From Isolation to Collaboration:
Cultivating a Partnership
 

Edna Varner
Associate,Leadership Development

 

With this first article, we welcome twelve new schools and re-connect with our second, third, fourth year and Foundation schools. Connecting is the key word here and also a goal for Cornerstone-school partnerships focused on making a real difference in student and adult learning.

We do consider our work together a partnership of schools and Cornerstone colleagues that builds on strengths (yours and ours), develops our individual and group capacities through shared learning, gives each other much needed, honest and credible feedback, and makes the time that learning together requires.

Gordon Donaldson, in his book Cultivating Leadership in Schools—Connecting People, Purpose, and Practice, lays out the work of leadership as relationship building, stewardship of purpose, and enabling actions-in-common. We know that building relationships is not about creating an aura of warm and fuzzy so that schools are insulated against their realities. It is about mobilizing relationships and developing the ability of groups to influence each other. It is what John Gardner refers to as developing a willingness to “shape” and “be shaped”. This describes our goal in developing school-Cornerstone partnerships as well--developing a willingness to shape and be shaped during our years with each school, and among schools in the network, and also gradually releasing responsibility to schools to do the same across their districts. We cultivate that willingness each time we come together around Cornerstone implementation at summer and regional meetings or school reviews, during site visits, through video conferencing and phone calls, and by connecting through emails. This is partnership.

We also know by now that leaders--principal leaders and teachers leaders--must be stewards of purpose in their schools. Whether it is stated in a vision statement, a school mission, or core beliefs, “a fundamental function of the leadership relationship is that it articulates and invigorates a sense of purpose and in the process strengthens members’ commitments to both purposes and each other”. He underscores the importance of partnerships around clearly articulated purposes. Partnerships can serve a dual role of helping shape those purposes through collective wisdom and knowledge, providing feedback to ensure everyone stays focused and committed, and by building capacity for success.

The first stage of the Cornerstone change cycle is “focusing”. This first stage is about articulating purpose that allows a faculty to focus, that determines the school’s (and the partnership’s) direction, that informs plans for forward progress, and clarifies what success will look like. What do leaders do to sustain focus? Donaldson suggests two common partnership practices: leaders regularly convene and focus the attention of their teams on purpose, and they engage colleagues in examining purposes, including their appropriateness in current conditions. This regular convening around purpose and progress toward it is something your Cornerstone partner strongly encourages—regular principal meetings with Cornerstone coaches, regular school leadership team meetings, regular meetings with Cornerstone staff on site visits and through conferencing, regular meetings with other Cornerstone schools across the network, and especially other schools in your district. I hesitate to use the word “meeting” because it may suggest something time consuming, formal, and often irrelevant. No one I know is interested in that kind of meeting. I am referring to making a point of (and time for) collaborating with your partners around issues of purpose and progress toward purpose.

Donaldson’s third element of leadership work is enabling actions-in-common, for ultimately, the proof is in the actions. “Actions-in-common” means that collective effects of individual action are greater than their sum. We have all read it. “two heads are better than one.” The greatest obstacle to acting on that belief is creating the time:

  • creating the time for teachers to come together,
  • creating the time to pick up the phone for a conversation with a colleague about some action you are considering,
  • creating the time for teachers to get and give feedback because they have the time to observe each other’s practice,
  • creating the time to achieve ultimate goals—equity, for example—where all benefit from the individual skills and talents each partner brings.

Creating the time is a challenge. But the work is less daunting when we partner with teachers, the larger school community, principals across the Cornerstone network, or Cornerstone colleagues.

Leaders promote actions-in-common by enabling colleagues in the following ways:

  • They highlight the interdependent aspects of their colleagues’ and constituents’ work. They look for opportunities to connect adults who share students or who have complementary talents so those adults can multiply their effectiveness rather than work in isolation. When your Cornerstone partners ask for time with colleagues, we are doing so in the service of encouraging interdependence over work in isolation.
  • They feed others a steady diet of feedback on their collective work and its effects. Engaging in leadership means facing the evidence that can help staff and parents know how well their efforts with children are working. These activities build relationships among adults around their common objective: to do the best they can by the children they share. Time with principals and coaches at the end of a site visit and time for the faculty to hear the feedback from a school review team, for example, are times we need as partners to share information, make sense of it, and act on it.
  • Leaders demonstrate in their conduct the value of collective learning and action. Their actions as well as their words convey the importance of partnerships. Presence is an important first step in aligning words with action. Principals have to make “being there” to confer with their partners (in classrooms, at site visit conferences, at leadership and literacy video conferences) a priority.
  • Leaders enable people to act on the information they have about their effectiveness and to feel supported in seeking new and different practices. Leaders encourage, problem-solve, and plan with those around them; they form partnerships with others for implementation and action. Whether it is decision making or just talking through something we are considering, we must routinely practice interrupting the inclination to work in isolation.

Cornerstone is a school change initiative driven by literacy. We could easily deliver some excellent reading and writing strategies and build teaching capacity to deliver them in coaches’ and their colleagues’ classrooms, but this initiative is more than changing literacy practice. It has to be about changing the context in which best literacy practice must live and grow. Cornerstone’s focus on leadership and literacy is borne of commitment to our purpose, to partner with schools and districts willing to be shaped and to shape

  • the context in which their work is done, both at the school and the district levels,
  • conditions that are not so far beyond our control as they may seem on the surface,
  • the capacity of faculty, parents, and the larger community to significantly improve student learning, and
  • a school culture committed to professional learning and shared leadership.

There is no reason for us to work in isolation and the work is too important not to benefit from our collective strengths. This is the beginning of a new school year full of promise longing to become our day-to-day reality. Ready, partner?

Source: Donaldson, Gordon A. Cultivating Leadership in Schools-- Connecting People, Purpose, and Practice. Teachers College Press