of the time, and I’ve probably been a little over trained in economics, but economists talk about capital and those are really resources that any organization brings to bear to try to do what they do well. And there’s a couple of different buckets there. Human capital, when people talk about that, they’re talking about the resources that are embedded in individuals. Things like their knowledge, their skills, their capabilities. And you really enhance human capital through education and experience. So those of you that are teachers, it’s what you’re doing every day is improving the human capital, the kids in your classroom.

Social capital is different. These are the resources that are embedded in relationships. Things like what’s the value of sharing information? How does trust enhance what we do? If we have the same goals, how does that make us better at what we do? And social capital is really created through interactions and shared experiences. You’re also, I’m sure, familiar with other forms of capital. Obviously money and facilities, technology time, etc. And those are all created and enhanced through policies and strategies for resource allocation. So human capital and social capital is my focus here. Let me first say something about healthcare and education, and I hope this is useful to you. That in terms of structurally, what we’ve got is the same situation in both of these domains. That we’ve got a situation where in the United States, healthcare and education are both very expensive relative to comparable countries and also simultaneously have very poor outcomes compared to other countries.

So you’ve got the same kind of structural problems. You also have very strong similarities in terms of the workforce that personnel is the highest component of costs, and the work itself is very relational work. And what I mean by that is that empathy with the client or identifying with the needs and the desires and the preferences the client, whether that client’s a fifth grade kid in the classroom or whether it’s a patient in the hospital, it’s really important in terms of outcomes, that it really matters. You also have difficult to measure kinds of outcomes. Irregular feedback. Commitment to the work tends to be very important in both hospitals and in schools. And as I’m sure many of you know, burnout and turnover also tend to be prevalent in both of these domains. And I should say, by the way, if you combine education and healthcare, it’s about half of GDP in this country.

So these are incredibly important domains. So what we have are high costs with low returns in both of these domains. And so what you see is a lot of different remedies proffered. These tend to focus on two things. One is a focus on human capital. Credentialing is really important. Professional development tends to be really important in both of these domains. And also monitoring and assessment to enhance individual accountability. And in education, what you have are these value-added models. And in medicine you have things like outcome dashboards. But you see the very same approach. Obviously they look different, but it’s the same kind of idea and the same approach. What I want to talk about today is how these approaches really contradict what we know from empirical evidence, from the research findings. And what our findings and those of others show is that if you want to enhance education, you want to enhance healthcare, this focus on social capital is really important. And social capital, again, being the relationships among people that work in these domains.

That focusing on the capabilities of the workforce as a whole, the grade team, the school, et cetera, accountability to peers, what sometimes is referred to as the culture of a school rather than superiors, which is generally what we think of as monitoring, and fostering trust in this meaningful sharing of knowledge really enhance outcomes. We’ve addressed a lot of different questions in educational contexts. Again, what I’m going to focus on here is teacher, human and social capital and not some of these other things we’ve done. I’m happy to answer questions about the other things, but for now I want to focus here.

Just to step back a little bit and maybe drive this point home a little bit, that when you think about what are the explanations for success or failure in public schools, and again, you can say the same thing about hospitals. One is a structural explanation and that’s socioeconomic status. All the things that kids walk in the door with. And you see that as an explanation for why some schools are better than others. But if we think about the processes, what we do with kids once they walk through the door, what we as educators do, then this question of why are some teachers so much better at this than others? A human capital argument would be that because they have better skills, they have better training, the professional development is better and that that’s what leads to better outcomes for the kids. A social capital argument would say that those things are important, but also what you need are those connections to other professionals and that’s what leads to better outcomes. And again, we can make the same arguments as you see here at the school level.

Our research questions that I want to talk about today is really this issue of why do some teachers perform better than others? And again, with a focus on social capital and how that affects student achievement gains. So I’m going to talk about just one study in particular. We have several of these, but the one I’m going to focus on was a big study we did with fourth and fifth grade teachers in New York City public schools. And you can see we had lots of schools, hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of students that participated in this study. And one of the things we were interested in is how do you know when there is good social capital in the schools? How do you know when people have good connections? You have to be able to measure it before you can account for its effects. The way social scientists tend to measure social capital or these connections are through the ties that people have to one another.

