Education Innovation

Dumber Together? Brainstorming in a Professional Learning Community

You have seen it before. The PLC agenda says, “Brainstorm ideas for…” You look around and see the chart paper, pens, and Post-It notes lying on the table, and you think to yourself, “Why do we waste the time.”

You know the rules of brainstorming in PLCs…
1. No criticism
2. Wild ideas are welcome
3. Quantity is the goal, the more the better.
4. Look for combinations of previous ideas and improvements on previous ideas.

You also know that it helps if your PLCs…
1. Stay focused
2. Stick to one conversation at a time
3. Get visual and physical
4. Use chart paper, white boards, Post-It notes, etc.

You know all these things. But does it work the way you hope it would. Are your PLC brainstorming sessions effective? Are they creative? Do they produce quality ideas to drive instruction and increase student achievement?

According to Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius, “In many organizations, the group ends up being dumber than the individual members.”

Why you ask?

Because, according to Sawyer, “…decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

In other words, instead of brainstorming, you should brain assemble. Put the ideas generated by individual teachers alone into an “idea pool” an assemblage of ideas.

It not that these rules of common brainstorming don’t work, it just that they work best when done by one’s self. “These studies just show that the rules work better when people use them alone than when they use them in groups.”

A lot of bad ideas are of no use to a PLC. What is needed is a lot of good ideas, or at least as many good ideas as the team is capable of generating.

But what makes an idea “good?”

According to Sawyer, we often judge ideas based on the wrong criteria. “Most people use the wrong criteria to evaluate their ideas; they think about what will work, about what worked before, or about what is familiar to them.”

What if you judged ideas based on how creative, how original, how unique, or how valuable they are? If you knew this is how ideas generated by PLC team members would be measured, chances are the teams would generate more creative ideas. You should give directions to your PLC teams that explain this.

Sawyer refers to this as “critical instructions.”

Telling your PLC that we want well thought out ideas that meet the instructional needs of students, ideas that are practical, unique, valuable, and high quality; no silly or impossible ideas.

Establishing an evaluation criterion for ideas sounds counter-intuitive, but Sawyer cites studies that show brainstorming sessions are more productive when participants are told their ideas will be evaluated for creativity and that, in fact, participants are more creative than with no criteria at all.

So instead of just telling your PLC teams to fill up a piece of chart paper with ideas, give them “critical directions” and judge them according to your pre-established criteria. You will turn brainstorming into an effective PLC tool, instead of a time wasting activity that fills ups chart paper but does nothing to improve quality of ideas developed using "critical instructions" and "idea criterion." Use the "new rules" of brainstorming.

Six Steps To Becoming A Professional Learning Community Coach

I have advised those concerned with the performance of Professional Learning Communities to gain fresh insight into how PLCs behave and information about how to drive improvement or fix problems is to play the role of the anthropologist.

The Anthropologist is one of the three learning personas from the Tom Kelley's The Ten Faces Of Innovation. See the full post here (The Anthropologist- Observing Your Professional Learning Communities)

According to Kelley, the Anthropologist practices 6 principles
1. Anthropologists practice the Zen principle of “beginner’s mind”
2. Anthropologists embrace human behavior with all its surprises
3. Anthropologists draw inferences by listening to their intuition
4. Anthropologists seek out epiphanies through a sense of “Vuja De”
5. Anthropologists keep “bug lists” or “idea wallets”
6. Anthropologists are willing to search for clues in the trash bin

Playing the persona of the Anthropologist is a powerful way to “see” and gather knowledge about the behaviors, effective or ineffective, that are occurring in your school’s Professional Learning Communities. But once you have knowledge to act on, it is time to become a coach.

Steve Roesler, Principal & Founder of The Steve Roesler Group, on his All Things Workplace blog offers great advice on what one can do to become a coach. I have excerpted the entire post because it is excellent advice for coaching Professional Learning Communities.

Do These And You'll Be Coaching

Six Steps to Coaching

1. Stop fixing everyone's stuff.

OK, the next time someone brings you a problem, stop. Do nothing. Then. . .

