CHANGE FOUNDATION FOR
Focusing on the FOUR PILLARS of a PLC AT WORK®
JONATHAN G. VANDER ELS JOSHUA RAY
Foreword by Luis F. Cruz
Copyright © 2024 by Solution Tree Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vander Els, Jonathan G., author. | Ray, Joshua, author.
Title: The foundation for change : focusing on the four pillars of a PLC at Work / Jonathan G. Vander Els, Joshua Ray.
Description: Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024003801 (print) | LCCN 2024003802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781954631977 (paperback) | ISBN 9781954631984 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Professional learning communities--United States. | School improvement programs--United States. | Educational change--United States.
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Acknowledgments
We have written this book to provide greater clarity and depth and additional resources for those in our field working at becoming professional learning communities (PLCs). To that end, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the many educators we have had the honor to work beside within our own schools as well as the many schools we have supported across the United States.
We are forever indebted to the unparalleled staff at Solution Tree, including Douglas Rife, for believing in our vision for this book and supporting our efforts to make it a meaningful and relevant tool for schools and educators everywhere. Thank you, as well, to Claudia Wheatley, for her thought partnership in what this book could become. A very special thank you to our editor Christine Hood, designer Rian Anderson, and the incredibly talented Solution Tree team for helping make this book a reality. We would not have been able to do this without you.
The influence of many of Solution Tree’s authors is evident. We thank all of you for the tremendous work you have done in helping educators throughout the world understand ways to better support students and teachers everywhere, and we consider ourselves very fortunate to work alongside each of you in support of all students. We hope this resource is one you all find useful as you continue to support schools in the work of becoming PLCs.
We continue to be supported and lifted up by our family and friends who have stood beside us through our professional journeys, those in the schools we’ve worked in, and those we’ve been fortunate to work with in other schools. Your hard work, dedication, and learner mindset are what push us to continue to do what we do, and we humbly thank you.
I am blessed to have a most wonderful family, which my world revolves around. At the center is my wife, Stephanie, and our three amazing kids, Grace, Garrett, and Will. I love you with all my heart. I am fortunate to have a mother, Linda; two sisters, Wendy and Amy; two “brothers,” Brian and David; a “little” nephew, Nathaniel, whom I get to continue to grow with, laugh with, and love; and my father, who, although no longer here with us, continues to make his presence known in so many ways, big and small. Thank you to my many friends and colleagues whom I learn from every day. Brian, the fact that we get to continue doing the work we do together still leaves me shaking my head, and I feel fortunate to support so many schools and districts alongside you in this all-important work. And to Joshua—I never expected that heading down to Arkansas would lead to not only a collaboration on writing a book but, even more importantly, lifelong friendships with you and Faith.
—Jonathan
Before I ever considered leading a school, I had the good fortune of learning about the PLC at Work® process from my best friend and wife, Sarah. Since that day, she has been an unwavering supporter and the single greatest blessing of my life. Every day, my sons, Hudson and Harrison, inspire me to be a better man and dad. Every second we share is a blessing, and I am proud to help lead the schools that will shape them. I am who I am today because of the selfless lives lived by my two incredible parents, Jesse and Tammy. It was the example of my mother, a kindergarten classroom teacher of forty years, who inspired me to be an educator. My earliest teaching experiences happened when my brother, Jacob, and I were side by side, practicing trumpet together in our room. His encouragement and friendship mean the world to me.
My leadership career began while I was learning from my best friend and mentor, the late Aaron Gamble. The honor of carrying on his legacy compels me to be my very best as an educator, husband, and father. My introduction to the work of leading schools and the importance of establishing a strong organizational culture came alongside my close friends Stephanie Griffith, Ashley Richey, Brandon Tate, and Becky Chatman. These individuals knew me at my most vulnerable and inspired me to become something better. So much of who I became as an instructional leader started with my leadership partner and dear friend, Faith Short. I learned so much from her and regularly find myself measuring my professional words and actions by the standard she set. Finally, Jon, there is no way to thank you for what you mean to me as a friend and mentor.
This book is the realization of a dream I wasn’t confident enough to even voice. I’m so thankful for you, brother. It’s been an honor working together on behalf of students across the United States.
—Joshua
Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:
Ian Landy
District Principal of Technology School District 47 Powell River, British Columbia, Canada
Louis Lim
Principal Bur Oak Secondary School Markham, Ontario, Canada
Janet Nuzzie
District Intervention Specialist, K–12 Mathematics Pasadena ISD Pasadena, Texas
Katie Saunders
Elementary/Middle School Teacher
Anglophone School District West Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
Lauren Smith
Assistant Director of Elementary Learning Noblesville Schools Noblesville, Indiana
Ringnolda Jofee’ Tremain
Director of Professional Learning
Texas Leadership Public Schools Arlington, Texas
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks to download the free reproducibles in this book.
About the Authors
Jonathan G. Vander Els specializes in supporting teachers and administrators in schools and districts across the United States to develop, sustain, and enhance structures that support all learners. As a practitioner, he blends his experience and expertise to meet educators where they are and assist them in developing practical next steps to ensure high levels of learning for students in their schools. He is the coauthor of Breaking With Tradition: The Shift to CompetencyBased Learning in PLCs at Work® (2018) and Unpacking the Competency-Based Classroom: Equitable, Individualized Learning in a PLC at Work® (2022), both with Brian M. Stack.
Jonathan serves as a project director for the New Hampshire Learning Initiative, overseeing and participating in supporting personalized and competency-based work in schools throughout the state of New Hampshire. Formerly, he was principal of Memorial Elementary School in the Sanborn Regional School District of New Hampshire. Under his leadership, Memorial School became a nationally recognized Model PLC and competency-based learning elementary environment.
Jonathan has consulted, coached, and presented at conferences and institutes throughout the United States on building highly effective PLCs, implementing competency-based and personalized learning, and developing balanced and rigorous assessment systems. He was involved in New Hampshire’s Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) initiative as a member of the
PACE leadership team and facilitated the state’s initial effort to integrate skills and dispositions into curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Jonathan has an education specialist degree in educational administration and supervision from the University of New Hampshire, a master’s degree in elementary education, and a bachelor’s degree in history, and he is certified as a superintendent, principal, and teacher. He is currently enrolled at the University of New Hampshire in their PhD program’s educational leadership and policy strand, with a focus on competency-based learning. Jonathan lives with his wife and three children on the New Hampshire Seacoast.
To learn more about Jonathan’s work, follow him @jvanderels on X (formerly Twitter).
Joshua Ray, EdD, is assistant superintendent of the Greenwood School District in Arkansas. Outside his district, he serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas and as a member of the state of Arkansas’s guiding coalition focused on developing PLCs throughout the state. Joshua has led PLC at Work campuses at the elementary and secondary levels and is a passionate advocate for adult learning and educator well-being.
Prior to being named assistant superintendent, Joshua was principal at Greenwood High School and East Pointe Elementary School. Under his leadership, both campuses were selected by the Arkansas Department of Education to participate in the Arkansas PLC at Work project. Because of the impact of the PLC at Work process, Greenwood High School became a destination for schools and educators across the state looking to learn how to implement this work on a secondary campus. Similarly, East Pointe Elementary went from a B school to a distinguished Arkansas campus in the top 5 percent for performance and top 5 percent for growth, resulting in nearly $150,000 in reward funding from the state of Arkansas. For their work in developing student leadership and agency, East Pointe was nationally recognized as a Leader in Me Lighthouse School by FranklinCovey.
As a researcher, Joshua was chosen to represent the University of Arkansas at the American Educational Research Association conference as a David L. Clark Scholar for his work on educational leader wellness practices. He has published research on PLCs and educator well-being in Principal magazine, The Standard,
AllThingsPLC Magazine, and the Journal of Educational Administration. These scholarly endeavors have provided him opportunities to present throughout the United States and Canada.
During his time in the classroom, Joshua was a Phi Beta Mu inductee, was designated as Arkansas’s outstanding young band director, and was awarded the National Band Association’s Blue Ribbon designation for his work as a music educator. Joshua holds a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Arkansas. He is a National Board–certified teacher and an Arkansas Master Principal graduate.
To learn more about Joshua’s work, follow him @JoshRay711 on X (formerly Twitter).
To book Jonathan G. Vander Els or Joshua Ray for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
Foreword
By Luis F. Cruz
As I read The Foundation for Change: Focusing on the Four Pillars of a PLC at Work®, I was reminded of the creative genius of Rod Serling, the creator of the television series The Twilight Zone, which aired from 1959 to 1964. For those too young to remember, The Twilight Zone was a science-fiction horror anthology that incorporated societal and political views through the lens of human behavior. On the show, characters endured terrifying conditions or encountered disturbing events. The innovative way Serling depicted human greed, narcissism, sexism, racism, and other issues led me to envision the following frightening episodes related to the education system inherited by professional educators.
• “Covert Flaws”: Our profession certainly attracts the right people— hardworking teachers and administrators who strive daily to effectively serve students. However, our education system is saturated with covert flaws that make it impossible to successfully promote high levels of learning for all students.
• “Loss of Steam”: Educators begin each year on a high note, seeking to ensure elevated learning outcomes for all students, only to run out of steam early in the school year due to a system designed to inhibit their intentions and efforts from coming to fruition.