And so one is what they call the strength of social capital. And I’m going focus on this a little bit because this difference is important. The strength of social capital is how frequently you interact with other teachers and how close you feel to them. So how often do you talk to them and how much do you trust them? So that’s strength. The density of social capital is really this issue of do you just talk to one or two people or is everybody on this team? Whether that’s a grade team or a subject team, whatever it is. Do we all talk to each other a lot? And instrumental ties mean you’re talking about the work. It’s great to talk to your colleagues about what you’re going to do in July on vacation, but that doesn’t really do much to enhance what happens to the kids in the classrooms.

So strength of ties and density of ties. And just to emphasize this density, this is what sparse ties look like. So if you have say, six teachers on this team and they kind of talk a little bit to each other about the work and they kind of trust some of their colleagues, those are sparse ties. You have one or two people that you might go to. Dense ties look more like this. That everybody is talking to everybody else about the work here so that you have this real team sort of collaboration. So I’m not going to say much about the methods here, but again, you can see tens of thousands of kids that are nested in classrooms, that are nested in schools, and we do hierarchical modeling to be able to sort out how much of the variance and how kids do is attributed to the school versus the teacher, to the kid, et cetera.

And we measured a couple of things. One is human capital. This experience and ability. I can talk more about the ability measures. You’ll have to trust me for now unless you want to get into that. But I think we had some pretty good measures of ability. And the social capital measures. Again, tie strength. How frequently do you talk and how close do you feel? And tie density. Does everybody interact or you just interact with a couple of people? And in this case, we were interested in math instruction so these ties are instrumental. The outcome measure here was changes in student achievement scores in math. So how much could you chalk up to what happened that year in the classroom? And I’m going to just give you the punchline. I could talk for an hour about some of these studies, but I’m just going to give you the punchline and most of this should be familiar to you. You already know this.

That when you think about why do kids improve in their learning, part of it has to do with the characteristics that they walk in the door with. Things like do they come to school? What is their home life like, their socioeconomic status, et cetera. Part of it is teacher human capital. How experienced is the teacher? How much ability does he or she have? Part of it is team social capital. How strong are these relationships among the teachers? But what I want to focus on is this interaction between teacher-human capital, their ability and their competence, et cetera, and their social capital. And here, what you see is something very interesting. That the punchline here is … And this is just a very simple kind of depiction of what we found. That on one side you see gains in student achievement and then at the bottom you see the strengths of ties among teachers and teams, whether those are weak or strong. And then the ability of these teachers.

And what you see is when social capital is low, that the ties are weak, that the kids don’t do very well. When the ties are strong, you see high-ability teachers doing very well and low-ability teachers also doing much, much better. What you also see though, and here, it’s the same gains in student achievement. Sparse ties, remember, you only talk to one or two people. Dense ties, you have a team that really behaves as a team and they talk to one another. That what you see is that dense ties are incredibly important for low-ability teachers. That when the ties are sparse, their kids do poorly. When the ties are dense, their kids do much, much better. With high-ability teachers you don’t see that much. They don’t get as much out of these dense ties, but low-ability teachers really do.

So summary. Interaction of human and social capital, teacher-human capital. Again, experience ability, it really matters for student achievement. A one standard deviation increase in teacher ability, 2.2% gains for students. But look at social capital. It’s two and a half times more important. That social capital benefits students even more. One standard deviation increase in team social capital, 5.7% gain for students, and that’s a big one. 5.7 is a big gain. Just by people interacting with each other and talking about the work. And the combined human and social capital effects, I think is what’s particularly interesting. Frequent and close interactions with peers, maybe a handful of people that you work well with, that’s really good for high-ability teachers. Dense ties, everybody talking, really good for low-ability teachers. So dense ties benefit less-able teachers, strong ties benefit more-able teachers. So just to close here, if I’ve convinced you at all … And again, this is a very short summary of some of the work that we’ve done, that from here I think Wendy is going to be more of the expert.

So if I convinced you at all, what do you do about that? Well, how do you enable and enhance social capital in the school? And just to summarize, how do you improve performance in the school? Again, the conventional wisdom is we talk about credentialing, professional development, getting a teacher’s ability and knowledge and experience up, and then we monitor them like crazy to make sure that that’s having an effect. If you really want to improve school performance, human capital is important, there’s no question. But if your reform efforts focus just there, you’re going to fail. Social capital is even more important, two and a half times as important. So the shift from focusing on the ability of individual teachers to the collective ability of the school and also tailoring that social capital to what the teachers need.