2. Ask them for more information using open-ended questions.

You already know how to ask questions. (And you may already know the answer to the question. But no one will learn much if they don't learn to think through issues on their own). The trick for "coaching managers" is to click a mental switch that triggers a question instead of an answer. An easy way to develop the questioning habit is to think of yourself as a journalist and start your responses with:

    * Who. . .?

    * What. . .?

    * When. . .?

    * Where. . .?

    * How. . .?

3. Use the bonus question that will automatically buy some time and gather more information: "Tell me more about that?"

4. Listen. (That means "Shut up, don't speak.")

You'll be surprised at how much you'll learn by listening. Once the other person stops talking, give them space to say more. Count silently to 10 if you have to. You'll discover that this block of information will reveal more than the first and often gives them the self-revealing "Aha!" needed. In which case, you'll be a hero.

5. Ask More.

OK, so they didn't get to the heart of the matter in #4. When your person's responses and energy start to fade, that's your cue to ask another open-ended question. Ask it about something they've just told you. Ask anything that will help continue the exploration of the issue. You can't really ask a "wrong" question.

Note. The reason you can't ask a wrong question is this: Your role is to alternate between helping them explore (questions) and being silent (just listen). The act of listening after a question is a gift that few people get. Listening shows respect. When it comes from "the boss" it's an indication of trust in one's ability to problem-solve.

6. Support giving "it" a try. You'll find that the Q&A process will have generated ideas and actions in your person's mind. This is where you help them stretch by suggesting, "Do you want to give that a try and let me know how it's going?"

The “Anthropologist” and the “Coach” are two effective personas and mindsets that can help you make your Professional Learning Communities more effective. David Kelley and Steve Roesler both provide great insight into how we can all make our Professional Learning Communities powerful sources of learning and increasing student achievement.

"Probably my best quality as a coach is that I ask a lot of challenging questions and let the person come up with the answer." Phil Dixon

Three Critical Beliefs of a Professional in a Learning Community

A "Guest Post" from Joel Zehring

Planting and nurturing a healthy professional learning community requires that every teacher (and employee) in a building arrive at three conclusions:

1. I am a professional. My mission is to ensure learning at high levels for every student, measurable by objective evidence.
2. I learn and I help others learn. My students learn more when I collaborate and learn with other teachers, sharing strategies and comparing evidence.
3. My school is a community, greater than the sum of its parts. It is built out of collaborative teams and disciplined professionals that share and learn from their failures and successes.

It’s not enough to adopt two out of the three conclusions. It’s all or nothing.

Because these conclusions aren’t just benign, buzzword statements, adoption can be pretty arduous. Teachers need time and patience to hash through the implications of these terms with other teachers.

Teachers need time to air their concerns, fears, and insecurities before they really assimilate these beliefs.

Teachers need time to struggle and even fight through the process of letting go of longer-standing beliefs that conflict with these conclusions, without feeling like they’re forfeiting their souls and their individuality.

For leaders, the whole process is less like building a tract house, and more like planting and growing a forest. It takes strategy and experience, nurturing and pruning, and time.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community: Kaizen and Tenakaizen

Part 3 in a series of posts on Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities

In a previous post “The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community” I shared it is the ability to embrace a duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold two opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an ambidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It is ability and, more importantly, it is an attitude.

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...
Internal and External Focus
Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action
Put Teachers First and Put Students First
Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning
Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students
Kaizen and Tenakaizen
High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability
We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers
Data Driven and Skeptical of Data
Predictable and Change is Normal

Today I will focus on Kaizen and Tenakaizen

There is a commercial about Tiger Woods that say, “relentless consistency, 50 percent; willingness to change, 50%.” The commercial from the global management consulting firm Accenture sums up perfectly the dual focus of the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community; relentless consistency while at the same time continuously innovating.

Professional Learning Communities must have a strong unwavering and unyielding commitment to use best practices, research based methods, proven strategies, and all practices that are known to make a difference for student learning. Professional Learning Communities must practice “kaizen”, the continual improvement in their work. A strong Professional Learning Community is always seeking to gain a greater depth of understanding of their work and continual implementation of those best practices. Their internal focus is to find those critical aspects of their work and apply the best-known methods without exception.