• “Learning Gaps”: While schools and districts create missions, visions, values, and goal statements that decorate offices, beautify school websites, and serve as impressive letterhead, all to publicly declare their commitment to student learning, schools are systematically flawed. As a result, they promote learning gaps, especially for historically marginalized student communities (cue the Twilight Zone theme music).
In short, unless educators intentionally commit to redesigning the education system by embracing the professional learning community (PLC) process, they will continue to reside in the twilight zone, and educator burnout and gaps in student learning will, unfortunately, persist. Hence, educators are facing a systemic dilemma.
W. Edwards Deming, a notable scholar and thought leader of the 20th century, believed that a system’s design impacts the outcomes it produces, and “a bad system will beat a good person every time” (as cited in Hunter, 2015). Thus, the twilight zone–esque system educators have inherited has produced expected results. However, as Jonathan G. Vander Els and Joshua Ray passionately remind us, when schools and districts commit to the PLC at Work process, they do not merely seek to employ a new program or embrace a new initiative.
Instead, staff adopt behaviors in line with deconstructing a system riddled with imperfections and, as a result, commit to behaving differently. Vander Els and Ray implore schools to actively prioritize the four pillars—(1) mission, (2) vision, (3) values (collective commitments), and (4) goals—to effectively employ uncomfortable but necessary adult behaviors collectively and persistently. They emphasize that when leadership in the form of a guiding coalition, administrators, and, most importantly, teachers intentionally use the pillars to establish schoolwide clarity and fidelity, schools create a laser-like focus on learning. This focus gives schools impetus to move beyond words to actions.
To further understand the systemic dilemma schools face, consider institutional theory. During my doctoral studies at the University of California, Riverside, Rodney T. Ogawa (1992), an internationally respected scholar in education with acclaimed expertise in education policy and reform (and one of my favorite professors), introduced institutional theory. In a nutshell, institutional theory states that organizations, like schools, strive not to achieve but to survive by conforming to external rules and belief systems to continuously solidify an appearance of legitimacy. Such conformity occurs regardless of the effect these processes might have on schools’ mission, vision, values, and goals.
As an educator of more than thirty years, I have witnessed institutional theory in schools across the United States. For example, schools spend thousands of dollars on curriculum because that is what legitimate schools do, but they fail to invest in training teachers to use the curriculum. Schools invest in sending teachers to conferences year after year because that is what legitimate schools do, but they fail to hold those who attend accountable for applying what they learn. And schools create beautifully articulated mission and vision statements because that is what legitimate schools do, but they fail to use these mission and vision statements to align their collective behaviors to achieve student success.
In The Foundation for Change, Vander Els and Ray ask educators to put an end to such organizational hypocrisy and implore educators to live their mission, actively strive toward their vision, collectively behave accordingly, and use data to accomplish their goals. Consequently, embracing the four pillars moves staff beyond an attempt to demonstrate legitimacy and becomes the organizational glue that keeps their school focused and committed.
This is not a handbook on how best to write mission and vision statements. Rather, this book ardently articulates a call to action and provides deep insight into the four pillars foundational to embracing a focus on learning. Vander Els and Ray comprehensively detail how staff can use the pillars to fuel their commitments to achieve their goals. Through taking daily actions (mission and values) to achieve a compelling future (vision and goals), educators can intentionally shift the system of their school. This book provides schools and districts with the momentum to transform ineffective policies, practices, and procedures into ones that ensure high levels of learning for all students.
Introduction
“Wait, we have to write another mission statement? Why do we continue to waste time on meaningless things? Can’t we just get to work?” If this sentiment sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Each year, tens of thousands of educators leave Solution Tree’s professional learning community (PLC) conferences energized and ready to change their campuses for the better. Eager to help students, they return to their buildings with brand-new copies of Learning by Doing (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, Mattos, & Muhammad, 2024), only to skim past or rush through the critical aspects of chapter 2, “Defining a Clear and Compelling Purpose,” feeling doubtful that the PLC process would benefit them. This is where this book comes in.
Richard DuFour, Becky DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas W. Many, Mike Mattos, and Anthony Muhammad (2024) describe the four pillars of a PLC as its foundation. The Foundation for Change provides the guidance and resources to undertake the immediate and future work of a PLC by leaning into the four pillars that form its foundation: (1) mission, (2) vision, (3) values (or collective commitments), and (4) goals. In this book, we share a pathway schools can take to make sure they stay on track and don’t deviate from their collective purpose. To prime yourself for this work, it’s necessary to first consider the all-important question, Why do so many well-meaning schools and educators struggle in their change efforts?
More often than not, even after an inspiring conference, schools beginning the process of change choose one of two paths: (1) they quickly check the proverbial box of creating a mission, a vision, collective commitments, and goals so they can get to “what actually matters,” or (2) they just skip it altogether.
Schools may have any number of reasons for doing these things, but let’s explore what is perhaps the most obvious one—many educators have already experienced creating mission and vision statements and subsequently developing goals for their organization. For example, staff in their school perhaps spent great amounts of time crafting text that, ultimately, very few people understood and even fewer valued. With their work completed, they printed out a poster-sized copy of the new mission statement, ran it through the laminator, possibly created smaller versions that would fit nicely on the backs of staff’s IDs (for easy access in case someone asked what the mission was), and went back to business as usual, thankful to be done so they could do their “actual jobs.”
They likely followed a similar process for the other pillars. For a handful of educators, these items came up again over the course of the year. For most, however, they were forgotten only to be resurrected during professional development the next summer because “someone at the district office must have read a book that said our schools need to have goals.” In such schools, handling the four pillars in this way colors educators’ perceptions of the pillars themselves— and, unfortunately, their great utility.
So, with the box checked or conveniently forgotten, schools get to work doing all the things that made so much sense to staff when they first heard them at the PLC conference. But what seemed so profoundly simple at the conference quickly devolves into messy personal discomfort back in their buildings. Schools respond to this in one of a few ways. Some schools decide to quit: “Clearly a PLC doesn’t work for our campus, for the age of our students, or in our community.” Others settle on what Richard DuFour and Douglas Reeves (2016) refer to as PLC Lite: “We’ll continue to let teachers meet, but we won’t expect them to change their instructional practice, reconsider their curricular choices, ensure learning for students who struggle, or share responsibility for the success of all students. That’s just too much. Our teachers can’t handle that right now.” Very few schools choose to go deeper and continue pushing; those schools that choose this will later face challenges that tempt them to throw in the towel. In fact, they’ll likely find themselves in this position numerous times before their organizations begin to change. There are five simple, related reasons for this.
1. The U.S. and Canadian public education systems weren’t designed for high levels of learning for all.
2. Your school likely wasn’t designed for high levels of learning for all.
3. Your master schedule likely wasn’t designed for high levels of learning for all.
4. You likely weren’t taught in a school where high levels of learning for all mattered.
5. You weren’t trained to ensure high levels of learning for all.
Quite simply, many educational traditions that schools hold dear fly in the face of the goals of a PLC at Work (DuFour et al., 2024). In a PLC at Work, educators adjust their practices to ensure high levels of learning for every student and design their master schedule to tailor the educational experience of every student according to need. Tradition and professional comfort give way to cycles of inquiry that constantly improve professional practice with a laser focus on student learning.
Yet as individuals, educators may feel a sense of shock at how difficult this change process is back on campus. The four pillars of the PLC at Work process are truly the foundation for change, as they provide a means to collectively begin to consider the adjustments you must make in both belief and practice to radically transform a system that was never intended to ensure success for every student. But it’s critical to prioritize the four pillars before you’re up to your neck in the pain and mess of substantive cultural change.
So, in the following pages, we begin by taking a closer look at the history of U.S. public education, the PLC at Work process as a means of departing from this past, and the four pillars as the supports needed to ensure schools are making the day-to-day and long-term modifications to ultimately reach their compelling future. We then lay out what you can expect to find in the chapters to come before leaving you with a word of encouragement as you move forward, wherever you and your school are in your PLC at Work journey.
Historical Context
To become who we all want to be as educators, we first must consider the painful reality of who and where we have been. As schools entering the PLC at Work process, we must recognize that our intent is to be something that public education wasn’t originally designed to be. Indeed, the idea that educators should ensure high levels of learning for every student is a radical concept in the broader context of U.S. history.
According to the Center on Education Policy (2020), it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that “common schools” offering public elementary education were available to White males in most parts of the United States. When White females were able to attend public school, they still had significantly less
access to secondary education and often received a curriculum that was completely different from what males were learning.
The situation was more dire for children of color, for whom reading was originally unlawful in nearly every southern state (Center on Education Policy, 2020). Even after the Civil War, with the passing of Jim Crow laws, segregation in public education—which focused primarily on African American children but also impacted Latino and Asian American children—denied students of color access to the same educational opportunities as their White peers (Center on Education Policy, 2020). For Native American and Indigenous children, the primary educational experience lay in boarding schools, designed to assimilate students into White culture while limiting or discouraging the expression of their own. These same constraints were later applied to immigrants, who, while being granted access to English, often had to pay with the loss of their heritage, their language, and even their own names (Center on Education Policy, 2020).