Last thing I want to leave you with is for you to think about this when you ask your questions. Excuse me. Think about your own school. How would you break the social capital in your school? Again, these connections among teachers and what does it look like? How dense is it? Does everybody talk or just a few people? You just talk to a handful of people. Those interactions, are they instrumental? Are they frequent? Are they close? And then the second and probably most important question, how do you know that your social capital is strong? And then finally, and again, this is where Wendy is more the expert, what would you do to improve social capital in your school? So I’ll leave my presentation there. Thank you.

Erin Grubbs:

Thank you, Carrie. That was great. Yeah, as Carrie mentioned, I think we wanted to frame the conversation a little bit around the research of why this is important and then get into the discussion a little bit more with Wendy on some of the real life things that are happening in the districts. So Wendy, we’re going to start with you. And if you don’t mind, can you talk about some of the challenges or barriers you’re facing when you’re trying to foster this culture of collaboration?

Wendy Anderson:

Sure. I’m going to talk about my districts in particular, and they’re very small, so some of the barriers might be specific to that and others might be general. I’d also like to share my screen. I think a picture is worth a thousand words as the saying goes. So I’d like to share the teachers, this is about a year and a half ago, created some images and posters of what their collaborative team experience was like, their current reality at the time. So if I can just share my screen. Are you able to see that? Okay. This is the first poster and some of these are very similar. These are the islands so every content area feels like an island unto themselves. They have Moby Dick here as the perfect PLC or collaborative team that we strive for, but it just can’t be caught.

And then we have a shark in the water down here, the person who doesn’t want to participate. And in the boat here, they did have some of the administrator names on the boat and I blacked those out. But this shows that when you’re what we call in Iowa, I guess singletons. So we have say an individual art teacher for the entire K-12 building, or we have two secondary math teachers. One is middle school math, one is high school math. So they can talk about some things, but they are teaching very different classes. So this is one barrier that’s in place, just not feeling like you’re really connected to anyone. Similarly, this second slide shows the islands. Again, at the top there’s high school islands, and then we have middle school islands and then on the bottom right we have the elementary islands. And it looks like they’re sending out these signals to each other. But the key at the bottom left shows that when they have the S curves, those are the turbulent waters. Now I have to tell you that these educators are all on one campus. They’re in the same building, K-12. So they can literally walk down the hallway and go see another teacher, but they’re still feeling like either time is a barrier or they just don’t cross those turbulent waters.

Here’s a third thing, similar along those same lines that they used flowers. But again, you can see the singleton. In particular, I think the art teacher was saying that she’s the hummingbird that gathers sugar from the different sources, but really feeling like you’re just flying on your own. This is a little bit different kind of perspective on a barrier. So we have the two people at the bottom that are talking, but then a squirrel comes along, so they’re constantly distracted by the things that they have to do during the day or, oh, remember we have a field trip on Friday. And so all those other things that are coming into play that distract them from their goal. We have the bottom left is a check mark. So again, whatever we’re doing is just compliance. We just check it off and then we move on to something else. We have the question marks here, and that really speaks to just confusion about what they’re supposed to be doing. What is the procedure? What is the process? What are the outcomes or goals that we’re supposed to be commonly working on?

And then this last slide is the house of cards. So if one card is out of line, the whole house falls. And so I think that speaks to a couple of things. We have a high rate of teacher turnover and we know that if you have one new team member, that’s like an entirely new team. So it may be that teams are starting over year after year after year. So that’s definitely one barrier as well as you can see in the bottom left corner, those roles are barriers as well. I think that Carrie referred to that there’s a little bit of a cultural, maybe unspoken narrative that if you’re a new person, you should maybe just sit back and be quiet and just watch everybody else. And the veterans are supposed to be the ones that have all the answers. There’s no real process for a legitimate peripheral participation for the new people to become that really true professional learning community. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen there. So basically, I guess if I could summarize those, it’s the procedure and process. Not really knowing what they’re supposed to be doing. The outcomes and the goals, the teacher turnover, and then what are the roles that they’re supposed to be taking on during that time.

