Collective leadership

Reflecting and Reframing: How a mindset shift helped this school leader focus on what matters most

Principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.

School leadership matters. Second only to teachers as a primary in-school influence on student success, principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.

We had the pleasure of catching up with a passionate educator, leader, and member of the Mira Education community: Vanessa Valencia, former Assistant Principal at Vista Peak Exploratory in Aurora, Colorado. Vanessa shared important insights from her leadership journey with us.

Read on to learn how a shift in mindset has helped her remain joyful, flexible, and solution-oriented in the face of systemic challenges and competing demands.

Q: What’s a typical “day in the life” of a school leader? How has your view of the role shifted from your first year as a school leader to the present?

A: Every day is different. Like teaching, your best “plan” doesn’t always (or ever) go as planned. You can have a full schedule of commitments, and one event, emergency, or unexpected hallway conversation can take the day in a completely different direction. The role requires immense flexibility. When I first started, I struggled when a day didn’t go as planned. I felt like I was always letting someone down. Now I approach the day from an ‘I don’t know how this day is going to go’ mindset. This has impacted how I show up — in classrooms, meetings, and one-on-one conversations — in a positive way.

I’ve come to realize school leadership is incredibly creative work. I’ve been at my school since it opened seven years ago, which has allowed me to observe growth and improvement over time. Schools are constantly iterating, refining, and co-creating systems. This is why staff retention and growing leaders committed to the school community are so important. Focusing on this, the fact that at its core, school leadership is about creating better learning experiences for kids helps me remain flexible and responsive to each day’s demands.

Q: What brings you joy in your work?

A: Witnessing the development and growth in a teacher’s practice and its impact on student learning. For example, one member of our staff was an effective teacher, yet very traditional, a few years ago. Her classroom was always on-task and compliant but didn’t necessarily reflect the cognitive engagement she knew was possible. I worked with her, initially as her coach and eventually as her evaluator. Today her classroom is completely different. Every day she offers students opportunities for interactive and hands-on learning, and cognitive engagement is high. Seeing authentic student engagement and the growth in her teaching, and knowing I played a role in impacting her practice, brings me great joy.

While instructional leadership has always been really important to me, I made it the primary focus of my daily work. As an assistant principal, I spent as much time in classrooms as possible. When I started working as a school leader, I was so worried about completing tasks as they came in that my inbox consumed large chunks of the work day.

Through reflection and conversations with my colleagues, I realized a clean inbox is never going to impact student achievement! This shift in mindset helped me reframe where and how I should be spending my time.

Prioritizing being in classrooms resulted in stronger relationships with staff, a deeper understanding of each educator’s professional growth goals, and an increase in timely and specific feedback to each staff member I evaluated. This feedback has resulted in more risk-taking and implementation of the feedback by teachers in classrooms. It shifted the culture from one of compliance to one where teachers say, ‘I’m trying something new today. Can you come watch?’

Q: Mira Education believes unleashing the collective capacity of teachers and administrators is the key to creating an equitable public school system that serves all students and their communities. What is your reaction to this? How does this value show up in the work you do?

A: I couldn’t agree more that we must work to remove the line that still exists between teachers and administrators. We cannot be divided if we are serious about serving all students. We must view and respect each other as professionals and leverage the collective genius that exists within our system.

One of the ways we’re doing this is through our professional learning studio structure. As a teacher, it was frustrating to me when professional learning didn’t mirror the instructional practice expected in classrooms. This made me realize our professional learning must model what we expect — if we want differentiated and personalized learning for students, we must orchestrate what that might look like with adults. Choice, and teachers’ real inquiry questions and problems of practice, should always drive professional learning. All studio-based learning that happened in our building happens through other teachers, including collaboration with practitioners at other schools.

Keeping a “teacher mindset” at the forefront and constantly reflecting on what it was like to be a full-time practitioner helped me co-create meaningful professional learning experiences with staff.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Image of Vanessa Valencia in front of a book shelf with the quote

by mira-mariah

Building Sustainable Leadership Practices

When I’m not working, I’m often running — for exercise or after a young child – and I’ve had my share of injuries, including a pulled hamstring that wouldn’t heal. When I complained to the doctor, she shook her head at me.

“Look,” she said, “the hamstring is actually a bundle of muscles. The way you’re moving yourself forward is using some of them more than others. Until you’ve got them all engaged equally, you’ll be hurting. And you won’t be running — at least not as fast as you want to.”

Running the change leadership race

Aches and pains in moving forward — and struggles to move forward at all — are an everyday challenge for education professionals and for some of the same reasons. No matter the role, we’re charged with moving others from point A to point B. We change how students engage with content and master the work of learning, how fellow practitioners guide young and professional learners, and how fellow leaders exercise sound judgment.

Put another way, moving change forward is our work.

