Educational Leadership - October 2009

Principals who develop collaborative cultures shift from
being the person who sets the goals to being the person who
sets up the conditions that allow others to establish goals.

one another’s journey toward better instruction. Principals who need to raise achievement are driving with the brakes on unless they build cultural norms that support faculty working together.

Collaborative cultures take the brakes off and accelerate a faculty’s capacity to improve instruction. As Figure 1 suggests, when teachers have many opportunities to collaborate, their energy, creative thinking, efficiency, and goodwill increase—and the cynicism and defensiveness that hamper change decrease.

Principals can foster a school environment that leads to collaboration and teacher leadership by sharing responsibility with teachers as often as possible and by helping them develop skills that foster collaborative problem solving. As we’ve seen in our own practice and our years mentoring principals,

collaborative cultures are guided by two overarching beliefs: transparency (meaning as little as possible is done behind closed doors) and shared decision making.

Toward Collaborative
Decision Making

Information is the lifeblood of any organization. Principals building a culture that supports school reform should pay attention to the ways official and unofficial information circulate through their schools. Official information includes published policies, schedules, and so on. Unofficial information includes rumors and the ways teachers relate to one another and translate official policy into classroom practice.

In collaborative cultures, official and unofficial information are similar and reinforce each other. In top-down

cultures, they are dissimilar and at odds with each other.

Transparency Tips
the Scale at Elmwood

During the 1990s, the faculty of Elmwood Elementary School1 worked with the principal and assistant superintendent to develop a literacy program that reflected its deepest beliefs about the ways young students learn to read and write. The goal was to help all students in the school’s diverse population develop sophisticated literacy skills and learn to love reading and writing. Elmwood’s test scores rose, and the accomplishment was celebrated in the local press.