Erin Grubbs:

Nice. Thank you, Wendy. Carrie, I’m going to pull you back into the conversation a little bit here to bounce off of some of what Wendy shared. But as you hear some of that, what advice do you have that you could offer to educators who are just starting to explore these benefits to combat some of those barriers? What would be your advice?

Carrie Leana:

Well, I’ve again spent a good bit of time with educators and with teachers and administrators and support staff, et cetera. And one of the things I hear a lot, and I’m sure Wendy can talk about this more, is that there isn’t time. That there isn’t time, particularly with elementary school teachers. There’s no time. You don’t even have lunchtime because you’re taking turns monitoring the lunchroom. So that when you think about if our findings generalize, and I think that they do because we did them across so many different schools, then you are missing … If you don’t build time into the day for collaboration, you’re missing this benefit. And so one thing that I hear a lot is time. Everybody thinks it’s a great thing. And again, when I give this presentation to administrators, they all say, “That’s great. That’s really good. But …”

And then you go back to your other way of doing it. So that kind of building this collaborative community becomes something you do as a hobby rather than as part of your job. And that thinking about this as part of the job and administrators thinking about this is an incredibly important part of making sure we serve the kids well. So time I think is a big issue. The second thing that I think is a big issue, when you think about the really good teachers, the ones that are really experienced and they’re winning the teacher of the year or whatever it is that we do, for what we know is for new teachers, novice teachers or even teachers that aren’t so new but just maybe aren’t as good at what they do or haven’t updated their skills or whatever, they benefit enormously from having this collaborative team.

When you think about teachers that are really at the top of their game, for them it’s more of a give than a take. So in some ways there has to be some rewards for giving that part of yourself. Because again, for them, they do better if they just have a couple of people that they can work with. That they don’t get as much personally and their kids aren’t really benefiting from these new ideas. It’s more of a teaching the teachers sort of thing. So there has to be some benefit to them to do that.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah. No, I agree. I think that’s great. Wendy, from your side, it sounds like you guys have put some process in place to kind of combat some of these barriers. Can you share an example of how you’ve helped with this teacher collaboration issue and how potentially it’s impacted student learning outcomes?

Wendy Anderson:

Sure. We made a conscious decision in both districts to place collaborative teams and the PLC process as a top priority because we understood its importance and how it related to everything else that we were doing. So one of the things that we consciously choose to do is to attend a professional learning. Usually it’s through Solution Tree. They’re partnered with our state and they will put on a two and a half day conference and we will take all our staff members there. So that’s in August for us. We’ll take every single one of our staff members to this conference to get everybody on the same page. Even if you’ve heard it year after year, until you’re doing it, until you’re actually with automaticity, it’s not really at its highest point of effectiveness.

I’m going to focus on one of my districts in particular. It was in 2018, they were designated with a comprehensive status from ESSA, meaning that they’re a priority school, meaning that their achievement scores were of great concern, maybe even in the lowest 5% of the state. So we partnered with Solution Tree and had them come in and do PD just for our school, and had a coach that came in and met with our teams just to clarify what are we supposed to be doing in our collaborative team time? And so we made those structures very clear and worked on improving those. So it took many years. It took a commitment. It took a lot of work and accountability to make sure that the learning we had took place. And so I do want to share … Again, I’ll share my screen.

This is a picture of us just this past Monday. Our Solution Tree representative came back because we went through an application process a year ago to show our data and the processes that we were using to address student achievement in our collaborative teams. And so we were awarded a Promising Practices School award. There’s a flag and the certificate there. So this is our elementary school staff. And we have some things to work on still. Our data certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s so much improved. We’re not targeted or anything like that for ESSA status. We’ve made great strides in those years. And so we’re very proud of just how far we’ve come, and it’s completely related to shoring up our practices and understanding the importance of our collaborative teams.

Erin Grubbs:

Nice. Thank you for sharing that story. That’s great. Congratulations on the award.

Wendy Anderson:

Thank you.

Erin Grubbs:

I think both you and Carrie have touched on this a little bit, but let’s dig a little bit deeper into the role that you think leadership plays in promoting and supporting teacher collaboration. And what strategies have you found to be effective in gaining that administrative buy-in?