Although one often sees the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 as the turning point, policy researcher Will Stancil (2018) notes that by the late 1960s, nearly 90 percent of southern schools operated under a “freedom of choice” plan, which presented its own set of problems. This plan automatically re-enrolled students every year into the school they previously attended, with a choice to change schools if they so desired. In practice, though, Stancil (2018) writes:
This approach tended to preserve racially divided education. Decades of segregation had left schools racially coded—everyone in a given community knew which schools were “black” and which were “white,” even if the district no longer said so. “Freedom of choice” placed the onus of integration on individual students and parents, who had to opt to cross the color line themselves, facing social stigma, and, in the case of black parents and children, enduring severe discrimination.
Although the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1968 that this “dual system” approach to schooling (in which so-called choice effectively extended segregation) was unconstitutional and would be corrected, six years later, a Supreme Court of newly appointed justices voted 5–4 to severely limit courts’ ability to desegregate schools in suburbs. What resulted was the massive “White flight” from cities to suburbs around the United States, once again segregating U.S. schools (Stancil, 2018). This is only part of the history that schools must reckon with in the 21st century.
We want to be clear: most educators devote their lives to the betterment of students. We believe that most professionals in classrooms desire nothing but success for all their students. Horace Mann realized this early in forming the foundation of Western public education when he said, “Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best” (as cited in Lumpkin, 2007, p. 158). This care for students has long been recognized and, according to Texas Tech University professor Angela Lumpkin (2007), can even be one of the greatest influences on a student’s educational success, but educators must stop and acknowledge that many educational traditions stem from years of learning for some, not all.
While teachers care deeply about the students they serve, they may simply continue traditions they experienced themselves as students, not understanding just how outdated some of these traditions are. For example, the Carnegie units for graduation requirements have been around since 1906. The course choices for U.S. secondary schools have barely changed since the report of the Committee of Ten in 1894. While this group of ten, including six presidents of Ivy League universities, helped standardize the high school experience, it also further reinforced the idea that every student would get the same subjects for the same amount of time regardless of individual needs (Mirel, 2006). Is it any wonder why secondary teachers across the United States operating in schedules of seven fifty-minute periods a day struggle with the idea that a student’s ability is not the single greatest indicator of their success?
Ensuring high levels of learning for every student is a revolutionary idea in North America—one that, even at the writing of this book, some still shockingly see as controversial. Schools can’t continue to practice the same methods, run the same schedules, and provide every student with the exact same instruction if they truly believe what the PLC at Work process promotes. To best support students as well as teachers, consider that the bell schedules built on systems that were revolutionary nearly a decade before the Wright brothers’ first flight and fifteen years before Ford’s Model T may not hold the key to meeting students’ complex needs. The fact is that there is much to reconsider, and as we suggested at the start of this introduction, educators will benefit from prioritizing the four pillars and viewing the PLC at Work process through the appropriate lens. In fact, the PLC at Work process is not an initiative; it is a radical shift in design and purpose for a system rife with exclusivity and divisiveness.
The PLC at Work process is not an initiative; it is a radical shift in design and purpose for a system rife with exclusivity and divisiveness.
The Past Behind You
Regardless of where you are in the process of transforming your school, the most important step is to recognize that what happened before is behind you. This is sometimes easier said than done. We readily admit that we’ve found ourselves wishing we could go back in time to change the way we taught or led—but hindsight is twenty-twenty. Regardless of your role, you will continue to make mistakes going forward. The PLC at Work process is as messy and as frustrating as it is beautiful.
Your school will look different from ours or the school in your neighboring district. Sure, many of the structures and mindsets may be similar, but this work is as unique and differentiated as the students, teachers, and community of every school. This is why many who begin the PLC process focus intently on the technical changes of this work. While school cultures and belief systems may seem nebulous, essential standards and master schedules feel more concrete and, therefore, easier to explore.
Educators’ greatest challenge in the PLC at Work process isn’t answering the four critical questions—it’s adopting a new mindset that informs their behaviors. The four critical questions include the following (DuFour et al., 2024):
1. What knowledge, skills, and dispositions should every student acquire as a result of this unit, this course, or this grade level?
2. How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?
3. How will we respond when some students do not learn?
4. H ow will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient? (p. 44)
The four pillars are meant to help you leave the past behind and, in their construction, act as a balance between action and mindset.
So, because The Foundation for Change is about prioritizing the four pillars of a PLC and staying on course, this book is necessarily a call for educators to do what, to many, may sound daunting; we are asking teachers, whose personal and professional experiences, training, and comfort zones all fall within a traditional educational system, to deconstruct this system. This massive change will be challenging for every single school that attempts it. That is why this step is so critical. The four pillars are meant to help you leave the past behind and, in their construction, act as a balance between action and mindset.
Figure I.1 from Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2024) captures the essence of the four pillars, the key questions they answer, and the critical purposes they serve. We will expand on this figure as we delve more deeply into each of the four pillars throughout this book. MISSION
WHY ? Why do we exist?
FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE
? What must our school become to accomplish our purpose? HOW ? How must we behave to achieve our vision?
HOW? How will we mark our progress?
TARGETS AND TIMELINES
Clarifies Priorities and Sharpens Focus Gives Directions Guides Behavior Establishes Priorities
Source: DuFour et al., 2024, p. 47.
Figure I.1: Mission, vision, values (collective commitments), and goals in a PLC at Work.
While each of the four pillars serves a crucial part in supporting the foundation of lasting change, they work in conjunction toward separate goals. The mission and collective commitments of an organization form the pillars of present discipline. The organizational purpose defined in a mission comes to life through changed behaviors to affect present practice. The ideal future defined
in a vision alongside sequential, measurable goals motivates and propels an organization toward the promise of what is possible.
The four pillars are a balance of the here and now and of a future yet to be realized, as shown in figure I.2.
Discipline of the Present
Hope for the Future
Figure I.2: Balancing the four pillars.
The vision and goals point you forward to a compelling future, while the mission and values help you define what daily actions you need to take—and the skills and discipline you need to hone—to maintain focus and transform long-term behaviors.
Because mission and values combine to create the daily behavioral change necessary to generate sustainable change in an organizational culture, we will group them together as the pillars of present discipline. Vision and goals work together to motivate people and create hope for a better future. As such, we will group them as the pillars necessary for future motivation. Together, the four pillars weave these foundational components through both the present and the future.
Pillars of Present Discipline
At the beginning of every new year, millions of people across the globe choose internal promises or resolutions to make some kind of meaningful change during the year. Gyms fill with new members who have decided to get fitter,
only to return to their normal attendance numbers just months later. The reason for this is that while many people aspire to live healthier lifestyles, not all of them commit to embedding greater discipline and different behaviors into their lives for the long term. Many schools find themselves in similar situations. School leaders may propose a new direction or initiative that is well intended and focused on the betterment of everyone involved. However, just as many gym members ditch their fitness regimens in February, many schools find themselves abandoning the changes that originally mattered so much.
Mission
The mission of an organization is their answer to the question, “Why do we exist?” It provides a school or district with their fundamental purpose (DuFour et al., 2024). With the past behind you, you begin with the mission because it’s how you, in your school, define your new present and fundamental purpose. In a PLC at Work, the mission must have some elements present to ensure this change—namely, grade-level learning for every student—is possible. Mission statement wordings similar to “high levels of learning for all” reflect this. Such language suggests that contrary to the original design of public education, teachers intend for all students, regardless of gender, race, need, or other factors, to be prepared for college or career upon graduation. In other words, your fundamental purpose is not simply to teach all students the same thing and let them succeed or fail according to their effort or ability. Instead, your purpose and moral responsibility is to examine and change, if necessary, every practice that could stand in the way of every student being successful.
Consider the gravity of this last statement and how some in your school might respond to it. Naturally, some teachers are going to struggle with this, not because they are bad people or don’t want the best for their students, but because this is challenging and radically different from the norm. Knowing how to proceed is uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar. Committing to a fundamental purpose without significant support for teachers, particularly in the form of consistent time for collaboration, is a recipe for disaster. Collaboration is the response to the radical idea that adults have a responsibility to ensure academic success for every student. No one could possibly accomplish this on their own.
Values (or Collective Commitments)
Your purpose and moral responsibility is to examine and change, if necessary, every practice that could stand in the way of every student being successful.
Collective commitments are the behaviors you commit to practice in order to fulfill the purpose of your mission (DuFour et al., 2024). Defining your
purpose is only the first step in cultural transformation. Not to discount this new purpose, but without a change in behavior, a new mission will be worthless. The mission is the large-scale declaration of your new purpose, and collective commitments are the granular, nitty-gritty disciplines of changing adult behaviors daily. Your new purpose should make it abundantly clear that not everything you’re doing and saying is in alignment with who you say you now are; this means getting specific about adult behaviors that promote a system for some students and how to change to a system for all students. Another way to think about this is that through collective commitments, you commit to prove you are who you say you are on a daily basis. There are few things more poisonous to meaningful change than knowingly not practicing what you preach. However, the better the collective commitments, the more discomfort they unearth.
Unlike a mission, collective commitments are often a new concept for schools and teachers. These values sometimes get wordsmithed to death, until the final products are wordy, fluffy, emotion-based statements that mean little and are nearly impossible to measure. As a result of bad collective commitments, many well-intended schools begin to fall into the habits of their old practices.