PLCs must continue to ask what students need to know, what is the best way for students to demonstrate what they know, use student data in the form of formative and summative common assessments, and re-teaching for those students who have not shown mastery, or provide enrichment for those who have.

The other duality of the Professional Learning Community function is to continually innovate. If “kaizen” is getting better at what they do, the term “tenakaizen” is to make something completely different, to innovate. Author of the book Think Better, Tim Hurson who coined the term tenakaizen explains that, “Tenakaizen is a composite word deriving from ten, meaning ‘law’ or ‘tradition,’ kai, meaning ‘change,’ and zen, meaning ‘good.’”  According to Tim we can interpret the word as meaning, “good revolution” because, “Rather than reproducing the old, it produces the new.”  The Professional Learning Community should be continuously learning to do new things in new ways. The only way to even greater results is to find new innovative ideas.

The “opposable mind” allows a member of a Professional Learning Community to have the, "…predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

In other words, ambidextrous PLCs have a focus on getting better at what you do, while looking for new ways to do it.Professional Learning Communities that can cope with this duality and manage this con-current focus will prove themselves to be... ambidextrous.

Michael Fullan describes it this way: the “learning is the work.” Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities focus on, “their core goals and tasks with relentless consistency, while at the same time learning continuously how to get better and better a what they are doing.”

“The secret behind ‘learning is the work’ lies in our integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) and the new learning required for continuous improvement.”

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities continually push themselves to improve and deepen their professional practice and use of proven best practices. Further, Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities simultaneously look for new and innovative ways to do their work, ways not yet discovered or explored.

"Habitudes" of Professional Learning Communities

I read Angela Maiers’ Change This Manifesto, "Habitudes in the Classroom: Teaching the Habits and Attitudes Our Students Need in the 21st Century". She shares her thoughts on what habits and attitudes (habitudes) students need to be successful in today’s world. I wondered if it is important for students then it must be important for teachers. And if it is important of teachers, it must be important for Professional Learning Communities. So what follows is a mash-up up of Angela’s habitudes with my ideas on Professional Learning Communities.

“The 21st century world needs learners to BE critical, BE creative, and BE strategic.”

“The 21st century world expects learners to HAVE the endurance, fortitude, and courage to brave through each new challenge with confidence and competence.”

Professional Learning Communities are no exception. They are increasing faced with questions of how to exploit the best expertise, talent, and knowledge regardless of geography. They face an ever-increasing desire for real-time feedback, the expectation of immediacy and the compression of time and space. Increasing expectations of accountability combined with increasing transparency in complying with expanding federal, state, and local laws in addition to categorical program monitoring requirements, and labor contracts.

Further, the need for organizations and teams to look outside themselves to expand their network with new members who are sources of learning, creativity, and innovation. And continuous change, choice, and disruption due to the increasing rate of development in the number of choices, options, disruptive ideas & technologies, and new paradigms is a further source of pressure on Professional Learning Communities. Times are changing for Professional Learning Communities. Angela’s ideas offer a core set of “habitudes” for PLC to adopt.

Habitude 1: Imagination
“Imagination is the foundation of all thinking. If we cannot see the possibility, we cannot achieve the outcome. Imagination is our mind’s eye, and has the capacity to jump from present facts to future possibilities. Our capacity to dream, hope, and plan for the future is influenced and impacted by the control and understanding of imagination’s remarkable power.”

What Professional Learning Community shouldn’t be imaginative?  The imagined outcome of student achievement, student learning, student success, should be a key driver of PLCs.

Habitude 2: Curiosity
“Champion learners are curious about everything.”

“Questions like ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder’ keep us in motion. Curious brains are active brains, and active brains become smart brains.”

Great results begin with great questions. Professional Learning Communities should develop the skill of questioning and the ability to conduct cycles of inquiry into student learning. All PLC should be curios to what students are learning, how they are learning, and what get in the way of the learning.