Wendy Anderson:

Well, I have to say, if the administrators aren’t being the models for this and voicing how much they value a collaborative team, then it’s not going to work. We can’t have that happen without the leaders modeling and appreciating that process themselves. So leaders have to be involved in teams. They have to be sharing their team’s work and the outcomes they have to be sharing their own personal learning journeys as professionals. And to say that this is how I reached out, this is why it was important to me, this is how I changed my practice. Without that, nothing else is going to work. I think as leaders, we also have to present a set of what we call non-negotiables. Meaning that teams have freedom and autonomy to do certain things and make decisions, but there are things we all have to do as collaborative teams in order to make sure that our practices are aligned and we are making sure that our students are having access to a guaranteed viable curriculum.

So we have to say, for example, that teams are going to work on developing some type of common formative assessments together and looking at those results and then deciding which practices, which instructional practices were most effective and how they’re going to change their practice to make sure that all students are achieving at the highest levels possible. I do also think that it’s really important for educators to model a risk-taking approach. I think Carrie alluded to this as well. I think a lot of teachers are just a little bit intimidated to try something new. What if it doesn’t work? And so when they have administrators that are saying, “I’m trying this as well. I’m doing this myself, and I’m not really sure how this is going to turn out, but I know that it’s based on educational theory or research. So all we can do is do our best and as a team, we’ll coach each other through it. We’ll figure out what didn’t work and what does work, and then we will move forward.” So I think when the educators are doing that, the teachers feel like, “Okay. I can do this as well.” And when you have that culture, that’s just how we operate. We have an art to teaching and we have a science to teaching, and how do we capitalize on both of those avenues?

Erin Grubbs:

Great. Carrie, do you want to touch on anything on that from your side, from what you’ve seen in your experience?

Carrie Leana:

The only thing that I would add to that is, and I agree with Wendy, I’ve seen some schools where the teachers somehow make it work without administrative support, but it doesn’t last long and they get burnt out and you lose your better teachers that way and they move on to a different school. But one thing that we found, one of the things we ask people is, and again, these were thousands of teachers, who do you talk to? If you have a problem in the classroom or you don’t know how to do something well, or what you’re doing isn’t really working. So in other words, you’re making yourself vulnerable in some ways by asking for advice. And that’s how we all learn is by making ourselves vulnerable and learning new things. That we ask them, well, who do you go to? And it wouldn’t surprise, I think, the teachers on this call that you go to one of your colleagues. You go to another teacher. That what schools do is invest an awful lot in administrative overhead for these things.

The last person you go to, for most teachers … And again, this is without the kinds of interventions that Wendy was talking about. So in schools where those interventions have been successful, then it’s probably very different. But without those kinds of interventions and that very mindful attention to social capital, they go to one another. The person they’re least likely to talk to is the principal or the assistant principal. They’re not going there and saying, “I got this problem and I don’t know how to deal with it.” That’s not who they’re going to go to. And they talk to their colleagues more than they talk to the people that have been hired into the school to be instructional leaders. So what that tells me is that for instructional leaders, what you want to do is work through that network of teachers. That doesn’t mean that your role isn’t important. Your role is incredibly important. But you want to do that through that network so that it moves around to the people that aren’t quite ready to ask you for help.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah. No, I like that. That’s great. Cool. I think you’ve all mentioned time being a barrier. One thing that we frequently hear is can technology and/or digital tools be leveraged to help with this time issue and in particular to facilitate collaboration. Wendy, do you have any thoughts on that?

Wendy Anderson:

I have a couple of thoughts. The first is take advantage of those virtual opportunities. For example, we have a Spanish teacher, and she’s the only Spanish teacher that we have in one of my schools. The other school doesn’t have one at all. But what she does is she’s connected with an international group of Spanish teachers. So she has some in Japan, she has some that she works with in Brazil, in some of the states. And so they will often meet on her time that it’s maybe the weekend or maybe in the evening, but then she gets compensated for that. So when the rest of the teams are collaborating on Monday morning, she might not have to come in during that time as compensation for the time she’s put in outside of the school day. So that is one option I think if leaders are flexible with that to look at virtual options.

