Collective efficacy is a word that has been circulating and booming in the education world. I am sure that you have heard the incredible impact that collective efficacy can have if you implement the value of it effectively within your community. I am not often drawn to numbers like I should be but effect sizes definitely grab my attention! I am obsessed with John Hattie’s work on evidence of impact of certain practices on student and adult learning. In fact, adult learning is my passion. I know if an adult learning is hungry to learn more, that is what will impact student learning the most. The student will see how the adult learns because they are passionate about sharing and implementing what they learned within their own teaching practice. That is what will change the culture of a school, a hunger for learning.
In order to create a hunger in your community you have to feed it with opportunity and information to stir up that hunger. Your community may not even know how hunger can wake up a culture and drive collective efficacy. That is your job as a leader, show them that they are hungry and then give them the tools to collect the evidence of impact that their hunger created. That, my friends, is how collective efficacy is born!
Collective efficacy influences how educators feel, think, behave, learn, motivate, and inspire others. When educators share a sense of collective efficacy, school cultures tend to be characterized by beliefs that reflect high expectations for student success with a high focus on adult learning to fuel the fire of student learning. When a team shares in a vision and each one contributes immense effort, they can overcome challenges and produce intended results. It is about collaboration in an effective, intentional and hungry way. Everyone is rowing in the same direction and everyone notices their own impact through evidence. What did we do as a team or as an individual to make an impact on that student’s learning?
Collective efficacy is the positive vibes we have been searching for for years! It is recognizing the patterns and trends in human behavior and the ability to find clarity and capability to organize and execute courses of action to achieve the goals set up. In other words, it is traction and momentum fueled by a hunger to do the best work of our lives in order to contribute as a collective whole.
Rachel Eells’s (2011) meta-analysis of studies related to collective efficacy and achievement in education demonstrated that the beliefs teachers hold about the ability of the school as a whole are “strongly and positively associated with student achievement across subject areas and in multiple locations” (p. 110). On the basis of Eells’s research, John Hattie positioned collective efficacy at the top of the list of factors that influence student achievement (Hattie, 2016). People need to believe in what they are doing again. They have to realize their influence and how they present themselves will impact everything. If the students see a deflated, overwhelmed community, that will be the result of student learning. However, if they see a community that is learning alongside each other, hungry to build others up, collaborating, and excited about what they are teaching then the students will also rise. All because they see the adults rising in order to show up each day with a hunger to be a difference maker.
There is a shift that happens from instructional compliance to a belief, a trust and a desire to do the best work of their lives in order to impact student learning. They start to realize that their effect on students is powerful and the student progress and achievement starts to follow because everyone who is in the building, actually wants to learn and not just be there because they have to be. Teachers and leaders also start to believe in viewing problems as solution based vs. problem based. They believe that success and failure in student and adult learning is more about what they did or did not do and they start to work together to analyze the evidence and pivot if needed. This work starts to light people up, then the hunger starts to burgeon. That is when results start to rise in student and adult learning, overall joy returns, and people do the best work of their lives.
The pattern in culture shifts from the groundhog day, monotonous feeling of flipping the page to do the next lesson (which is someone else’s creation) to high yield strategies. It becomes a ripple effect because people are co-constructing lessons together, fuelling their own learning, implementing and taking action, and measuring their evidence of impact. That is the primary input – evidence of impact. The evidence comes from multiple sources that are validated through triangulated data of observation, conversation, and product. It comes from noticings of evidence beyond the submissions and into the conversations that people are starting to have. It comes from the work productivity that is starting to happen, and the work that the group is producing. Evidence of impact reinforces proactive collective behaviourism feelings, thoughts and motivations. It goes beyond just visioning and talking about it, to actually taking intentional actions in order to provide the outcome that we are hungry for.
Collective efficacy is not just about the adults. The students are heavily involved and are given the responsibility to provide evidence of their own learning, their progress, their struggles and their motivation to keep learning. These are the life skills and processes of learning that we have been looking for to instill in students so that they can transfer what they are learning in schools to real life. The key is for the teachers and leaders to examine the artifacts and evidence that the students and teachers are gathering and make a link to the teachers and student’s actions that went into the learning. We need to understand the sphere of influence and how much better we need to do with this.