But that doesn’t make it easy. Whether it’s greater emerging needs among student enrollment, staffing shortages and budget cuts that ask public schools to do more with less, new faces on a team, or rapid shifts in standards and other mandates, it all adds up to nearly constant pressure for educators to make complex shifts in how they do every aspect of their work.

Fatiguing the muscles of leadership

The pace of these changes can be difficult to manage and sustain — sort of like trying to run a half marathon on a hurt leg. In fact, 70 percent of change efforts fail due to isolation from a supportive team, conflicting priorities, confusion about why change is happening or what it looks like, and a lack of individual or collective efficacy in navigating the change.

Schools and districts often tend to resort to single solutions and single leaders to turn things around. The idea is that pushing on the same programs and people will accelerate progress toward a goal even though the change failure rate and the rising frustration levels among teachers and administrators show us we’re wrong.

Pressing on the same “muscles” to power change over and over again while others atrophy is a recipe for slowdown or worse. And it’s not as if we have a shortage of options. With one in every four teachers ready to take on school-wide leadership work alongside teaching, schools and school systems have lots of leadership “muscles” they can engage. We know collective efficacy is a key to instructional improvement, and research shows that engaging educators in collective leadership is the key to sustaining transformational change in schools.

Moving forward together

So where do we start? At Mira Education, we find that the educators and leaders who are successful make three big shifts to retrain those leadership “muscles” so they work better together:

  • From leaders to leadership.
    Traditionally, leadership development has been about developing individual leaders, usually administrators. Given high rates of turnover in these positions, it’s difficult to see the path to ROI or sustainability in that approach. In fact, three-quarters of all principals agree their work is too complex to be done by a single individual anyway. Stone Creek Elementary and others with which Mira Education has worked think about how they develop larger and more robust teams to share the leadership load. That way, if one leader leaves, change doesn’t lose its momentum because every leader creates more leaders.
  • From compliance culture to rethinking resources.
    Every school and district lives with mandates to implement programs, manage budgets, and fill Full Time Equivalencies (FTEs), each of which can feel siloed at best and incoherent at worst. Good leadership manages them well, but great leadership figures out how to reorganize them into a coherent whole. Led by a team of administrators and teachers, Walker-Gamble Elementary did just that. Today, every teacher at Walker-Gamble has at least five hours of weekly learning and collaboration time, staff report increased collective efficacy, and students are meeting both their own learning goals and state standards.
  • From siloed to networked.
    These schools didn’t learn how to build this kind of capacity or get this kind of results on their own. They learned from one another. Teachers and administrators from each school’s leadership team visited partner schools as part of a network hosted by Mira Education. Likewise, we partnered with Northwest Independent School District (ISD) to help them find more effective ways for schools to set goals aligned with the district strategic plan and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) goals, break down barriers to collaboration among schools, and engage more of their staff in ongoing innovation and improvement efforts.

We know through these partnerships and others that collective leadership works where traditional improvement programs have not. And we know that teachers and administrators are equally important in putting practices in place to create sustainable educator leadership pipelines that have been challenging to build in other ways. But we also know that it takes many, many more stories of those successes to make a movement. Otherwise, we’re working with lone runners instead of a real race.

What is your school or district doing to build the power of teachers and administrators to lead collectively? Find tools and insights to power your work on our website, and share what works with us via social media using the #collectiveleadership hashtag.

by dandi-admin

Leading Improvement, Together: Walker Gamble Elementary and the SC Collective Leadership Initiative

Like many other Title I schools in small, rural districts, Walker-Gamble Elementary felt stuck between ambitious goals for student learning and the staff’s ability to reach them. In this case study, read how engaging in the South Carolina Collective Leadership Initiative helped this school leverage the collective expertise of its staff to sharpen focus on instruction, boost achievement, and narrow achievement gaps.

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by dandi-admin

From One Leader to Many Leaders: Stone Creek Elementary and the Transition to Collective Leadership

Taking a leadership approach that engages the expertise of each educator in improvement work and decision-making requires shifts in every educator’s practice. This case study describes how teachers and administrators can make that transition together, and how schools and district offices can work together to make it a successful lever for improvement.

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by dandi-admin

Building Collective Leadership from the Central Office

Nader Twal is a program administrator for Innovative Professional Development (iPD) in Long Beach Unified School District. He is an accomplished teacher. In November 2003, his outstanding instruction was recognized by the Milken Family Foundation’s prestigious National Educator Award.

If your focus is on cultivating learning for each student even as student needs grow more diverse, then you know no one person has all the skills to accomplish that work. Collective leadership offers an approach that turns every staff member into a leader prepared to play a role in student support and success. In this interview, Long Beach USD program director Nader Twal explores the role that district central office staff play in accelerating collective leadership in each building.

How do you define collective leadership as a leader in the central office?

Collective leadership represents the recognition that we can operate in one of two ways: as a human-centered enterprise or as a sterile system. Systems can be very mechanical; they have interchangeable cogs. But education is a human-centered enterprise. We cultivate the minds, hearts, and emotional well-being of students and staff. Human-centered efforts focus on people, so the system operates more like an organism and less like a machine.