I think back in January we had a day where both my districts had a common day on the calendar for professional learning, and it was January in Iowa, so we were planning on one district driving up to the other district and because of weather that didn’t happen. So it was an opportunity, we did a virtual collaboration. So with over a hundred people, we changed our format to be virtual, and it turned out to be a really great day. So I would say anything that you have that you could connect with over Zoom or Google Meet, take advantage of those things. Take advantage of the groups that are already out there. And the other resource I would point you to … Again, I’m going to share my screen.

This is a website, allthingsplc.info. If you haven’t gone here, I would highly recommend that. It’s everything that you could want. You have it in one place. So I guess it’s seeing the recognition here. If you wanted to, for example, see the evidence and you can filter. These are all the schools across the United States. But if I wanted to filter by Iowa, then you’d be able to see it. So this is actually one of my districts, Baxter Elementary. This is showing us that we won the Promising Practices. And then if you want to click on there, you can see all of our application materials, the processes that we used, and obviously you can look at others who are even a higher status, a model PLC school in any state. And you can filter by … Well, I work in a small school, or we have a high population of certain type of student.

You can filter by those as well. The other thing I would highly recommend is the resources tab. So if you want to click on the articles and research, you can do that. But the tools piece, these are all kinds of tools that teams can use to help them with whatever issues they might be experiencing. So if you’re having difficulty understanding how you should use data within a particular building or a data protocol, here it’d be like the non-negotiables of what your collaborative team should be. And even if you’re just looking for things like schedules, how do we make time for those interventions? Middle school and high school intervention schedules. Different school districts have added some things here that you may find. I found we found very helpful. We didn’t have to recreate the wheel. We could just look at some of these things and decide if they would work for us. So I would highly recommend that site. I think it’s really well done. It’s just nice to see other people where they are in their learning journey.

Erin Grubbs:

Nice. What a great resource. I haven’t seen that one before, so we’ll make sure we share that out. That was all the questions that we had prepared for today. I know we got a few that have come in, but before we get to those, I just want to ask Carrie or Wendy, do you guys have any final thoughts or advice for our attendees that you want to offer up on this topic?

Carrie Leana:

The only thing I would say, and this is for teachers and administrators and other professionals as well, is that social capital is not a luxury good. That it needs to be built into the school. And again, when you think about all the time and effort and resources that go into professional development to build human capital capability, and again, you get two and a half times more out of building social capital. We often think of it as, again, we all know it’s valuable and it’s mom and apple pie kind of thing that we all agree with. But you have to make room for it and really put the resources behind it. Some of the things that Wendy was talking about. Again, what I hear from teachers is they do these kinds of things, but they do it on their own time. And this has to be built into the job. Professional development is not just an individual professional building your own capabilities, but again, building the capabilities of a team. And so treat it with the respect that it deserves.

Erin Grubbs:

Nice. Thank you.

Wendy Anderson:

I would echo that, Erin. I think for educators, we don’t necessarily refer to it as social capital, but maybe the term we use more often is collective efficacy. And we know from the work of John Hattie that the effect size of that is very high. I want to say something like a 1.5. So if we think of a 0.4 is roughly equivalent to a school year, increasing student achievement over a year, then we’d look at something that is a 1.5 is maybe four times or four years worth of growth in one year is our collective efficacy as a district or a building team. It’s absolutely where you should put your investment.

Carrie Leana:

Let me say one last thing. Remember the slide that I showed you about how less able teachers, maybe new teachers, etc, that again, the slide showed the growth, how much their kids grew in that one year just based on being in a team that was supportive and they can talk to. The growth was really phenomenal. So I think particularly if teacher turnover is a problem and you’ve got a lot of newcomers coming in, this becomes even more important.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah. No, I agree. That sounds great. So we haven’t had a ton of questions come in. Just a reminder that you can use that Q&A tab. One of the questions that we did have come in was about the slides and if we can share them out. So the recording will be available, but we’re not going to make the slides available. Wendy has some research articles that she shared that we can include in the follow-up email that ties back to the slide she shared. So we’ll make sure that that’s available. Wendy, we had a question for you around what was the prompting question that you used for the staff to create those images that you shared with us earlier?

Wendy Anderson:

Sure. It was very simple. We just said if you could draw a picture that represented your current reality of your team’s functioning, and you could talk about it as just your individual team or your building or even what you saw in the district. And they were in their groups, so they were actually in their teams that they collaborated with. And how would you represent what your current reality is right now?