Habitude 3: Perseverance
“Perseverance is the cornerstone of any successful endeavor, in school and out. It is a key to victory over unfavorable circumstances.”

The work of a Professional Learning Community is not easy. It takes perseverance.

“It’s the ‘no-matter-what’ part of the habitude where difficulty lies.”

“Real perseverance happens when we do it anyways, in spite of opposition.”

“…struggle is the welcome mat to the door of breakthrough.”

Professional Learning Communities must be committed to the struggle. There are plenty of barriers and obstacles. No matter, PLCs must collaborate, co-create, innovate, and ideate around these barriers, obstacles, and cultural opposition. The students are depending on that level of perseverance.

Habitude 4: Self-Awareness
“We all have strengths and weaknesses in regard to our learning performance and capabilities.”

“Self-awareness is the ability to simultaneously exist both inside and outside or ourselves.”

Self-Awareness is a powerful concept for Professional Learning Communities. I define awareness for PLCs here as the ability to or knowledge of…
Ambidextrous Thinking
Wisdom Stewardship
Abilities
Response-ability
Network
Experiences
Skills
Scalability

Habitude 5: Courage
“Courageous learners understand that safe is risky. Success is the byproduct of taking risks.”

Professional Learning Communities must have the courage to overcome barriers to collaboration such as…
The Hoarding Barrier
The Not-Invented-Here Barrier
The Search Barrier
The Transfer Barrier
Information Cascade
The Three Sins of Teamwork

“When students become accustomed to asking each other for reasons and opinions, to listen carefully to one another, to build on another’s idea, they demonstrate courage.”

It takes risk. It takes courage. Professional Learning Communities must display both if our students are to succeed.

Habitude 6: Adaptability
“Adaptability is more than just serving change; it is using change as a growth opportunity. In fact, with anticipation of change, you can control change.”

“Simple put, in our world, there is only one constant: Change.”

Professional Learning Communities should operate as a CiNO. A Change is Normal Organization. They should be built to change, adapt, modify, and adjust. That is what learners do and that is what is at the heart of a PLC. The learning is the work. That means change is normal.


Angela says, “We are the CLO’s, Chief Learning Officers, of our classrooms. We must be the learner we wish students to become. As living, breathing exemplars of the Habitudes in action, we model passionate curiosity, imagination adaptability, and persevere out loud and in front of our students.”

Shouldn’t our Professional Learning Communities demonstrate the sort of professionalism, learning, and community that our student will be expected to display when they leave the classroom? Shouldn’t our Professional Learning Communities display these “Habitudes?”

The answer is yes.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community: Internal and External Focus

In a previous post “The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community” I shared it is the ability to embrace a duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold two opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an ambidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It is ability and, more importantly, it is an attitude.

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...
Internal and External Focus
Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action
Put Teachers First and Put Students First
Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning
Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students
Kaizen and Tenakaizen
High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability
We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers
Data Driven and Skeptical of Data
Predictable and Change is Normal

Today I will focus on the internal and external focus.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community holds a dual focus, both internal and external, simultaneously. They focus on developing strong norms, processes for communicating, problem solving, building consensus, etc. This is important, but Professional Learning Communities must recognize that equally important, is a clear understanding of how their work fits into the needs of those outside of the team.

They clearly understand that their work must fit within the greater goals of the school and the district. They are externally focused and internally focused. They do not wait to create and establish internal norms or practices for every aspect of their work before getting down to critical tasks of the PLC, but rather, they get on with the work meeting the needs of students, the grade level, the department, the school, the district, and the team together, while simultaneously developing their internal processes. They also keep an eye out for trends in technology, new research, and new strategies, and new compliance issues developing outside of the group.

It is a little more difficult and messy, but the reality is that the school day and school year are too short to spend valuable time solely focused on internal aspects of PLC operation and neglect the external needs as well.