There are few things more poisonous to meaningful change than knowingly not practicing what you preach. However, the better the collective commitments, the more discomfort they unearth.
Great collective commitments instead function similarly to an individualized workout plan. They are personal and tailored, and target areas of need. As a result, they can cause discomfort and aren’t always easy to maintain. This is why we initially described collective commitments as disciplines. They require accountability, practice, and a willingness to push through discomfort. They hold you accountable for your beliefs and behaviors on great days as well as hard days. Additionally, they are the means by which a school begins to embody its mission. Unless educators take the time to address the current reality and identify specific, actionable behaviors that will take them and their school from who they were to who they say they are, a mission is little more than a statement on the wall.
Pillars of Future Motivation
If the mission and collective commitments were the only two pillars, a school would no doubt improve through their use. However, it would mean much pain and little encouragement or motivation. Is it important to maintain discipline and manage discomfort as you address your present? Of course. That said, if you don’t look to the future and what is possible, it is much easier to struggle in your daily discipline. That is why vision and goals are critically
important. These two pillars come alongside the discipline of the present and paint the hope for the future. They tap into the motivation of what is possible and what matters deeply to us as educators. In this way, they become the proverbial carrot that keeps us going through the discipline of changing behaviors.
Vision
A vision is the picture of the organization you must become to accomplish your fundamental purpose (DuFour et al., 2024). A vision serves a couple of important purposes. First, it compels or motivates people through the predictable challenges of change. In other words, if you can envision a school where all students are succeeding, where teachers uplift one another in their work, and where teachers are changing lives for the better, it motivates you through the discipline of constantly checking your own behavior. Next, a vision provides a trajectory. While the mission provides a purpose, vision gives direction. You know what you aspire to, so you know where to point your work.
Finally, vision unites. The promise of a compelling future for educators and students is something that brings people together. A great vision taps into the nature of great educators and the desire that each of you must make a difference. When you each are connected to and deeply motivated by the direction of your school, your work begins to feel infinitely more personal.
When you each are connected to and deeply motivated by the direction of your school, your work begins to feel infinitely more personal.
As with the mission, the importance of establishing a compelling vision is that it brings value to everything you do. You aren’t creating common assessments and studying data to be a PLC. Instead, you’re doing this because it will help you improve and reach the future you envision for students. This vision isn’t just for “my class” or “my students,” though. Instead, professionals unite and dedicate their lives to the betterment of others and grow together to be the very best they can for every student they serve. There is great power in a school that can make such a statement.
Goals
Goals are the means by which a school or district can see the impact of their work over time (DuFour et al., 2024). Just as collective commitments put a mission into action, goals guide you to your actualized vision. Great goals are part of the fabric of teacher teams’ day-to-day work and provide a common target and process for teams to look toward. Unfortunately, many schools miss this purpose. They see goals as the end instead of the means to the end. While teachers are tracking proficiency and mastery of skills unit by unit, the
school is inching closer to its ultimate vision. A team driven by meaningful goals will be able to see their progress and the growth of their students. They’ll learn a great deal as professionals and start the next year with a completely new understanding of and refined approach to instruction. Year after year, this gradual acquisition of expertise means students are achieving more.
Great goals are visible, meaningful, and celebratory. They energize the work of teachers and compel teachers to keep pushing on behalf of their students. They are timely and tied directly to the work of collaborative teams. As teams answer the four critical questions together, their goals keep them inching forward from where they were to what is ultimately possible.
What’s in This Book
In the chapters to come, we’ll explore the four pillars of a PLC at Work in depth. In chapter 1, we describe how educators can begin to develop their organizational mission, getting at the meaningful why for both individuals and the school as a whole, and then integrate that mission into their day-to-day work. It’s here that we introduce the critical role of the guiding coalition, which we’ll refer to throughout the book. In chapter 2, we take a similar approach to the organizational vision, explaining how educators can create a compelling vision they can embody in their work. In chapter 3, we examine the process of assessing and changing adult behaviors through strong values, or collective commitments; and in chapter 4, we discuss the why and the how for creating strategic, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound (SMART) goals for schools and teams. The epilogue brings it all together to assist you, and the leaders and classroom teachers in your school, in moving forward with the next steps.
All the chapters conclude with questions for reflection. Throughout the book, we provide resources and templates to help inform and drive your work. We also present relevant scenarios from a fictitious school, Central School, to bring context and life to different ideas we explore. At the end of each chapter, we offer reproducible tools to support you and your colleagues at various points in the process.
The PLC at Work Process in Your School
As a school or district works to develop a collaborative culture, commitment from every professional is required. Because of this, this book is designed to support educators and leaders in any school wishing to build the cultural
foundation for a successful shift in practice. We recognize that some of you chose this book at the beginning of your shift to a PLC at Work. If this is you, we are excited that your school and students will benefit from the intentional development of school culture before you dive into the technical elements of this change. Conversely, some of you find yourself coming to this book for support in the midst of your PLC at Work journey.
Whether your school culture is in need of a little rejuvenation or your school is struggling with a fractured culture, this book provides a pathway to the foundational strength needed to implement this educational shift. At the end of each chapter, we take the time to position new learning in contexts that fit the unique needs of those who are new to the PLC process as well as those who have already begun this work. It’s never too late to strengthen your school culture, and we are glad you are here.
New PLC at Work Process
If your school is just beginning this work, this introduction may cause you a little anxiety. While it is not our intent to scare anyone away from this process, we want to be very clear that this work is a substantial change, not just a new program to try on your campus.
There are a few points we want to reiterate before continuing our journey together. Your school has likely made decisions or previously employed practices that weren’t best for every student. You might recognize some of these decisions and practices in our example Central School scenarios. The Central School experiences we describe encapsulate not only our own past experiences in schools we were privileged to be a part of, but also the experiences of many schools we’ve supported, as well as thousands more that have worked with our colleagues in their own change processes.
The goal of shifting school culture is not meant to demean or guilt those who came before us. As stated earlier, we believe teachers care deeply about the students they serve. We also believe every student deserves to learn, and has the right to learn, on grade level or higher. The PLC at Work process is meant to honor professionals and advocate for students. The opponent of this work is not a professional or a student; it is the broken systems the field of education struggles so mightily to escape. When all students, regardless of need, receive the same curriculum, the same instruction time, and access to the same resources, some will fail, and some will succeed. However, if you refuse to allow any student to fail, you must be willing to alter the instruction, time, and resources
to fit the needs of each student. You must be willing to depart from your educational experience to change your present and point toward a completely different future for the students you serve.
You must be willing to depart from your educational experience to change your present and point toward a completely different future for the students you serve.
Through this book, we address the purpose and practice of shifting the educational culture of your school through the four pillars of a PLC. We implore you to see these pillars not as the first step but as the genuine change process that necessitates all steps that follow. These changes might feel threatening for those in your school who have never known anything else. That said, we believe, and have experienced firsthand, that these changes are what ultimately transform a school, its teachers, the greater community, and most importantly, the lives of all the students it serves.
Existing PLC at Work Process
If your school is somewhere on the journey to becoming a high-functioning PLC, focusing on the four pillars will help support this journey. In fact, if you have found yourself wondering why all the technical changes in your building seem to be yielding only modest results, now is a great time to come back to and reconsider the present purpose and behaviors and the future motivations that are driving your work.
Educators and schools are at a critical point in history. Classrooms are full of students who are struggling to find their footing after spending months at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers have been pushed to the brink, and many feel as though they can’t be all the things the system requires of them. For the sake of teachers and students everywhere, it’s time to unite around a common purpose driven by what is possible when people work together. No amount of innovation can move a school like a unified purpose and a compelling future. It’s our hope that this book helps you lay the foundation for your school to function unlike ever before. So, regardless of where you are in this process or what steps you’ve taken, these four pillars are the means by which a school can transform into the kind of place every teacher and every student would cherish.
The vision answers the question of what a school needs to become to make their purpose a reality (DuFour et al., 2024). The vision of a school is the compelling future that connects so deeply to the organization that it acts as a North Star through the predictable challenges of change. This chapter outlines the processes that are necessary to develop a vision for learning that will carry forward in a meaningful and sustainable way. We’ll begin by explaining what a vision is and exploring what makes a great one. From there, we’ll discuss the role of the guiding mission in casting a vision, as well as how to embody a compelling vision, before leaving you with recommendations on how to proceed with this pillar in your school’s current reality.
What Is a Vision?
If your mission is who you are—your purpose—then your vision is the dream of what your future will be that compels you beyond the predictable struggles of change. Every great organization and innovation began with a deeply compelling vision of what was possible but not yet recognized. In their garage, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had a dream for what Apple could become. The first time Paul McCartney and John Lennon played together, they had a dream of what the future could hold. Imagine how steadfast these individuals had to be in their commitment to their respective visions to stay on course despite countless technical failures and interpersonal frustrations.
The education profession is the single greatest influence on the future of our world. As educators, we hold the power to change lives, strengthen communities, and build a future better than the present we know. With this incredible opportunity comes the questions that become the foundation for a compelling organizational vision: “What will we become?” and “How will our organization change the world through the lives we touch?”
If your mission is who you are— your purpose—then your vision is the dream of what your future will be that compels you beyond the predictable struggles of change.