Collective efficacy feeds heavily into culture. We do not want to approach this collective vision in a negative way. Leaders need to create a non-threatening and evidence based instructional environments. They do this through modelling, being visible and walking the walk alongside the teachers. However, the content and the goals are not a ‘one and done’. Reflection plays an integral part in examining evidence of impact. Leaders conjure up more conversations and less telling. Leaders conjure up hunger through engagement in conversations about the vision and the meaning of impact. They look at the difference between analyzing just grades and achievement and focus heavily on evidence. Hattie talks about the importance of shifting the conversations from task related concerns (for example, “How much of my time is x going to require?” or “How will I manage x as part of my daily routine?”) to broader impact concerns (“What was the impact when I did x?” “How did x affect the students in my classroom?” “How can we work together to make x even better?”) (Hattie, 2016). The shift in conversation becomes more hungry. The conversation becomes about the meaning of the value of people and their impact, about the difference between standards and achievements and how evidence becomes more lingering. That is what we are after – learning that will linger long enough to make transfer into their lives and last beyond the event. Teachers can then increasingly orient their work around outcomes: “Did the students gain the essential understandings and skills?” “How do we know?” “How can we use evidence of student learning to improve classroom instruction?”
The next thing a leader must do is to set expectations and time and space for teachers to have conversations and collaborate. Establish high levels of trust that they will do the work through setting that expectation that they are also gathering evidence of their impact. They do this through gathering information and actions that come from meeting together. The expectation shifts from accountability to thinking about how can your group mentor and impact your community as a whole. The emphasis becomes about student and adult learning and finding solutions through examining evidence and developing a common structure. It also becomes about ways that the group pivoted when obstacles arose. This will build a community of learners where they are dependable, high trusting, collaborative people because of the structure that was set.
Once the leaders have set expectations and a structure and have provided time and space for collaboration/capacity building, a leader must showcase time management. How does the evidence collection fit into daily routines? This is where the leader must model this type of evidence collection in a workshop structure within professional learning meetings. No longer are staff meetings filled with housekeeping. Now they are filled with modelling expectations and structures in order to set up the collaborative work times and space for evidence in order to build capacity. It also provides a trusting culture that fosters empathy and effective interactions among teams because the leaders are presenting themselves in a vulnerable position of walking the walk and providing their own evidence of impact. The stakes are high in a non-threatening way. Now the stakes are all about impact.
Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t say that even if your school were collective efficacy experts, that there wouldn’t be obstacles, potential pitfalls, and possible derailment. Now, notice that I said potential and possible. I did not say that the pitfalls and derailments would happen for sure. They could if leaders do not plan for the undercurrents and build confidence and belief that the team’s work are essential. Controlling the narrative of a school is a game changer. Think about what your narrative is. Is it administrative or is it about what impact means? How we can gain traction? How can we stay hungry? Is it filled with problems or is it filled with what we learned from setbacks? Think about how you can add value to everything by taking every opportunity to learn and feed the hunger. That is when collective efficacy burgeons and rises to become ‘just what we do around here’.
Want more? Check out my FREEBIE, “A Guide To Cultivating A Thriving Culture Using the Three Bucket System.”
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Another FREEBIE! This one is a “Roadmap to Assessment for Learning in a Distance Learning World.” This is also a great online pd for leaders to use with their teachers that can be done virtually or in a brick and mortar classroom.
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References
Donohoo, J., Hattie, J., & Eells, R. The Power of Collective Efficacy. Leading the Energized School, 75(6), 40-44. Retrieved May 31, 2020, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar18/vol75/num06/The-Power-of-Collective-Efficacy.aspx
EELLS, R. J. (2011): Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Collective Teacher Efficacy and Student Achievement, (Abstract / Full text)
HATTIE, J. (2016). Third Visible Learning Annual Conference: Mindframes and Maximizers, Washington, DC, July 11, 2016. (Programme)
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