School Climate

Leading With Collective Efficacy

Peter M. DeWitt

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781506385976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Build a positive school climate to impact students, teachers, and the community!

Is improving school climate on your to-do list? Do you think about it as a top-down directive or as a dialogue to build equity within the school? A healthy school environment should never be seen as an option, but instead supported as a must-have.

Peter DeWitt offers leaders practical high impact strategies to improve school climate, deepen involvement in student learning, and engage a broader family network. In addition to international vignettes focused on community stakeholders and research-based practices, this book features tools such as

· a leadership growth cycle to help leaders build their self-efficacy

· a teacher observation cycle centered on building collective efficacy

· an early warning system to identify potential at-risk students

· action steps following each chapter to apply to your own setting

· discussion questions for use in team environments

Establishing a supportive and inclusive school climate where professionals can take risks to improve the lives of students is vital to maximize learning in any school community.

1 What Is Collaborative Leadership?

Whatever one’s style, every leader, to be effective, must have and work on improving his or her moral purpose.

—Michael Fullan

In our leadership training, we are told to be visible. After all, it’s important to be seen in the hallway, on the sidewalk, and in the cafeteria. Being visible contributes to a safe school climate, partly because visibility means that leaders are present and able to maintain a calm atmosphere. Behavior changes when the principal is around, right? However, what we learned from Dr. Trudy Cowen’s leadership is that we can be visible but contribute to a negative school climate at the same time. It’s more important to engage positively with teachers, families, and students. We, as leaders, need to create positive relationships with the different stakeholders in the school community, as Tim Cooper does at Waterville High School, because that all leads to a more positive and engaging school climate. Tim exemplifies the idea of collaborative leadership.

Collaborative leadership includes the purposeful actions we take as leaders to enhance the instruction of teachers, build deep relationships with all stakeholders through understanding self-efficacy (0.63), and build collective efficacy (1.57) to deepen our learning together.

The Hattie Effect

You will notice that there are numbers next to self-efficacy and collective efficacy, which will play an important part in this book. Those numbers, referred to as effect sizes, come from the work of John Hattie (2009, 2012a). Hattie’s research, which provides the best lens on what works in education, involves over 1,500 meta-analyses and 300 million students. Hattie’s research focuses on influences on learning. For example, some of the influences that have an important impact on learning are feedback (0.75), classroom discussion (0.80), and reciprocal teaching (0.74). All of the influences Hattie has researched come with effect sizes.

If the influence has an effect size of 0.40, which Hattie refers to as the hinge point, it equates to a year’s worth of growth for a year’s input. Any influence with an effect greater than 0.40 equates to more than a year’s worth of growth, and any influence with an effect size lower than 0.40 equates to less than a year’s worth of growth for a year’s input. For example, in the definition of self-efficacy, which refers to the belief we have in ourselves that we can make learning happen or can have an impact on the learning of our students, you saw that it had an effect size of 0.63. Additionally, collective teacher efficacy has an effect size of 1.57, which equates to almost four years of growth on the part of the teacher. On the other side of the scale, retention has an effect size of –0.13, which has a negative impact on learning.

Hattie’s research revolves around a list of influences on learning, or strategies or circumstances that have an impact on learning, such as classroom discussion, reciprocal teaching, metacognitive activities, student mobility, and family engagement. The list of influences grew from 138 in 2009 to 150 in 2015 and far beyond 250 today (Hattie, 2015a, 2016). His research has been used by ministries of education, countless teachers and leaders, and has professionally been implemented in over 7,000 schools.

Hattie’s work is not without some criticism. School and district leaders need to be careful to understand the nuances of the research’s implications before making policy decisions based on the work. One such criticism states that when the meta-analysis is averaged with the effect size of the research, the researcher misses out on certain nuances in the research (Killian, 2015). For example, school leadership has an effect size of 0.39, but when you take out the moderators of transformational leadership versus instructional leadership, you will find that transformational leadership has an effect size of 0.11, while instructional leadership’s effect size is 0.41.

People who read Hattie’s more recent work (2015c)—and are not aware that the influences are an average—tend to jump to different conclusions than those who understand the averaging because they look at the effect size as the be-all and end-all, and it is not. There is much more to the story. School leaders need to keep in mind the specific culture and students in their schools whenever they aggregate this kind of data. To get the deeper story, educators must read Hattie’s original work (2009) on specific influences. Despite the criticism, I have included Hattie’s research here because it offers us important insight into learning and provides the catalyst we need to kick off these important conversations.

The Importance of Self-Efficacy

Secondly, let’s take time to understand self-efficacy and collective efficacy because they are central themes in the book. Bandura (1994) defines self-efficacy as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave” (p. 2).