Educators often conflate mission with vision, using the terms interchangeably, with neither carrying a great deal of meaning. But where a mission outlines the fundamental purpose of a school, the vision is more forward focused. The vision provides a school with “a sense of direction and a basis for assessing both the current reality of the school and potential strategies, programs, and procedures to improve on that reality” (DuFour et al., 2024, p. 48). In this way, it lends itself to action, but as with the mission, arriving at the school’s vision requires educators to step back
and take the time to talk about and understand change. You and your school are about to embark on cultural organizational change. Intrinsic to the nature of human beings and all change processes is the understanding that resistance will be a byproduct.
With that in mind, a great vision serves a few critical points for a school.
• The vision creates a meaningful depiction of what’s possible for the school. You articulate the dream of what’s possible and move toward this dream through meaningful goals.
• A clear vision focuses the work of the school. Your vision acts like a compass. Where your mission is the daily focus and your collective commitments are the steps you take toward the future, the vision is the compelling goal at the end of your path.
• Most importantly, your vision is deeply motivating. “A shared vision can energize people by connecting them to the purpose of the organization” (Lipton, 1996, p. 84). A mission provides purpose in the present, and collective commitments define your behaviors, but they are disciplines. A vision is exciting, meaningful, and something to look toward. It is bigger than any individual and represents something so important that your effort is worth the prospect of achieving it.
• Finally, a great vision unifies individuals through the motivation of being part of something bigger than themselves. If a vision taps into the deep meaning that drew many of us to education, this motivation becomes so powerful it almost feels personal to each person in the school.
The forward-facing, motivational aspect of a strong vision is critically important for schools. More than ever, professionals desire purpose and meaning in their work. In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented mass exodus from the workforce occurred. During this period, dubbed the Great Resignation, forty-seven million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Fuller & Kerr, 2022). Many people cited an introspection they had previously never made time for as the reason for their departure. Not feeling a deep sense of purpose in their work, people began questioning why they couldn’t work from home, whether their job held meaning,
A vision is exciting, meaningful, and something to look toward. It is bigger than any individual and represents something so important that your effort is worth the prospect of achieving it.
and what their professional future would be in a rapidly shifting technological landscape exacerbated by quarantines and lockdowns.
The educational field was not immune to the challenges professionals were facing. The Merrimack College Teacher Survey reported a sharp decline in educators’ job satisfaction to only 12 percent in 2022. From February 2020 to May 2022, the profession saw the exit of more than three hundred thousand professional educators (Kurtz, 2022). Educators were facing more difficult situations, unprecedented learning loss, public scrutiny, and an onslaught of programs and curricula competing for the newly awarded funding across the United States. A recurring theme of this book is focus; if the pandemic reinforced anything, it was that we could not solve our issues by continually adding more and more to educators’ and students’ plates. Instead, in a PLC at Work, we focus our efforts to do a few things incredibly well with deep intentionality.
Many chose education because of the draw of the larger professional purpose. As such, our profession is typified by service-hearted, giving people. Leadership adviser Jodi L. Berg (2015) notes that when people find purpose instead of just financial necessity in their work, they are substantially more likely to see their professional accomplishments as “laying a foundation” for a job that is “far reaching” and bigger than them. As a group, these people tend to be more motivated by the purpose of their work than by simple task completion (Berg, 2015). If a school can align their compelling future with the passion and purpose that motivate each professional within it, the pursuit of the goal will begin to feel noble, purposeful, and larger than any one person
This is why it’s so important that, like the mission statement that preceded it, the vision is not a document or a piece of paper but a compelling, collaboratively created picture of the future that acts as a beacon for a school, and individuals within, to travel turbulent times. This type of vision has a dramatic impact on the engagement of teachers and staff in a school.
The vision is not a document or a piece of paper but a compelling, collaboratively created picture of the future that acts as a beacon for a school, and individuals within, to travel turbulent times.
Often, schools skip this step and first commit to the PLC process with collaborative teamwork, data analysis, assessment creation, or other professional practices in mind. The what of the work of collaborative teams immediately attracts leaders and practitioners because it’s action oriented—it’s tempting to take the approach of getting right to work. These structural changes seem effective, they’re easy to observe and replicate, and they feel like a meaningful use of time. For this reason, as with each of
the other pillars, you might attempt to just pass over the work of developing a meaningful cultural foundation for your change efforts.
There won’t be an issue with this approach as long as every piece of work feels immediately meaningful, and you don’t encounter anything that challenges the status quo. But the truth is, the process of becoming a PLC is messy. There will be times when great effort does not yield the results you hoped for, when you find yourself feeling inadequate in light of the success of others around you, or when you are discouraged by the time and effort it takes to make your work impactful.
Schools once deeply committed to the beliefs and tenets of this work often allow these experiences to be the end of their PLC journey. They may either quit altogether, simply explaining that the work of a PLC is not what was promised, or, even worse, begin to settle. Collaboration becomes meetings, job-embedded professional development becomes the sharing of anecdotes or personal opinions, and schools stop at PLC Lite. A lack of commitment and purpose will result in educators and schools going through the motions. As the motions become uncomfortable, your school may continually make minor concessions that feel insignificant in the moment but together will prevent you from delivering on what you set out to achieve.
Consider this in light of behavioral statistician Joseph Folkman’s (2014) work, which shows that employees’ belief in the vision of their organization significantly influences their engagement. Folkman’s report states that the average employee is engaged professionally 40 percent of the time. For employees who find no meaning in the vision of their organization, engagement falls to a staggering 16 percent. However, employees who find meaning and value in their company’s vision are 28 percent more engaged than the average employee (Folkman, 2014). This incredible difference means that a meaningful vision creates not only a dramatic improvement in the organization as a whole but, most importantly, more fulfilled and connected workers. This makes a great deal of sense: when you feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself and your contribution has meaning to those around you, you’re much more motivated in your work.
Organizations that successfully change their beliefs and behaviors take the time to intentionally define who they are and who they hope to become. They confront the present through their mission and are motivated by their vision of a compelling future. As leadership expert Mark Lipton (1996) explains, though goals become the day-to-day drivers for staff, the organizational vision
never fluctuates in its ability to present an enduring promise of the future. The connecting, inspiring picture of a brighter future influences daily practices as schools make sure their important decisions align with who they hope to grow to be. When every member of a school is clear on the vision of what the school wants to become, writes organizational management educator Siu Loon Hoe (2007), individuals can make decisions that are synergistic with this vision without the need to constantly check in with leaders. Consider the power of a school whose future is so clear to all within it that they can each operate within that vision without needing approval. This type of system is unified, motivated, and highly effective.
At Central School, Ms. Davis and her guiding coalition recognized that although they now had a mission statement that identified their reality— their purpose—they didn’t have a vision statement to guide the steps their school would take next. They soon realized that using their mission as the driving force, they could begin to develop their collective vision by first acknowledging educators’ challenges in their current reality and empowering them in their roles as teachers.
How to Create a Great Vision
Simon Sinek (2020), the well-known author and speaker, suggests a compelling vision is your just cause. He suggests a vision entails more than simply being the best school or company; instead, it must connect deeply with those who embody it so as to motivate them toward the collective possibility of their organization. Sinek identifies three important qualities of a compelling organizational vision that ensure connection with all staff, as shown in figure 2.1.
Resilient
Sinek (2020) says a great vision must first be resilient. This means a vision can withstand cultural, economic, or political change. In the PLC at Work process, one subscribes to the power possible in meaningful collaboration, so a vision for your organization can’t belong to a single leader. The vision must represent what collectively brings purpose to the power of your collaborative work. It’s easy to think of resilience in the face of leadership changes, but imagine for a second the purpose a collaborative vision must hold amid political shifts directly impacting education, school or community tragedies, significant retirement losses in buildings of largely veteran staff, or educational funding shifts
Source: Sinek, 2020.
Figure 2.1: Three components of a compelling organizational vision.
in the economic landscape. As the vision is the North Star for the school, it will impact the hiring of leadership, define the type of person you look for to replace staff, and direct the use of resources regardless of the state of finances. A great vision is the constant that all variables adjust to uphold.
Creating a resilient vision means accepting the reality of constant change and ensuring your vision will not be derailed by things outside of your control. Three key areas to consider when building resilience into your vision are (1) policies, (2) people, and (3) programs.
Policies
As an individual school or district, you may have an influence on state or provincial educational policies, but they are likely not within your power to directly change. This means that the vision for your school should not be restricted to any particular policy or state or provincial mandate, even if it holds value for your school. A tangible example of this is basing a vision on a specific state or provincial assessment. Because such an assessment is important in the accountability of school districts, a school could easily have a vision that all students be proficient on the assessment or that a particular group of students show a specific measure of growth on the assessment. This vision is ultimately focused
on student learning, but it is only relevant as long as the assessment doesn’t change, and it also puts a great deal of emphasis on one measure.
A school dedicated to the results of a specific test could easily fall into the trap of spending more time preparing for the test than ensuring learning. Also, this school could find itself somewhat lost if the state assessment changes, and then staff struggle to understand how a new set of results connect to the work they have already done.
