Educational leaders are under enormous pressure. They are expected to improve student outcomes, support teacher learning, navigate competing initiatives, manage budgets, respond to community concerns, and maintain a coherent vision for improvement. And they are asked to do this at the same time they are leading through increasingly complex conditions.
Given those demands, it is surprising that many districts do not offer more than one-day workshops or conferences for leaders to attend. Unfortunately, they do not often attend these workshops and conferences with other leaders, or many times, their leadership teams, which can negatively impact the team’s ability to create a common understanding about some of the biggest issues within their schools or districts.
That gap in understanding led the two of us to conduct a multiyear qualitative study recently published in the International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership. Our research focused on collective leader efficacy, which is the shared belief among leadership teams that, through their collective actions, they can positively influence adult and student learning.
What we found challenges some common assumptions about leadership. Some of those assumptions are that leadership teams lack commitment or that they lack expertise. In most cases, the teams we worked with were deeply dedicated to improving outcomes for students and educators. Yet, even highly capable leadership teams often struggled to translate their individual strengths into collective impact.
In our work, as well as our research, we have seen breakdowns in how teams engage with each other in three predictable areas.
First, teams struggle to develop a truly shared understanding of priorities. Many leaders believe they are aligned because they can recite the same strategic goals. However, the alignment of their actions and behaviors toward their goals is different, demonstrating a lack of shared understanding. Shared language does not always result in shared understanding. It’s one of the reasons why we wrote this post a year ago focusing on how many leaders, regardless of country, are working on the same common issues. Since we wrote this, we have worked with hundreds of more leaders, at the building, district, or regional level who are experiencing the same issues.
Second, teams often confuse congenial collaboration and collegial collaboration. Collegial collaboration is often referred to as joint work. Many leadership meetings focus on updates, logistics, and reporting. While those activities are necessary, they are not the same as engaging in joint work. The strongest leadership teams in our study spend less time exchanging information and more time collectively examining problems of practice, challenging assumptions, and learning from one another.
Third, and perhaps most important, teams struggle to identify meaningful evidence of progress. Often, the evidence of progress is not aligned or directly connected to the goals. Teams are collecting data to collect data without a true purpose. This finding emerges consistently across contexts. Leadership teams can often describe what they are doing. They can explain their plans and initiatives. But many find it difficult to determine whether their leadership actions are actually improving the conditions that support teaching and learning.
Too often, the evidence they collect consists of implementation checklists or end-of-year outcome measures. By the time leaders receive the information, opportunities for adjustment havealready passed.
As one participant noted during our study, leadership teams frequently became better at documenting activity than understanding impact. This finding has significant implications for educational leadership. In schools, we often encourage teachers to examine evidence of student learning, reflect on practice, and adjust instruction based on what they discover. Yet, leadership teams do not always apply the same disciplined inquiry process to their own work.
The most effective teams in our study developed routines that helped them answer three essential questions:
- Do we have a shared understanding of what matters most?
- Are we engaging in meaningful joint work that improves our collective capability?
- What evidence tells us that our leadership actions are helping us make progress and have an impact on student and adult learning within our schools?
When teams regularly examined those questions, they reported stronger coherence, deeper collaboration, and greater confidence in their collective ability to influence improvement.
This is why we believe the future of educational leadership depends less on developing individual leaders and more on strengthening the effectiveness of leadership teams.
Schools improve when adults learn together. Districts improve when leadership teams learn together. What we know is that systems also improve when leaders develop the collective confidence, structures, and habits necessary to move from individual expertise to shared impact.
The challenge for educational leaders is not simply to ask whether they have talented people around the table. Additionally, progress and impact will not happen when leaders at the school or district level choose members for their teams that will offer a path to least resistance and just robotically agree with what the leader wants.
The two of us have been fortunate enough to work long term with many leadership teams and have learned a lot from them. We believe this research is a way for other teams to learn from them, too.