This concept of self-efficacy was first introduced by Bandura (1977) and focused on whether individuals believed that they had the capabilities to meet the demands of a specific task. McCormick, Tangum, and López-Forment (2002) suggest that “research findings have demonstrated a consistent relationship between self-efficacy and work-related performance” (p. 35). That work-related performance can contribute to a more productive and innovative school climate.

Building Self-Efficacy

We build self-efficacy in these ways:

• Providing support to teachers through supplying resources they need (e.g., articles, sacred prep time, and professional development based on their needs)
• Coconstructing goals with them
• Giving feedback around those goals

Through collaborative leadership, teachers with a low level of self-efficacy can change their mindsets to have a strong sense of one. In fact, McCormick and colleagues (2002) suggest that “efficacy beliefs are derived from experience” (p. 38), and collaborative leaders help contribute to efficacy through providing positive experiences to teachers, students, and parents. Bandura (1986) has identified four major categories of experiences that influence efficacy. A discussion of those four categories follows.

Experiences That Influence Efficacy

• Personal performance accomplishments: A challenging activity brings out the strongest indicators for changing self-efficacy.
• Vicarious experiences: McCormick et al. (2002) write, “By observing new skills and strategies in others, people enhance their task capabilities” (p. 38).
• Positive feedback: In Bandura’s research he referred to this as social persuasion. However, feedback was one of the major contributors. Positive feedback, when given correctly, helps to increase a person’s level of self-efficacy.
• Physiological condition: Social and emotional well-being matter because they contribute to a person’s level of self-efficacy. (Bandura, 1986)

All four categories have a strong relationship to leadership, and throughout the book, self-efficacy will be explored through the lens of students, teachers, families, and leaders. Collaboration is an important element of those four categories, and examples that fit into these four categories will be provided throughout the book.

Thirdly, in the collaborative leadership definition the topic of collective teacher efficacy was used. Tschannen-Moran and Barr (2004) define collective teacher efficacy as “the collective self-perception that teachers in a given school make an educational difference to their students over and above the educational impact of their homes and communities” (p. 190). The collective efficacy of teachers leads to a stronger school climate for students.

Building Collective Teacher Efficacy

We build collective teacher efficacy in these ways:

• Collaborative inquiry (Donohoo, 2016)
• Authentic professional learning communities (PLCs), in which teachers engage in learning activities with one another
• Faculty meetings where there is a problem of practice (POP) that staff investigate and bring evidence to share with others so that they can learn from one another
• Coteaching and mentoring

In Pursuit of Collaboration

We know that self-efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, and collaboration are interrelated. For some of us, the word collaboration conjures up images of people working together with their sleeves rolled up, making one idea stronger. To others, the word collaboration makes them cringe, as they think of yet another meeting where they are asked for their input but know deep down inside that the decision has already been made. Collaboration is sometimes just code for “agree with me so we can move forward, and no one will get hurt.”

In order for collaboration to be real and for teachers, students, and parents to feel as though they are a part of a school climate in which they are valued, collaboration needs to include times where we not only learn from one another but also challenge each other’s thinking. Kuhn (2015) found,

More productive collaborations have been identified as those in which participants directly engage one another’s thinking. They listen and respond to what their peers say. In less successful collaborations, participants are more likely to work in parallel and ignore or dismiss the other person’s contributions. (p. 146)

I believe that our moral purpose as leaders is to challenge our long-held beliefs, build the collective efficacy of staff, help raise the self-efficacy of students and families, and create opportunities in which we learn together through collaboration and a stronger school climate. Michael Fullan (2001), someone I respect greatly for his work in leadership over many decades, writes,

You don’t have to be Mother Theresa to have moral purpose. Some people are deeply passionate about improving life (sometimes to a fault, if they lack one or more of the other four components of leadership: understanding of the change process, strong relationships, knowledge adding, and coherence making among multiple priorities). Others have a more cognitive approach, displaying less emotion, but still being intensely committed to betterment. Whatever one’s style, every leader, to be effective, must have and work on improving his or her moral purpose. (p. 13)

What the Research Says

Research suggests that collaborative leadership can have a positive effect on student learning and achievement. In their longitudinal study involving 192 elementary schools, Hallinger and Heck found that “collaborative leadership positively impacted growth in student learning indirectly through building the academic capacity in schools” (2010, p. 673). The researchers also suggest that there are three important elements to collaborative leadership to assist in its success. Those three areas of focus that Hallinger and Heck found were vision, governance, and resource allocation.

Collaborative Leadership: Elements of Success

• Vision: Making decisions to facilitate actions that focus the energy of the school on improving student ...