Instead, a school could have a vision that every student in the building read on grade level or that all students leave school possessing the academic skills necessary to be successful at their next campus. While these long-term goals are vaguer, they allow for many measures to assess them. This does not make the state or provincial assessment unimportant. Instead, this assessment becomes a critical tool in measuring progress toward your desired future, rather than the goal on its own.
People
Next, as you work to build a resilient vision, you must ensure that it does not depend on any one person. One example of this comes from a high school that had a vision to ensure a specific portion of the student population had a work-internship experience before graduation. This school saw great success in this vision and was aided substantially by a school counselor whose spouse was a high-ranking executive at a large employer in the community.
When the counselor’s spouse relocated to a different part of the country as part of a major promotion, the connection to the largest provider of student internships never recovered. The school worked hard to maintain the relationship with the business, but inevitably, the number of students who received internships diminished over time.
Like the example of the state or provincial assessment, this was a noble vision; it had roots in a desire to see students graduate with meaningful work experiences. However, the school never considered that they could lose such a critical partnership, integral to seeing this vision succeed, until they did. There are likely people in your school who bring a unique skill set—or in this case, a connection—that benefits your entire school. It is important to remember that the vision for the school must be bigger than any one person, no matter how great their impact is.
Instead, this school could have broadened their vision to include the professional skills students could acquire during the school day. Rather than simply
making the professional internship the goal, they could have created a list of employable skills they wanted each graduate to possess and found ways to both teach and measure these skills for all students. Professional internships would have been a very important component of the vision, but wouldn’t have had the power to completely derail the school’s progress toward their goal. The school could have infused the instruction of district employees with these employable skills and brought in people from the community to create connections and provide outside internships. Of course, the loss of the business connection would still have been a major concern for the school to navigate, but it wouldn’t have meant the breakdown of all their work.
Programs
Finally, a strong vision must be resilient to changes in funding or programs. Lessons from both the previous examples can be applied here.
Similar to a school whose vision relies too heavily on a state or provincial assessment, schools often develop dependency on a particular program or resource. A school that envisions reading growth or proficiency for every student likely has tools and resources in place. They may have specific staff members who provide tiered interventions, leveled tools that help to diagnostically meet the needs of different students, or particular curricula or methods to deliver instruction in the area of reading. All these are great resources, as long as they become part of the measurement of a student’s ability to read instead of the singular component of this vision. If a school only uses one curriculum for small-group reading instruction and assessment, then a vision of grade-level reading for all students is functionally dependent on the continuation of this curriculum.
On another note, like the school whose vision was dependent on the counselor’s connection to a local business, sometimes schools build dependency on an individual into instruction as well. In the case of a school envisioning reading on grade level for every student, only a very small percentage of people may deeply understand the tools or curriculum used to provide specific intervention. Typically, these people are designated as instructional leaders or interventionists, and they often find themselves on short lists for promotions within the district. A vision that depends on a handful of specialized instructional professionals is just as fragile as the vision of the high school that lost its internship connection.
Instead, a school that wants to see every student read on grade level could check to make sure that progress is not too dependent on any one program, resource, or person. Practically, this could involve using reading screeners to validate the results generated from curricula-specific assessments. It also could
mean providing training and specialization for multiple members of the faculty so a number of them understand the most specialized resources employed on behalf of the vision you have for students. The vision of reading on grade level does not change. However, in each of these examples, the way the vision comes to life determines its ability to withstand unforeseen change.
The questions in figure 2.2 can help you and your colleagues determine whether your school’s vision is resilient.
Resilient
Can your vision withstand cultural, economic, or political change?
Consider the following three questions to determine the resilience of your vision.
1. Is your vision dependent on a certain state or provincial assessment?
2. Is your vision dependent on a particular person or leader?
3. Is your vision dependent on funding for programs, curricula, or resources?
Figure 2.2: Determining the resilience of your organizational vision.
Inclusive
Sinek’s (2020) next critical component of vision is inclusivity. It’s important to pause for a second to remind yourself that a great vision ensures learning for every student. In a PLC at Work, the vision should be inclusive of all, it should present a glorious future for students and professionals, and it should encompass the power that education must truly change lives. The collective effort needed to ensure high levels of learning for all is something that requires focus on all four cultural pillars of educational organizations. All students should be part of your fundamental purpose, their success should be part of your empowering vision, the behaviors you commit to for the sake of ensuring no student is excluded from high levels of learning should be woven into your collective commitments, and your goals should regularly check your progress toward your aim.
To create an inclusive vision, a school must first begin with an inclusive team. This is one reason why it is so critical that no one individual leader build the four pillars. Without the varied perspectives of people throughout the school, the vision will inevitably have blind spots. In order to be inclusive, the vision should have an impact for all adults and students. This requires an intentional approach to understanding and including those who represent the services the school provides and the unique complexity of the student population you serve.
This likely necessitates outside influence. Not every school is staffed with adults who reflect the needs of the students. If you feel the guiding coalition could use support from someone who better understands the needs of a student group, you should bring that voice to the table. Additionally, an often-forgotten voice in this process is the voice of those who benefit the most—the students. Bringing student voice into the grand future you desire for your school will add validity and a perspective that would be nearly impossible to achieve without it.
With the addition of those who can collectively represent the services and students of the school, the guiding coalition can begin to consider ways that their vision is inclusive not only in impact but also in motivation. A vision empowers and pushes a school, and therefore, no one should be excluded from its creation. Sometimes, well-intended schools create a vision that targets only a specific group of students. Practically, this may mean a school envisions engaging a particular subset of students who are currently struggling, or dramatically impacting the performance of students who receive special education services. These aims are noble but, in their specificity, exclude other students or staff who may not be directly impacted.
Instead, a vision can be inclusive while also focusing on known areas for growth. If a high school notices that African American male students are graduating at a lower rate than the rest of the student body, a vision specific to ensuring college- and career-ready skills can help these students without excluding others. Like in the examples of resilience, the action behind the vision is where a school can specifically target a need. Perhaps this school could bring in prominent African American members of the district and community to discuss how the school can change its approach or practices to ensure the vision is met for African American students.
Teachers whose results with these students show success above the norm for the rest of the campus can provide practical tools and strategies for supporting them. However, with an inclusive vision, the school recognizes that success after high school is their goal for every student. This vision can then push teachers to begin learning how to meet the diverse needs of any student in their school who is currently falling through the cracks. Figure 2.3 (page 62) shows questions to help you determine whether your vision fits the bill in this regard.
Educators care deeply and intrinsically for their students. If they didn’t, they would have chosen another profession. However, lack of accountability, fixed mindsets, and toxic school cultures have allowed educational organizations to lose their way and students to fail. Because teachers mostly work in isolation,
Inclusive
Is your vision inclusive in its motivation and impact?
Consider the following four questions to determine the inclusivity of your vision.
1. Does the focus of your vision exclude anyone within your school?
2. Is your vision built around goals that exclude any students?
3. Does your vision hold value for those outside your building (parents, the community, businesses)?
4. Does your vision rally support for your cause from everyone?
Figure 2.3: Determining the inclusivity of your organizational vision.
they may sometimes look for ways to exclude themselves from the pressure or responsibility of ensuring success for every student. No one teacher can meet the needs of every student, but collectively, they can ensure success for all. That’s why you must find your purpose—your motivation—set your goals, and align your behaviors to the collective process of ensuring success for every student. Without this intentionality, it simply will not happen.
Service Oriented
Finally, Sinek (2020) says a great vision statement is service oriented. The primary benefactor can’t be the contributor. In the business world, an example of this would be to have a vision for the profitability of a company. Of course, all companies want to be profitable, and profitability benefits employees across the business. However, as we saw in the COVID-19 pandemic, people seek more meaning and impact than simply making money.
A school seeking to create a compelling vision aspires to more than sheer accomplishment or simply being a great school.
Now, consider for a moment the educator. Intrinsic to the education profession and those who choose it is the importance of making a difference in individuals’ lives. Therefore, we suggest that a school seeking to create a compelling vision aspires to more than sheer accomplishment or simply being a great school. This in no way is a poor pursuit, but it’s not what deeply motivates a service-minded profession. Can the vision ensure that each person is a small part of something that creates great meaning? Can you ensure that the benefactors are your students, families, and community? If, as Sinek suggests, this provides deeper motivation for the businessperson, imagine what it does for the professional educator. Your vision should motivate you to find
purpose, courage, and value not through your own benefit but through the lives you change for the better.
A school wanting to write a service-oriented vision should begin with a focus on those they serve—the students. As referenced previously, school accomplishments are in no way bad. However, they do not motivate educators like making a difference for a student does. A vision that points a school toward being “the premier school in the state” and “a model school for others in the area” depends on adults’ always being motivated by these accomplishments.
If you’re honest with yourself, there are probably days when an accolade does not provide the motivation you need to be your best. On the other hand, you likely can recount, with a twinkle in your eye, a time when a student you taught finally got a tough concept or skill. A vision that can elicit this response from adults is motivational while being beneficial to students at the same time. A guiding coalition, in writing a service-oriented vision, should be looking for inspiration. As with the other two components, resilience and inclusivity, the vision is just the catalyst. The work happens behind the scenes in pursuit of the future you aspire to.