The analogy I would use is an amoeba under a microscope. Think about the amplified image of a needle poking the amoeba and the entire thing moves. It is so interdependent that touching one part has a ripple effect across the whole.

Collective leadership can be represented in that way. There is recognition that no one person has all the knowledge, talent, skills, and experience to meet the needs of everyone in the system. You need to have collective leadership to be highly effective. If you’re about cultivating success of all kids, then you have to recognize that it is impossible to do it alone.

No one person has all the knowledge, skills, and experience to meet the needs of everyone in the system. That’s why collective leaderhsip is important.

Collective leadership is the recognition of varied sets of skills and strengths that need to be called out and called up to operate as an organism rather than merely as a system. Collective leadership amplifies natural strengths while modeling and developing potential areas of strength.

What is the power of collective leadership in both shaping the culture of a school and improving student learning?

The power of collective leadership to improve student learning depends on whether that collective leadership is a structure or a value.

We can build collective leadership structures that have no impact. The small schools movement, a powerful catalyst for positive change when implemented well, is an example. Many wanted to personalize education by shrinking schools, but we didn’t see an impact for students because everything stayed the same—only in smaller learning environments. Personalization isn’t about the size of a school, it’s about people knowing your name and teachers coordinating efforts for students. Changing the structure should have changed the way schools were doing business, but instead some kept doing things the same way they always had, just in smaller spaces.

Shared governance and distributed leadership are amazing ideas, but they have to be applied appropriately to carry meaning. For many, those terms mean representation in a meeting, but that isn’t voice, nor is it impact. Empowerment for teachers at the site level is expressed in how collective leadership functions. What are the norms that govern group dynamics? How are decisions made and implemented? Is there allowance for failure?

How does collective leadership move from an idea on paper to transforming outcomes for students?

There has to be a shared vision and purpose that everyone finds value in. There has to be adequate time given for people to build relationships within the group — professional relationships, not ropes courses. I’m talking about creating an atmosphere where real discussion can happen and people are creating meaning together, which is a messy process. Collectively making meaning creates culture, which becomes self-sustaining.

There has to be real decision-making power in that collective. Organizations that value collective leadership are flat—with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives—when priorities are being decided, but they become vertical—with managers and supervisors responsible for divisions of labor—when it comes to execution.

As a district administrator, I won’t be the implementer once a decision has been reached. I will resource, strategize, and enable implementation, but I won’t be leading it with the kids. Our principals, teachers, and support staff do that, so their stake in the work has to be honored. All voices matter to arrive at a decision, then it has to be flipped vertically to execute it.

What is the relationship between individual leadership and collective leadership?

Collective leadership, if it works well, builds up individual leadership capacity. Conversely, individual leadership capacity functions and thrives best in collective leadership environments where it has a context to have an impact.

There’s a whole psychology about the difference between power and influence. Power is positional. I can get you to do stuff. I can build up the resume and titles to give orders, which builds culture of compliance. But when I leave the school or district, so too does everything I prioritized.

But the psychology of influence is that my individual leadership gets valued as part of the collective. My voice now matters in informing the collective. It is shaping not just work we do, but the thinking and approach to the work. In this case, if I were to leave, my influence is sustained. Leading with a greater skill set and a deeper body of experience that I can bring to different contexts.

Individual and collective leadership only detract from one another when they conflict. They only conflict when used as a mechanism of compliance rather than change.

True leadership isn’t threatened by the leadership of others. Every leader should want to bring his/her best to a team.

If you’re an individual leader invested in collective whole, you are bringing your best to a great team. You also know when to let others shine because they aren’t a threat to you, they are an asset.

How can teachers and administrators support and encourage collective leadership?

There are three layers that come to mind. First, there has to be structural commitment to collective leadership. Symbolism in the representation, time devoted to meaningful conversations, and some value attached to it in terms of how it is resourced and empowered to make decisions. To show it is valuable, you have to create time for people to meet, and fund the work tied to what they are doing, and give them real say in what happens.

The second layer is about support, coaching, and training. How does one function in these groups? How do they come to consensus and reach a decision? People need to have a framework for getting the work done.

The third layer is establishing how the group’s deliberations and conclusions are communicated to the rest of the staff. How does the rest of the staff access and inform what is happening in that group? It is not just a matter of describing what transpired in a meeting, nor is it sharing an agenda of the five things that should be covered in the meeting. Appropriate communication recognizes that in collective leadership contexts, real decisions are made. For those to be informed and implemented, people have to trust that they are heard. And people have to trust that when a decision is made—whether or not they agree with it—that it was adequately addressed. That kind of trust is built over time with early wins and small successes.

When people are moving into collective leadership from more traditional models, I think ‘high process and low content’ works best to get people used to functioning in that environment. When they are comfortable functioning in that new space, they have internalized the work and the system of the school has shifted to function more like an organism.

by dandi-admin