Erin Grubbs:

And you did that during an in-service that you had for teachers. Is that what you did?

Wendy Anderson:

Correct. Yes.

Erin Grubbs:

Great. Thank you. I think we’ve got a quiet group today, so not a lot of questions. I did just see one come in. Let see what that is. Let’s start with Wendy on this one. Can you list the non-negotiables? Do you find that those non-negotiables help make meeting PLCs and not just department meetings?

Wendy Anderson:

For sure. We actually, in both districts, we are on a journey with that again, because we haven’t necessarily found the perfect format that I think works. So non-negotiables would be, you have to have some sort of norms established, and you have to have an agenda, and you have to have a smart goal set. I mean, that’s just foundationally at the beginning of the year, every team is going to do that. But what their norms are, what agenda they use, we’ve even come flexible with that. We used to have a form that said, everybody use this agenda. Well, we got some feedback that, well, that doesn’t work for us. We don’t like that. We don’t do things. So we said, okay, choose your agenda where you keep the minutes of a recording of what you’ve talked about. You’ve pick the form.

We just need to see the evidence that it’s being done. So some other non-negotiables that we had are just in terms of, I think I mentioned this before, that we are going to have a guaranteed viable curriculum. That’s what we’re working towards. So unit by unit, we need to understand what is it that you’re teaching? How does it address the knowledge and skills that students need based on what we’ve determined are priority standards? What kinds of assessments are you using and what kinds of results are you getting? So you have to come together and say, “These are the assessment results. What are we going to do about it?” So it’s really answering those four questions. What do we want students to know? How are we going to get that across to them? The third, what are we going to do if they don’t get it? And the fourth one, if they already come in knowing it, we have to have a plan for helping those students grow, not just starting where we always start it.

Erin Grubbs:

That’s awesome. It looks like we had one come through the chat. Wendy, what advice do you have for those in departments who might not be on board with committing to PLC practice or are less accommodating with implementing that change?

Wendy Anderson:

I always like to have a chat with them and just kind of listen to their reasons why they’re not on board. Because some of them are very legitimate. Some of them are like, you’re asking us to fill out these forms, but we don’t see anybody ever looking at these forms or talking to us about them. So are we just checking off a box? Because I don’t really think that’s valuable use of time. I agree. It’s not. Or maybe they’re saying, “Yeah, when I come to team, I’m the one here and no one else is here on time, or no one else comes with what they need.” Yeah. Then we need to establish some norms. So sometimes they need our support or an instructional coach just being part with the team and helping them establish those foundational skills. I’ve done some research myself on the role of conflict in teams, and that’s a tough one. We constantly run up against that. That’s a whole nother webinar probably of how to address conflict. But I think that a lot in education, it’s just ignored, swept under the rug. Now we fall silent. We don’t really surface those issues that are problematic. So our schools went through a book study on crucial conversations and understanding a process to surface concerns and to address those professionally.

Erin Grubbs:

That’s great. Thank you.

Carrie Leana:

Only thing I might add to that is there’s an awful lot of work on conflict in teams. A lot of research on this. And I don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news, but school teams and teacher teams are not the only ones that experience conflict. You think it’s bad in schools. You ought to see what it’s like in hospitals with doctors. And as Wendy said, there are some better and worse ways to handle that. Confrontation generally doesn’t work, but sweeping it under the rug doesn’t work either. And so there are steps that, as Wendy put it, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on managing conflict either.

Erin Grubbs:

Great. Thank you both. I think we are just about at time and I’m not seeing any more questions. So just to wrap up, thank you Wendy and Carrie both for the excellent discussion. You provided a lot of valuable information and some great takeaways for helping teachers make a shift to be more collaborative. If you’ve enjoyed this session, just check out our virtual conference reaction, which is happening April 10th and 11th. We’re offering sessions similar to this with more thought leaders and industry experts in K-12 specific track on supporting teachers. So we just dropped that link in the chat for more information. And just a final thought. Thank you for our attendees for joining us and making it an interactive presentation. Watch for an email with a link to the recording and some of those resources we’ve discussed today so you can revisit and share the great information and insights from today’s discussion. We hope to see you on a future GoReact webinar. Have a great day.