Elisa B. MacDonald is the author of one of our new favorite books: The Skillful Team Leader: A Resource for Overcoming Hurdles to Professional Learning for Student Achievement (Corwin, 2013) and the Director of Teacher Leader Development with the Teach Plus T3 Initiative.
In Part 1 of her interview with ABPC’s Cathy Gassenheimer, Elisa talked about the hurdles and dilemmas that all leaders of adult learners face; her strategies for assuring that teams involved with leading change are both high functioning and high impact; and what it means to genuinely share leadership for learning.
In Part 2 of our chat, Elisa describes some of the hurdles that can arise for teams who function in a “scapegoat” school culture; why it’s important for teams to engage in “rigorous discourse,” and how resistance to change can become an opportunity for learning.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Elisa, can you talk more about the “scapegoat” school culture you discuss in Chapter 5 of The Skillful Team Leader?
Elisa MacDonald: I encourage team leaders who encounter a hurdle to consider the role school culture plays. It is not always the cause of the dilemmas we face, but it’s often a great contributor. Although talking about school culture is often a sensitive subject, skirting around it will likely only give rise to the hurdle again.
Each chapter in Part 2 of my book dives into a number of possible causes for a hurdle, including school culture gaps, when actions don’t align to values. Chapter 5 encourages leaders, who struggle to set and/or attain meaningful goals with their teams to consider the existence of a scapegoat culture, where underlying fear and mistrust turn accountability into a blame game.
In a scapegoat culure, goals are set and assessments are used as a “gotchya” or at least perceived that way. Instead of accepting mutual accountability for poor performance or unattained goals, individuals fault others. Teachers who fear becoming the scapegoat are wary of measured goals and avoid risk. Even in schools where school leaders are not pointing fingers, teachers may still carry the belief that they are.
Tackling any gap that impedes a high-functioning school culture is hard, but this one seems particularly so. Despite the challenge, we must persist in working with school leaders and teachers to foster trust and shift from associating accountability with blame to accepting shared responsibility for student learning. In a culture of mutual accountability every stakeholder sees themselves as contributors to students’ success and failure, supports one another with specific feedback to grow, and commits to get better.
Cathy: Why is it important for teams to engage in “rigorous discourse.” What are some barriers that coaches and team leaders need to overcome to ensure this type of dialogue?
Elisa: If you’ve ever left a meeting with new insight about a problem, or an uncomfortable feeling that you have made unwarranted assumptions about a student, or with action steps growing out of a realization that what you have been doing has not been working, then you have likely engaged in rigorous discourse. I define rigorous discourse as: evidence based, dialogic, culturally proficient, reflective, and actionable. Not all team discourse must be rigorous, but for teams striving to achieve a high impact on student learning, it’s a must.
This type of talk requires people to be vulnerable. Teachers become conscious of instructional decisions and their impact, positive or negative, on students. And they do so in front of their colleagues. More than just causing people to step out of their comfort zone, rigorous discourse can drudge up feelings of self-doubt, uncertainty, defensiveness, and even panic. Consequently, some teams avoid it.
As team leaders, we might encounter any number of hurdles in trying to engage in rigorous discourse. For instance, individuals may show resistance to giving assessments, causing the group to struggle with evidence-based dialogue. Or team members might be willing to give assessments, but those they choose to give don’t provide the information or level of detail the team needs to arrive at realizations and “aha” moments.
Or team members choose the “right” assessments to examine but the discourse about them is censored by “the culture of nice” – an underlying school culture of politeness and guarded talk that inhibits educators from learning what and how to improve. Or a team’s analysis of data is riddled with blame, excuses, or assumptions about students and teachers that put off action steps for change.
My book explores these hurdles, uncovering why they might exist and what to do about them.
Cathy: On p. 136, you observe that “Resistance is not an attribute: it is a temporary state of being.” You suggest that one can use resistance as an “entry point into rigorous discourse.” What do you mean by that?
Elisa: Encountering resistance to change is part of the work of being a coach or team leader. The all-to-easy default response when it crops up is to label the person who is pushing back as a resistor. “Don’t bother with Mrs. B; she is just a naysayer.” But the truth is no one is born resistant, and everyone shows resistance at some point to something.
Few people are comfortable in a situation where someone shows opposition, but the skillful team leader views it as an opportunity for learning. Beneath the surface of someone’s resistance are concerns. When a teacher voices opposition or demonstrates resistant behavior, rather than allowing that moment to shut down conversation leaders use it to open up a dialogue. We view the moment as an invitation, a point of entry, to learn about the concerns holding the person back.
Not only does this give the teacher who is slow to adopt a change a chance to voice his or her concerns, and a chance for us to know what support he or she needs, it also brings forth an alternate perspective, one that the team may not have considered.
We actually need to hear from people who put on the brakes when the team wants to charge forward. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re among the members on the team who want to move full speed ahead and you have built momentum to do so, it can feel extremely frustrating to have an individual slowing your team down.
But if we use that moment of resistance to pause from action and engage team members in rigorous discourse about why the team wants to do this change at this time, the discourse drives them to either recommit to the change or consider alternative viewpoints that might reshape their work for the better.
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