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Setting the Tone

Principals play a key role in establishing a collaborative environment.

By Mindy Cameron

It’s the rare and lucky principal who has serendipity as an ally in the goal of teacher collaboration. Rarely does it just happen. Most often, as principals in this story explain, genuine collaboration is the result of clear focus, careful planning, and energized leadership.

While there is no template for effective teacher collaboration, there is one essential resource: time. Principals are not magicians, but somehow they have to find a way to carve out time from an already busy school day and year for teachers to spend time together—away from students—to plan, think, learn, and train.

Rearranging a school schedule created a century ago is common to school success stories. Don Peck, who retired last spring after 30 years in public education, describes it as “moving from a system built 100 years ago to sort kids to a system that helps us be sure they are learning.”

Peck has been principal for nine years at Cheney Middle School in Cheney, Washington, a diverse community of farmers, professors, rural poor, and suburban residents 17 miles west of Spokane, Washington. He is proud of what has been accomplished, yet well aware of what is left to be done. “There is so much out there we haven’t achieved yet. We are not truly collaborating in the way we could be, at the school or districtwide. We have pockets of collaboration.”

“There is no silver bullet,” he said, “it takes lots of things, including teachers keeping abreast of current knowledge about teaching and learning and having time to reflect on new approaches.”

Peck met with resistance when he arrived at Cheney Middle School. Teaching teams were more label than reality. “Some were working together, but not regularly.” His goal was “to create little families in the school.” Schedules were changed to create common times for preparation and for training. Peck shared the growing body of research on why teamwork and collaboration matters.

Eventually, a “fairly traditional” math teacher and a not-so-traditional history teacher who combined math and geography began to work together. “It was a little victory,” Peck recalls. “I went home and cheered.”

Byron Yankey faced a considerable challenge when he arrived as principal of Meridian Elementary in Idaho’s fastest growing school district. Meridian is just outside Boise. He’d been an elementary principal for nearly 20 years but, at more than 500 students, this was his largest school.

The school has a large high-risk population. It is a Title I school with approximately two-thirds of all kids qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch. It is in an area of low-cost housing and has an annual student turnover around 25 percent.

When Yankey arrived, student performance was at the low end. “We lived down to what everyone expected. We worked hard but not at the right things to make a difference.”

Yankey set out on a path of “systemic and schoolwide change in climate and atmosphere.” The goal was to “know everything we could about ourselves and what we needed to do differently.” One powerful technique was to focus on five fourth-graders and five fifth-graders who had been at the school since kindergarten and were not succeeding. “My premise,” said Yankey, “was that these are kids we own. They need more help. What happened?”

“It was a watershed moment,” he said.

One realization was that the school district was “the victim of random professional development.” Training and development were not necessarily matched to school and teacher needs in either content or timing. Another was that the old approach “created a Swiss cheese effect. We’d pull kids out for special instruction and they’d miss something in the classroom.”

Reallocating time was part of the answer. “The biggest resource necessary to change is time,” Yankey said. Moving to a block schedule at Meridian helped to bring services to kids in an efficient and individualized approach. Instruction focus groups were created to maximize the time teachers and specialists worked with students. The block schedule also allowed for common planning time and the opportunity to match professional development to current needs, not the calendar. “We scrounged to provide the time,” he said. “Sometimes we reached consensus by exhaustion.”

Yankey, who sees his job as part coordinator and part cheerleader, believes in the power of slogans to reinforce and energize a team. Here’s a sampling: “Further, Faster” and “Success Breeds Success.”

Ultimately, he says, “You have to believe. In the past a lot of decisions were based on exceptions. The attitude was, ‘but what about these kids ...’” Yankey ignored that and acted as if everyone agreed.

It seems to be working. Since the changes, test scores at Meridian Elementary have increased. Yankey has a slogan for that: “Success by Design, not by Chance.”

In 2003 Patti Kinney, principal of Talent Middle School in the Phoenix-Talent District in Southwest Oregon, was National Middle School Teacher of the Year. “The award was not about me, but about we,” she said.

That comment is shorthand for her philosophy as a school leader. “Recognize the strengths of others and capitalize on them by finding ways to allow them to use those strengths.”

She puts that philosophy into practice by giving broad interpretation to collaboration. Talent Middle School established a case manager system. Every certified person in the school has a caseload. They work with students on annual student-led conferences, state assessments, goals for high school and keep track of what students are working on and what they are most proud of.

Kinney said success at Talent has come through seeing the staff as a whole, not as certified and classified. Support staff is actively involved in decisionmaking. “Without that you don’t have true collaboration.”

An example is the work of the front office secretary who teams with a teacher to run the student leadership program. They meet one morning a week with 75 to 100 students interested in focusing on school and community service and recognition.

Kinney, who is president-elect of the National Middle School Association, has advice for others about collaboration. “You have to work at collaboration and revisit it. It is easy to feel like you are doing it, but you have to take stock every now and then.”

When it’s working, collaboration is hard and demanding for teachers. Principals Peck and Yankey both emphasized that reality but said teachers are up to the job. “We don’t have a teacher here who isn’t far superior to teachers I worked with 30 years ago,” said Peck. “Entry level teachers have better skill sets and a better grasp of what we’re trying to do. Veteran teachers have learned to change.”

When he spearheaded change at Meridian, Yankey said teachers “worked harder than they ever had in their careers.” They also had to give up a lot of independence. But ultimately, he said, “success really does build success.”