Smart & Good High Schools - The Flippen Group

CHAPTER 4: The Professional Ethical Learning CommunityPELC 1: Develop shared purpose.1.3PELCPromising Practice 3:Hire all staff wisely; work to get theright people on the bus, in the rightseats.This was a key recommendation from the Good to Greatresearch reported by Jim Collins and his colleagues. It wasa point confirmed by our own research. It is very difficultto overcome the wrong faculty and staff, in the wrongseats. Granted, schools must often work with the handthey have been dealt: The existing staff may be the resultof low wages and benefits, another administrator’s orschool board’s hirings, and so on. Nonetheless, even inthe face of such constraints, seeking to build a high-qualityfaculty and staff must be an important long-term goalfor every school.“Change takes time—you have to keepplugging at it.”The superintendent of a large public school district toldus, “Change takes time; it takes an extraordinary amountof time. You just have to be patient and keep plugging atit.” He was patient, but he was also dogged in assemblinga team of teachers and administrators who believed in hisvision of academic excellence, service-learning, andpreparation for democratic citizenship. His vision of a districtcommitted to excellence and ethics was developedhire-by-hire. He said:Seventy-five percent of the high school staff have been hiredin the last eight years. Every one of our ads explicitly talksabout what we want to do. Every one of the final interviewsthat I have had with every candidate at the high school hasincluded a discussion of service-learning, a discussion ofcharacter education, a discussion of the democratization ofthe high school and their interest in that area.Another principal described the growing pains of gettingthe right people on board and headed in the right direction:“There aren’t a lot of people left from that first year.There were people here that, in my opinion, were herefor the wrong reason. There was definitely a parting ofthe ways in the first couple of years.”Effective administrators also described their quest to goafter key personnel—a great coach, a gifted choir director,an inspiring teacher. The PELC is constructed personby person, built over time—like a team.PELC 1: Develop shared purpose.Promising Practice 4:1.4 Cultivate collegiality.PELCIn his book, Moral Leadership, Thomas Sergiovannispeaks to the importance of collegialityin the culture of a school:One has the right to expect help and support from othermembers, and the obligation to give the same; collegiality isreciprocal, in the same way that friendship is. The more thisvirtue becomes established in a school, the more naturalconnections among people become and the more theybecome self-managed and self-led, so that direct leadershipfrom the principal becomes less necessary. 11Susan J. Rosenholtz cites evidence indicating that collegialityis an important element distinguishing “learningenriched”schools from “learning-impoverished” schools. 12A Stanford University study of effective schools found thatteachers most involved in examining their practice andpedagogy were members of strong collegial communities.13Collegiality distinguishes learningenrichedschools from learningimpoverishedones.In many of the schools we visited we observed faculty,staff, and administrators who were openly and unabashedlysupportive of one another; unafraid to challenge oneanother; willing to admit their own faults and to appreciatethe strengths of their colleagues. One teacherdescribed the institutional norm of collegiality at his highschool:We believe that character is inspired through synergy thatyou get from other people. That requires us to be models ofthis in every sense—by confronting each other, by holdingour colleagues to their best. We have faculty ”discoverygroups” where we share our personal experiences, talkingabout what’s happening in our lives at a deep level: WhatSchools require skilled, effective principalsin order to outgrow their utterdependence on those principals.—TOM DONAHOE67Smart & Good High Schools