Balance Above the Green Line and Below the Green Line

Examples of such paradoxes, and the subsequent “balancing acts” that leaders undertake, include the following.

1. The implementation of any initiative requires leaders to provide staff members with both choice and framework. 2. Leaders must give practitioners both autonomy and feedback while carrying out the established vision and accountability models for the organization. 3. Leaders must acknowledge that ongoing learning is important for building competence and capacity, but it must be measured against results. 4. Leaders must nurture interdependence yet honor independence for individuals and teams. 5. Leaders must delicately counterbalance relationships and identity with accountability and process. These are just some of the examples that reflect the dichotomy of leadership. It is imperative that leaders first become aware of such paradoxes (often time-opposing constructs) and then consider how to balance these within their leadership decisionmaking processes and practices. Paradoxes often complicate the work of building collective efficacy of teams; however, in this book, we attempt to highlight those common paradoxes faced by leaders to alleviate confusion and uncover the realities of school leadership. The chapters in this book will reveal the genuine struggle to strike the necessary leadership balance to continue to move teams forward. We believe that if leaders can infuse the right formula of balanced leadership into the fabric of school teams and organizations, it will help foster the conditions necessary to build collective efficacy.

Sanger’s Journey as a PLC

Sanger’s PLC journey began in 2003, when Sanger High School was involved in a joint school improvement project with the Riverside County Office of Education. Those initial conversations led to Sanger understanding and implementing the PLC process (Johnson, 2015). Subsequently, when district leaders Marc Johnson and Rich Smith brought back the language of a PLC from a 2005 conference hosted by Rick and Becky DuFour in Palm Desert, California, the story of building collective efficacy through a PLC began to form. From that moment, the initiative of building PLCs across Sanger’s schools and district had begun. At first its site leaders were confused by the new terminology and quickly reverted to the all-too-common excuse, “We are already doing this.” The assumption that grade-level meetings were the same as collaborative team meetings was shortsighted, uninformed, and based off false assumptions. Where most districts