The internal focus develops key group processes, norms, goals, time-lines, etc. The internal focus is what great Professional Learning Communities do to build solid teams. But this is not enough. The must also have the concurrent external focus. They need to understand others' expectations (school or district) constantly update their information about available talent and knowledge in their network of useful outsiders, and be aware of the external situation in which they work. The external focus creates an awareness of The Expectations, Network, and Situation. (T.E.N.S.)

Being able to have the dual perspective of the internal and external approach is to be ambidextrous.

Most educators who have participated in grade level, subject matter teams, or Professional Learning Communities are comfortable with an internal approach. It’s what most of us know. The belief is that all that is necessary to increase student success is for the teams to focus inwards on their members, the issues, and their processes. We are comfortable working across the table with a small group of fellow educators. This internal focus has worked. But, the times are changing so rapidly.

Educators are going to have to align their work with the needs of the school and district. Technology and research are growing and being created at amazing rates. Educational issues are growing in complexity and number. Much knowledge, expertise, data, and information is available outside of the team boundaries. We must deal with social changes, legal changes, technological changes, demographic changes, etc.

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities simultaneously focus on internal and external needs and demands.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly describes the quality of thinking possessed by an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community.  They are comfortable with a duality, an "ambidextrous" approach to their focus and their function.

Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of the book The Oppossable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking, calls the embracing of this duality as having an, “opposable mind.”

“…we were born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension. We can use that tension to think our way through to a new and superior idea.”

“Using our opposable minds to move past unappetizing alternatives, we can find solutions that once appeared beyond the reach or our imagination.”

In other words, Professional Learning Communities can think with ambidexterity.

Ambidextrous Thinking
Ambidextrous thinking is similar to what Roger Martin calls Integrative thinking, that is, “…the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

Martin defines integrative thinking as: "The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each."

Martin offers 4 qualities of the integrative thinker.

1. "The first difference between integrative thinkers and conventional thinkers is that integrative thinkers take a broader view of what is salient.”

“More salient features make for a messier problem. But integrative thinkers don’t mind the mess. In fact, they welcome it, because the mess assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity. And they feel confident that they will not get lost along the way but emerge on the other side of the problem with a clear solution.”

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities welcome complexity, they welcome the mess of student needs, strategies, student data, research, mandates, rules, restrictions, and barriers. Ambidextrous PLCs are comfortable with the mess and confident in their ability to arrive at a solution that will benefit students and teachers.

2. "Second, integrative thinkers don’t flinch from considering multidirectional and nonlinear causal relationships. Simple, unidirectional relationships are easier to hold in the mind, but they don’t generate more satisfactory resolutions."

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community understands that there are many factors, including nonlinear causal relationships that might account for increases or decreases in student achievement. Easy and quick conclusions are not necessarily the correct conclusions. There are many factor involved in learning, and the ambidextrous PLC considers more of them in their work.

3. "The third difference between integrative and conventional thinkers is in the architecture of their decisions. Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on its individual parts."

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities can work on keep the entire issue of student learning and achievement in their minds while they plan, develop, improve, and manage individual parts. They do not fall into the problem of “elementitis”, breaking things down into smaller disconnected elements and losing context. They keep all the elements connected and in context of the overall needs of students and teachers.

4. "Fourth and finally, the integrative thinker will always search for creative resolution of tensions, rather than accept unpleasant tradeoffs. The behavior associated with such a search—delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the eleventh hour—can appear irresolute from the outside, but the results are choices that could only have been generated by an integrative thinker who won’t settle for trade-offs and conventional options."

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities do not accept the traditional method of accepting trade-offs. They believe that all students can learn, regardless of the student, the situation, and resources. They believe they can put students first and put teachers first. The traditional trade-offs of breadth vs. depth, or taking your time vs. staying on pace, can be avoided through creative and innovative thinking. They look for non-conventional options to accomplish their work.

It is the ability to embrace this duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold to opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an amdidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It’s ability, but maybe more importantly, it’s attitude.

In the coming days I will discuss how the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...