Writing a service-oriented vision means you center the purpose on the motivational aspect of changing students’ lives for the better. Consider the story from earlier in the book about Joshua as a young reader. Both his teachers prioritized his ability to read, but only one sought his love for reading. A school with a vision to ensure graduation for every student could think about what it’s like to see a student overcome obstacles to walk across the stage and receive their diploma. Instead of focusing on leading the area in graduation rates, now this school could prioritize being a place that ensures every family experiences the joy of seeing their child graduate.
A vision that comes to mind is one of a school that served students who were dealing with mental and emotional trauma. This school faced many challenges: the behavior of the students, the lost learning that occurred when students were in and out of acute care facilities, and the challenges of families often reeling from the same trauma that impacted their children. The principal, a graduate of the school whose personal story was indistinguishable from those of the students he led, began the process of creating a vision for the campus by sharing his story with his guiding coalition. After about ten minutes with barely a dry eye in the room, the principal expressed that the school had helped him find the security and skills he needed to ensure his children experienced a different life than he did.
Collectively, the school rallied around these two components and formed a vision for what they would become: they would equip every student who left the campus with the security and skills necessary to change their future. This vision meant the school had to determine which academic and social skills to prioritize, what strategies they could use, and how they could improve their practice to meet the very specific needs of the students they served. However, the possibility that any of their students could one day leave with the security and skills needed to be their principal was unifying and motivating.
Answer the questions in figure 2.4 to determine whether your vision is, in fact, service oriented.
Service Oriented
Does your vision go beyond accomplishment?
Consider the following four questions to determine whether your vision is service oriented.
1. Does your vision motivate stakeholders to serve?
2. Is your vision too accomplishment driven?
3. Could your vision be mistaken as self-serving for anyone in the school?
4. Are there more beneficiaries of your realized vision than those doing the serving?
Figure 2.4: Determining the service orientation of your organizational vision.
With resilience, inclusivity, and a service orientation, the school vision begins to be powerful and universal in its impact. A school parsing these components could start with a resilient idea not tied to specific tests or funding, such as grade-level performance or growth. This can be measured by any assessment, it is not tied to a specific leader who could leave, and it encourages innovative approaches to multiple instructional practices to accomplish the vision.
Educators should also think about how to make their vision as inclusive as possible. If academic and social proficiency for every student is the vision of the school, how might you go about ensuring the vision is inspiring for every student, family, and professional within the organization? A school may consider things like whether the district has created a portrait of a graduate, whether there are community organizations that provide support in areas of social development for students, and whether language should be added to ensure the vision encompasses every student.
Finally, your vision must have a service orientation. There is a unifying component of serving together toward the common cause, which you could miss if
you are not intentional in this area. The service aspect of this work helps inform behaviors in your future school. With this component included, a vision that addresses each of these three areas is an enduring pursuit that rallies others to your cause of serving students.
Utilizing the preceding criteria, Central School developed a vision statement that captured the essence of what was going to allow them to ultimately achieve their collective purpose: “At Central School, we envision a school where our fundamental purpose is achieved through our commitment to living as a professional learning community. This includes finding our collective strength through collaboration; continually improving in our professional practices to be better for every student; and committing to structures, mindsets, and actions that focus on each and every student’s strengths, needs, and overall well-being.”
As part of working toward their new vision, the Central School guiding coalition began digging deeply into the multitude of data at their disposal and noticed a disturbing trend that had never been discussed. Over many years, there was a clear discrepancy between the performance of students who were in need of special education services and the performance of students who were not. Staff at Central knew they had to address the reality that students who received special education support were underperforming compared to their peers.
With a mission to ensure high levels of learning for every student, the guiding coalition and school leaders knew they had to start the process of reexamining their work. If they were to be true to the vision they were seeking, they needed to do something different. So, educators at Central began learning together about a full inclusion model for students receiving special education services.
A main factor they had to address was that some students in the building were being pulled from Tier 1 instruction (grade-level initial instruction) with their peers to a smaller classroom setting full of students with varied academic and social needs. Central considered evidence showing that this practice, although originally well intended, wasn’t meeting the needs of all students. Therefore, the guiding coalition implemented plans to re-evaluate the master schedule, teacher assignments, student placements, and allocation of resources to provide students initial grade-level instruction coupled with support from a highly skilled educator trained to meet their specific needs. These practices were in strong alignment with the third big idea of a PLC—a focus on results (DuFour et al., 2024). Central School used results to drive decisions.
The Role of the Guiding Coalition in Casting a Vision
In this chapter, we have outlined what makes a compelling vision. As in all other elements of the PLC at Work process, collaboration is at a compelling vision’s core. In order for educators to enter into this conversation, a resolute mission should already be established. Your defined purpose as an organization is foundational to everything else you do. Therefore, before you begin seeking a motivating North Star for your school, you must know who you are and where you take a collective stand.
Once the mission is in place, the distributed leadership or guiding coalition of the school should start asking questions such as, “What deeply motivates our collective organization?” “Is our motivation resilient in that it will remain meaningful despite outside influences?” “Is inclusivity a foundational component in what we’re striving for?” and “Are we focusing on the service orientation of the profession to which we were individually called?”
In the Central School example, the school established a mission of ensuring high levels of learning for every student. However, Central’s data and practices suggested they needed to make major changes to their approach to students who received special education services. The recognition that pulling students from on-grade-level instruction misaligned with their mission was only the beginning. Changing their practices, switching to a full inclusion model, and adjusting their master schedule were all substantial changes. These changes were not easy for every member of the staff to initially accept and understand. Without the motivation of what their school could become, staff might have viewed these changes as “the next thing” or just another educational fad. However, with the clarity that came from recognizing that their data said they were not fulfilling their mission or the promise of what was possible for each student, they could find deep meaning to help motivate these changes.
It’s important to develop a strong understanding of your current reality to help you envision what you could provide your students in the future. Does the vision resonate with staff in such a compelling fashion that it provides forward motion to their shared purpose? If so, the process of writing meaningful goals and adjusting adult behaviors through powerful collective commitments will have purpose and direction. As the unifying vision takes hold, the administrators and guiding coalition can begin to tailor the vision where they have influence in the school. With a draft of the vision created by the guiding coalition and inspirational members of the staff, individual teams across the school can start asking what this vision could look like for their team and the students they serve.
This process serves several purposes. First, you’re demystifying the work of the guiding coalition and bringing professionals throughout the school into the collaborative creation of your compelling purpose. Second, you’re developing ownership throughout the school. This vision can’t belong to a leader or even a leadership team. If it doesn’t provide motivation to the school at its core as well as to individuals throughout the school, then a vision isn’t compelling.
In addition, at this stage, the school has already collectively agreed on a fundamental purpose that is the mission of the organization. Making the process of casting a vision clear in its connection to the school’s mission provides purpose and meaning to the work already done while laying the foundation for goals.
The goal is not for a school committed to the PLC at Work process to simply create four separate documents that they can hang in the building before setting off to do their collaborative work. Instead, by making connections among the four pillars of your organization, you’re creating a through line of your purpose, future, behaviors, and goals. Each piece is individually important, but who you collectively become when these four pillars act in tandem is what creates the foundation for transformational change.
Our colleague Brandon Jones simply and artfully describes the work of the school leaders and guiding coalition in leading the school when he says, “The leaders stay two steps ahead of change while directing and empowering the guiding coalition. The guiding coalition is then one step ahead of those they lead in the building” (B. Jones, personal communication, April 14, 2023). What Brandon is referencing makes great sense when you think about Principal Davis’s approach at Central School.
At Central, the building administrators and guiding coalition unpacked data and noticed that the support they were providing students identified for special education services was not translating into high levels of learning. So, they began a conversation about what meaningful change could mean for their building and how they could learn new ideas and strategies to meet their students’ needs. They studied the data, examined possible considerations and solutions, and collectively started researching best practices for the future of their school.
As they arrived at research-backed practices to help their students, the guiding coalition members each went to their respective teams, replicating the process the leaders took with them. They explained the current reality, presented research, and established the why for potential change. From there,
each team across the building considered how they served students and allocated resources, and what was possible going forward. This reciprocal flow of conversations pulsed in and out of the guiding coalition and ultimately culminated with the moving experience that changed the school. The vision would then begin to come to life as the school progressed through goals that acted like crumbs on the trail to a compelling future. This organic organizational embodiment of a motivational vision is what schools achieve when they stay the course and go beyond PLC Lite.
How to Embody a Compelling Vision
A vision describes the ideal future a school hopes to achieve. A great vision has power when it compels an organization toward a brighter reality. For this to occur, the vision must be embedded within the rhythm of the daily school culture. Following his reporting on the impact that a meaningful organizational vision has on employee engagement, Folkman (2014) went on to suggest several different ways to ensure vision is valued within an organization. A few of these key components are symptoms of a culture where the organizational vision is meaningfully embedded into the day-to-day work of continuous improvement (Folkman, 2014).
• A compelling vision is communicated through many different means: This suggests taking the vision outside the walls of the school to stakeholders, advertising the service-oriented nature of the school to those who can support the cause, and keeping the future relevant through regular points of progress toward the goal.
• A vision has the power to be meaningfully tied to innovation: When innovation is used to drive improvement toward the vision, the organization will also see that creativity and change of the status quo are worthy of consideration and will attempt to become the desired school of the future.
