Shared Leadership: The Essential Ingredient for Effective PLCs

In 1991, Richard DuFour wrote, “Too often, principals have looked upon staff development as a secondary consideration, an aspect of the operation [Page xviii]of the school which warranted little, if any, of their time and attention.” The book was The Principal as Staff Developer, which connected professional development of teachers—by the principal—to the gold standard in educational leadership strategies of the day: clinical supervision. More than two decades later, clinical supervision remains a respected practice, and formal observation remains a required feature of teacher evaluation, mandated in contracts across the country. But more current research, such as that of Carroll, Fulton, and Doerr (2010), Hattie (2009, 2015), and Hord, Lloyd, Roussin, and Sommers (2010), compels us to work from a new paradigm that is both more effective and more efficient: professional learning communities. But in many schools—in the absence of a district’s or area service agency’s professional development program—the responsibility for developing teachers as leaders to create a PLC still falls to none other than the principal.

New books are emerging on teacher leadership, as are teacher leadership certification programs—both very positive developments. However, these assume that amid the myriad expectations and responsibilities placed on today’s principals, they have also managed to somewhere acquire the know-how for developing teachers as leaders within a cohesive culture of community, then for sharing leadership with them appropriately. At the very least, they assume that principals will allow teacher leadership to develop and will allocate meaningful roles to teacher leaders beyond the traditions of department chair, grade level chair, or academic coach/mentor. Realistically, an effective teacher leadership certification program needs a parallel track for the principals, with many intersecting sessions to ensure the development of a cohesive, shared leadership model. Principals must lead the work of improving their schools; teacher leadership cannot be developed in a vacuum and have a meaningful school-wide impact. The ideal program is to develop shared leadership together in a team model, with principal and teacher leaders attending the sessions together.

To be certain, many books for developing a school as a professional learning community are available. In 2015, Richard DuFour’s book In Praise of American Educators and How They Can Become Even Better synthesized the essential elements of all his previous works, refuting the negative media image of U.S. schools while acknowledging the significant challenges they face, with a review of PLC processes as the path to an improved future, but emphasizing the importance of high fidelity to those processes. In the final chapter, DuFour touches on shared leadership, discussing “dispersing leadership,” especially among team leaders.

The body of research on shared leadership in education is growing. However, in the absence of a comprehensive shared leadership development program for school teams, I have found no guidebook for principals with the how-tos for fostering shared leadership in a school setting, despite the fact that “principal as staff developer” remains an inescapable role for principals who understand the need for their schools to begin operating as PLCs, with teachers assuming a substantially different role in leadership outside their own classrooms. The concept of learning organizations originated in business. For business leaders, this is not a new concept, and a body of literature on shared leadership does exist for them.

This book is devoted to outlining and describing, in a flexible sequence, specific practices and processes a principal can use to develop shared leadership in a PLC. It begins with selecting the right team, then proceeds to team agendas designed to develop the teacher leaders’ expertise in just-in-time fashion for leading teams of colleagues. The sequence is what I typically use with school teams, but the meetings purposefully are not numbered. You may wish to re-sequence them or add your own agendas. Foundational elements of a PLC are addressed in the outlined guiding coalition (GC) meetings—norms and other teamwork tools; essential learnings and common assessments; mission, vision, commitments, goals; and student interventions. Depending on your school, you may wish to set aside some of the other agendas for now. For example, the chapters on discussion protocols represent a powerful set of tools that accelerate effective collaboration more rapidly than almost any single strategy. But as you work with your teacher leaders in shared leadership, you may decide as a GC that at the present time resistance would outweigh the benefits of introducing them. Or conversely, that most teams are far beyond needing them. Choose what you will use based on your own and your teacher leaders’ judgment.

Reproducible tools and agenda notes are provided for each GC meeting. The online resources contain more detailed facilitation notes for principals who would like more structured support with planning and facilitating. Many of these resources can be found as editable Word documents on the book companion website www.corwin.com/sharedleadership Chapters outlining GC meetings conclude with principal follow-up suggestions, and many include troubleshooting tips. Troubleshooting often rests on principals developing and refining their abilities to balance their leadership, whether to be “loose” or “tight” in the nomenclature of the DuFours and their colleagues (2010), or to “step up” versus “step back” in the work of Waters and Cameron (2007). Site administrators face these dilemmas frequently in the development of shared leadership. I believe this is part of the reason that developing shared leadership is, in a sense, more complex, and in its early stages, sometimes even more labor intensive than being the Lone Ranger principal. Yet principals today can no longer lead in ways that accomplish outcomes of significance for all students if they are acting in that outdated role.

On the companion website for Shared Leadership: The Essential Ingredient for Effective PLCs, you will find many resources. These include downloadable versions of the forms and tools in this book (Forms and Tools), links to related articles referred to in the chapters (Resource Articles and Videos), and highly detailed facilitation notes to augment the Agenda Notes in the chapters containing meeting agendas (Facilitation Notes). The book’s References and Resources are also included so that you may access web links.