Internal and External Focus

Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action

Put Teachers First and Put Students First

Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning

Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students

Kaizen and Tenakaizen

High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability

We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers

Data Driven and Skeptical of Data

Predictable and Change is Normal

The Three Sins of Teamwork at School

If you are creating pockets of teamwork without creating school wide teamwork you creating the wrong kind of teamwork. If you “talk the talk”, but don’t “walk the walk” yourself on teamwork, you are creating the wrong kind of teamwork. If you require teams to do everything, even when there is no need, you are creating the wrong kind of teamwork.

Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen’s, book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, describes what he calls the three sins of teamwork.

Sin 1. Small Teamwork Kill Collaboration
Principals who insist that certain grade levels or teams display teamwork, but then let other grade levels or teams work as a group of individuals kills collaboration. Teachers are going to ask themselves, “Why should I have to work as a team, when they don’t?”

“When managers start instilling teamwork in their own units and not across the rest of the company, it leads to pockets of local teamwork, but not companywide collaboration. The company becomes ‘teamy’ but not collaborative.”

If a principal is going to preach teamwork, then it has to be for everybody. Requiring some to collaborate while letting others continue in a “privatized” or “hoarding” fashion is one sure way to quickly kill collaboration across the campus.

Sin 2. Everybody Do Teamwork Now (Except Those of Us at the Top)

If your superintendent or director communicates that teamwork is way, then he or she better well display him or herself.

“When leaders give a sermon about the value of teamwork to the troops, and then ignore it themselves, they are not promoting collaboration.” Hypocritical leadership is bad enough, but preaching teamwork and being a non team player is going to kill collaboration across the district, among principals, and among other departments.

“To unite a company, the top team needs to be united, too.”

Sin 3. Teamwork Becomes the Point of It All
Not everything at school needs a team to accomplish it. Sometimes, teamwork just winds up complicating the issue. It doesn’t take 5 teachers to make a recess duty schedule or order flowers for somebody’s birthday. Not every decision or task takes a Professional Learning Community to decide or complete it.

“Teamwork, when practiced incorrectly, becomes the sole purpose: ‘The leader says we need to do teamwork, so we better do teamwork, all the time.’ People’s judgment about when to work in teams---and when not to—gets corrupted by a norm that says, ‘You should do teamwork.’ As a result, people work in teams when they shouldn’t, as when there is no compelling reason to team up…”

The bottom line is it’s all about results. Sometimes the team, the Professional Learning Community is the best means to those results, and sometimes not. The goal of collaboration and teamwork is not collaboration and teamwork, but effective outcomes.


School leaders who promote teamwork and collaboration must be careful to avoid these three “sins” of teamwork. People can often hide behind a team and not do what their individual responsibility requires of them. All collaboration all the time can be used as an excuse not to share or do your part, because they assume someone else will share. Leaders need to take care that they look out for and avoid the three sins of teamwork.

Educators need to participate in what I call Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities. The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community requires high levels of collaboration and teamwork, but also high levels of personal responsibility and accountability, and avoids the three sins of teamwork.

A Glimpse At What The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative Could Be- Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management

A look into how Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management could be leveraged in a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative.

I define the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative as, "“Educators working together in the ongoing purpose of increasing student learning and achievement while sharing physical space, virtual space, or both simultaneously."

An essential element of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is K.W.O.K

Technology allows teams to connect to islands of expertise located in any geographic location. Technology allows teams to archive their learning and share with others. The sum result is that technology allows the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to “Know What Others Know” (K.W.O.K.).  Knowing what others know and sharing what you have learned is what I refer to as Wisdom Stewardship. Technology makes it easy for educators and schools to be good stewards of available wisdom and to know what others know.

These excellent SlideShare presentations give a glimpse into what the PNLC could be in education.

The Wikipedia Myth - Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - People at the Center

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - Getting started

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Professional Learning Communities Overcome Collaboration Barriers Through Unifying Goals

In a series of posts based on Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, I described the four major barriers to collaboration that Professional Learning Communities and schools face.

“The Transfer Barrier” concerns people who are unable to transfer knowledge easily from person to person, from team to team, from school to school, or from district to district.

“The Search Barrier” concerns people who are looking for information and people, and but are not able to find them easily.