• In a vision-driven organization, leaders are both “open and honest,” and their words lead to action: This makes the vision more than a theory because humanized leaders whom staff find relatable are putting action behind their goal to create the compelling future once only dreamed of.
• An organization moving toward the realization of a compelling vision is quick to respond when adjustments need to be made: Vision development isn’t a box to be checked. When the guiding
coalition and staff members recognize that refinements need to be made, they take action to make them.
• An organization driven by vision is filled with individuals who understand the greater good—or, to use Sinek’s (2020) words, the “just cause”—behind the organizational vision: The culture of the organization will slowly begin to change through this process. Individuals will not make decisions simply based on what they personally desire. They will consider what is best for their students and the school as a whole—and this will drive their decision making.
What these components create in harmony is a group of people following sensitive, intentional leaders through innovative action toward a unifying greater good. The synergy of this type of culture would no doubt move your school from the current reality to a more compelling future.
The checklist in figure 2.5 (page 70) provides a quick way for the guiding coalition or individuals throughout the school to check how intentionally the vision is intertwined with the daily school culture. (You will find a reproducible version of this figure on page 73.)
Vision in Your Current Reality
Each of the four pillars has a specific purpose in defining the school, and the vision, which represents your destination, clearly conveys that your daily work is part of something bigger than you. You are contributing to something that will make a difference in the lives of the students you serve. Accordingly, a school can use the vision as a basis for purposeful celebrations, positively acknowledging every step staff take toward that destination—the progress they’ve made and the fact that the school is that much closer to realizing the future it imagines for students. A vision is also incredibly useful in future planning. When the guiding coalition or school leaders consider allocation of new resources or future plans, they can stay rooted in the fundamental purpose of the mission while pointing toward what they envision for the school.
Finally, a vision is a powerful tool when onboarding new members. In a PLC, the collective identity guides the work of individuals. With this in mind, new team members should understand who you are (mission) and what your work is designed to accomplish (vision). The onboarding of new staff is an opportunity to bring new perspectives and talents, but the core tenets of the school—the four pillars—will hold fast. This means incoming staff must acculturate to the mission, vision, behaviors, and goals of the school they are joining while using their personal abilities to help the school achieve its goals. Your school can
Insert your school’s vision here:
In his work on making meaning in an organizational vision, Joseph Folkman (2014) suggests that certain elements make a vision a compelling part of the day-to-day life of your school culture. This checklist can help you determine whether these elements are present in your school while providing next steps for continuous improvement.
Is your school vision being communicated through many different means to different stakeholders? Yes
Is innovation driving your school from its current reality to the compelling future of your vision?
Are leaders throughout the school:
1. Open and honest?
No
Evidence: Evidence:
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Yes
No
Evidence: Evidence:
2. Effectively translating their words into action? Yes
Does your school respond quickly when changes need to be made in alignment with your vision?
No
Evidence: Evidence:
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Yes
No
Evidence: Evidence:
Is your school filled with individuals who understand and believe in the greater good or just cause of your school vision? Yes
No
Evidence: Evidence:
Source: Adapted from Folkman, 2014.
Figure 2.5: Checklist for bringing your vision to life.
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
eventually reap all these benefits of a vision regardless of where it currently is in its PLC at Work journey. Read on for the next steps to take depending on where your school stands.
New Vision
If you find yourself working to define your school’s vision for the first time, the first step is to understand the purpose a vision has in your school. Mission and collective commitments are behaviors or disciplines. Vision and goals are meant to inspire and compel. While your guiding coalition is the engine behind this work, it’s important to make sure a few key personalities are part of the original vision conversation.
Which people in your school are most defined by their purpose as educators? Who are the individuals inspiring others? Who is most likely to have an emotional response to the successes or struggles of your students? While these people may be on the guiding coalition already, they’ll be especially important in envisioning a compelling future. The goal of a great vision is inspiration and purpose. For this reason, it only makes sense that you would elicit the help of the most purpose-driven, inspirational people in your school.
With these people assembled, think about where your school finds purpose for the students and families you serve and the community in which you reside. As these ideas begin to come together, don’t forget the wisdom of Sinek (2020). You want a vision that will push you through the most challenging times and unite all adults on behalf of all students, in a posture of service. Utilizing the “Checklist for Bringing Your Vision to Life” reproducible (page 73) will help guide the creation of your vision toward these three goals. Then intentionally send your most inspirational people into your school to bring others to this unifying cause. A vision will elicit feelings from those it influences, and there are no better spokespeople than those who feel most strongly about the work of your school.
Existing Vision
If your school currently has a vision statement, what does it provide to those who work there? If you can’t remember the vision, there’s a very low likelihood that your school has one that’s capable of lifting the school through hardship and challenge. In this case, vision begins with an understanding of who you are as a school as well as individually. What matters deeply to your school? Who are the teachers or professionals within who find great purpose in their careers?
Does your current vision elicit any feelings from these people? If not, it’s worth going back to the drawing board.
If you find yourself here, please don’t stress. The right people who find great purpose in their work will likely never have a problem talking about the school they hope to become one day. This is an easy conversation to start and one that can continue over time to develop great meaning. The “Checklist for Bringing Your Vision to Life” reproducible allows your guiding coalition to have a template to check and adjust your current vision.
Ultimately, vision is much more than a statement. A vision is the direction for the work of a school. The promise of a brighter future for students and staff is something worth working very hard for, but it requires small changes daily to ensure you continue along the path to what you intend to become. With a fundamental purpose that acts as the watermark for your decisions, and the driving force of a compelling vision, your school finds itself ready to begin the work of analyzing adult behaviors to practice changing from who you are to who you want to be in your vision.
Reflection Questions
Consider the following questions when crafting a compelling vision for your school.
1. What motivates your school? Is there something so compelling that it could inspire the work of your school for years to come?
2. Do you have a just cause for your school that is resilient, inclusive, and service oriented? How could these three elements provide deep motivation for your staff?
3. How might you articulate a compelling vision within and outside your school? Could this vision define the future of your school and how it’s perceived?
4. Is your vision more than just a document? How are you intentionally making it part of the daily culture of your school?
Checklist for Bringing Your Vision to Life
Insert your school’s vision here:
In his work on making meaning in an organizational vision, Joseph Folkman (2014) suggests that certain elements make a vision a compelling part of the day-to-day life of your school culture. This checklist can help you determine whether these elements are present in your school while providing next steps for continuous improvement.
Is your school vision being communicated through many different means to different stakeholders?
Is innovation driving your school from its current reality to the compelling future of your vision?
Yes No If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Evidence: Evidence:
Are leaders throughout the school:
1. Open and honest?
2. Effectively translating their words into action?
Yes No If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Evidence: Evidence:
Yes No If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Evidence: Evidence:
The Foundation for Change © 2024 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks to download this free reproducible.
Does your school respond quickly when changes need to be made in alignment with your vision?
Yes No
Evidence: Evidence:
Is your school filled with individuals who understand and believe in the greater good or just cause of your school vision?
Yes No
Evidence: Evidence:
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
If no, what are your next steps for making this happen?
Source: Adapted from Folkman, J. (2014, April 22). 8 ways to ensure your vision is valued. Accessed at www.forbes.com/sites/joefolkman/2014/04/22/8-ways-to-ensure-your-vision-is-valued on October 17, 2023. page 2 of 2
The Foundation for Change © 2024 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks to download this free reproducible.
THE FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE
Focusing on the Four Pillars of a PLC at Work®
As they implement the professional learning community (PLC) process, many schools are tempted to skip creating their mission, vision, values, and goals in their haste to help students. In The Foundation for Change: Focusing on the Four Pillars of a PLC at Work®, Jonathan G. Vander Els and Joshua Ray emphasize that glossing over these pillars either dilutes or dooms to failure the messy, complicated, necessary process of true school improvement. In fact, establishing this foundation is critical to all the steps a school must take to ensure high levels of learning for all. This valuable resource guides readers through the work of laying their PLC foundation by offering practical strategies, tools, and templates to support them throughout the journey.
K–12 teachers, leaders, and administrators will:
• Understand how educators can contribute to developing the four pillars and integrating them into classroom practice
• Clarify the role of the guiding coalition in implementing the four pillars as the foundation for changing school culture
• Gain practical templates, charts, and other reproducible tools and resources
• Follow the journey of one fictitious school as it executes the PLC at Work process
• Reflect on content with end-of-chapter questions for deeper learning
“The Foundation for Change is a compelling and indispensable resource for any education leader who desires to cultivate a truly impactful, collaborative school environment. The authors expertly unpack complex concepts into practical, actionable strategies that readers can implement immediately. A definite must-read for leaders and school teams who are ready for their school to become a high-functioning PLC that fosters learning for all!”
—Faith Short Principal, East Pointe Elementary, Greenwood, Arkansas
“Schools that want to deeply embrace the PLC process must collectively discuss and come to consensus around their purpose, future, and commitments. The Foundation for Change provides great clarity on both why and how. Pillar by pillar, the authors help the reader understand how to utilize a school’s guiding coalition to discuss, write, and embrace a shared mission, vision, collective commitments, and goals. This is an absolute must-read for any school leader!”
—Jon Yost
Former Associate Superintendent, Sanger Unified School District, California