"The Not-Invented-Here Barrier"
“…the not-invented-here barrier, which arises when people are not willing to reach beyond their own units to input and collaborate.”

"The Hoarding Barrier"
“Unlike the not-invented-here barrier, where people do not want to ask others for input, the hoarding barrier concerns people in the opposite role: those who might provide help but do not offer it.”

Hansen offers some advice on how to overcome these barriers to collaboration. One way to overcome these barriers to collaboration is to unify people through unifying goals.

Creating a unifying goal is not as straightforward or easy as it sounds. When President Kennedy stated the goal of landing a man on the room and bringing him back safely, others in his administration suggested the goal should be preeminence in space. One goal sounded all encompassing, while the other was very limited, focused, and specific. One seemed tangible while the other was a concept. How often have you seen goals that seem so overarching that they don’t connect with your day-to-day experience? Hansen explains that unifying goals must do four things.

The Goal Must Create A Common Fate
“A unifying goal has power only is all relevant groups need to pull together to make it a reality.”

A unifying goal must unite all the teachers or all the Professional Learning Communities. Creating a goal that puts the pressure on one team or grade level is not unifying. For example the goal of raising the 4th grade writing assessments results, or 5th grade science scores put all the pressure on one grade level and does not unify the entire school.

“The greatest benefit of a common-fate goal is that it elevates the aspirations of people to something bigger than parochial group goals.”

When was the last time your school or district created a goal and raised your aspirations to “something bigger?”  Maybe raising test scores is aspiring, maybe not. Whatever the goal, it should require all to look ahead to something great.

The Goal Must Be Simple And Concrete
“Kennedy’s moon goal is so memorable—so captivating—precisely because it is simple and concrete.”

A goal like, “Prepare all students for college” isn’t exactly specific and concrete. Which college? What type of college? Equally vague is “prepare all students for the global workplace.” What does that mean?

Don’t make it wordy. Keep it simple. Stay away from clutter.

“Clutter is used to hide and hedge. Simplicity means stripping away clutter. One simple phrase (‘land a man on the moon’) beats many long sentences.”

“But there is a problem with simplicity. Most leaders, when they try to be simple, turn out vague and abstract goals, not concrete ones”

“Leaders who state a simple and concrete goal will do better, because people will know what it means. It is not open to interpretation. It also is measurable: worlds like premier, preeminence, and superior are open to many interpretations and hard to measure. In contrast, ‘bringing him back safely to Earth’ is measurable. Did the astronauts come back safely? Yes, they did. Check.”

The Goal Must Stir Passion
“Powerful and unifying goals stir passion and inspire. They appeal to people’s hearts and not only their minds.”

Raising test scores has never appealed to my heart, but maybe it appeals to yours. Sadly, I haven’t had a goal as an educator that that every appealed to my heart. Staying “fiscally solvent” or “increasing API scores” just doesn’t get me up in the morning.

“Unifying goals need not appeal to a higher purpose (such as helping humankind) or noble pursuits (landing a man on the moon) to be inspiring. Leaders who appeal to high performance and excellence can also stir passion among people.”

The Goal Must Put Competition on the Outside
“Few things unite people better than having a common enemy.”

“Many executives blunder by stoking competition among employees—for example, by instilling rivalry between salespeople. In a special issue devoted to competition, Business Week wrote, ‘Everyone likes to win. Beneath all the talk about teamwork and balance, all the books on being kind and cultivating emotional intelligence, people still crave to be the best.’ The problem with this argument is that teamwork and ‘being the best’ are seen as mutually exclusive. But they are not. People can still crave to win, be the best, but they can do so as part of a team that wins against an outside competitor. They unite in competing against an external force.”

Schools and grade levels should not be in competition. The point here is that there are external forces (NCLB, Race To The Top, public perception) that can be used to motivate the staff to unite against. The goal is focus energy toward the external force and not at each other at school.


Creating unifying goals while balancing the need for individual educators to create their own individual goals is the key to creating powerful Professional Learning Communities and schools.