Teams

This paper examines a number of promising principal preparation programs to identify lessons for improving the impact of principals on student perrmance.

Research supports that school districts' prereferral consultation teams adhere less closely to quality consultation procedures and are less effective than those conducted through university research projects. This study investigated whether this finding might be due to incompatibilities between school settings and recommended team consultation practices.

The purpose of this chapter is to articulate those best practices that have been identified to increase the effectiveness of pre-referral teams.

This chapter describes a process, collaborative problem solving, that can guide decision making and intervention planning for improving academic and behavior outcomes for students. The primary focus is on the two basic components of the term collaborative problem solving.

The Benchmarks for Advanced Tiers (BAT) allows school teams to self-assess the implementation status of Tiers 2 (secondary, targeted) and 3 (tertiary, intensive) behavior support systems within their school. The BAT is based on factors drawn from the Individual Student Systems Evaluation Tool (I-SSET). School teams can use the BAT to build an action plan to delineate next steps in the implementation process.

Over the past 10 years, the Southern Regional Education Board has helped states and public universities across the region evaluate their state policies for preparing school principals who are leaders of instruction. This benchmark report reviews the past decade and looks at 10 learning-centered leadership indicators to gauge how far states have come and how far they need to go in selecting, preparing and supporting leaders of change.

Although prereferral intervention teams (PIT) are common in public schools, there is little and conflicting research to support them. The current article conducted an empirical meta-analysis of research on PITs by reviewing 72 articles.

The belief that working in teams makes us more creative and productive is so widespread that when faced with a challenging new task, leaders are quick to assume that teams are the best way to get the job done. Getting agreement is the leader’s job, and they must be willing to take great personal and professional risks to set the team’s direction. And if the leader isn’t disciplined about managing who is on the team and how it is set up, the odds are slim that a team will do a good job.

A meta‐analysis was conducted to determine relationships between team training and team effectiveness. Results from the 21 studies provided evidence that training is positively related to team effectiveness and effectiveness in five outcome categories: affective, cognitive, subjective task‐based skill, objective task‐based skill, and teamwork skill.

This study reports the results of several meta-analyses examining the relationship between four operational definitions of cognitive ability within teams (highest member score, lowest member score, mean score, standard deviation of scores) and team performance. 

A prominent philosophical influence in school consultation research proposes that to effectively serve children, school psychologists must work primarily and paradoxically on changing the behavior of adults. Although the consultation literature base has traditionally conceptualized this role within a dyadic model emphasizing the consultant-consultee relationship, much of school consultation today occurs in the context of teams rather than dyads.

Teachers work in isolation from one another. They view their classrooms as their personal domains, have little access to the ideas or strategies of their colleagues, and prefer to be left alone rather than engage with their colleagues or principals. Their professional practice is shrouded in a veil of privacy and personal autonomy and is not a subject for collective discussion or analysis.

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change. Continuous
improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the
landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that
organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those
organizations work.

A review of the literature demonstrates that schools are frequently called upon to improve by developing high levels of teacher collaboration. At the same time, there is a paucity of research investigating the extent to which teachers’ collaborative school improvement practices are related to student achievement.

The purpose of the current study was to test theoretically derived hypotheses regarding the relationships between team efficacy, potency, and performance and to examine the moderating effects of level of analysis and interdependence on observed relationships.

Teams have more talent and experience, more diverse resources, and greater operating flexibility than individual performers. J. Richard Hackman, one of the world's leading experts on group and organizational behavior, argues that the answer to this puzzle is rooted in flawed thinking about team leadership. 

If we think about leadership as being confined to only those in positions of authority then we are willfully ignoring the leadership talent and capability of many others. If leadership is fundamentally about influence, then within any school there are many sources of influence, both formal and informal.

Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform.

A central premise in the literature on leadership highlights its central role in organizational change. In light of the strength of this conceptual association, it is striking to note the paucity of large-scale empirical studies that have investigated how leadership impacts performance improvement in organizations over time. Indeed evidence-based conclusions concerning the impact of leadership on organizational change are drawn largely from case studies and cross-sectional surveys.

Learning communities serve a variety of education constituencies, beginning with grade-level or subject-matter teams, vertical-grade or subject-band teams, school leadership teams, cadres of principals, or teams of employees in district offices.

This report is a comprehensive and research-based framework outlining the conditions necessary for transformational school leaders to succeed. It offers a framework of conditions that can help districts enable great school leadership.

Using longitudinal elementary school teacher and student data, we document that students have larger test score gains when their teachers experience improvements in the observable characteristics of their colleagues. Using within-school and within-teacher variation, we show that a teacher's students have larger achievement gains in math and reading when she has more effective colleagues.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the way in which principals in different countries are securing successful organisational change through systematically building social capital. It argues that how a school works as a cohesive unit and how people collaborates will ultimately define organisational performance.

This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of the Class-Wide Function-related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT) program, a group contingency intervention for whole classes, and for students with disruptive behaviors who are at risk for emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD). 

School based leadership is an increasingly complex task that requires leaders to find ways to spread responsibility throughout organizations to achieve goals. This dissertation research is an exploratory study in the field of sustainability of distributed leadership at Capital High School, a large urban high school.

This review chapter examines the literature on work team effectiveness. This paper consider their nature, define them, and identify four critical conceptual issues—context, workflow, levels, and time—that serve as review themes and discuss the multitude of forms that teams may assume.

Sitting in our schools right now is one of the most powerful levers we have for deepening equity: teacher teams focused on developing collective expertise in high-leverage, equity promoting practices. One conversation at a time, teams like the one in the vignette above, a composite of teams we have observed over time, chip away at low expectations, racism, and cultural biases that have marginalized special education students, English language learners, students of color, and others who have not traditionally been served well by schools.

The authors review team research that has been conducted over the past 10 years. They discuss the nature of work teams in context and note the substantive differences underlying different types of teams.

In this paper, the authors use tools from social network analysis (SNA) to derive principles for the design of effective clinical quality improvement teams and explore the implementation of these principles using social network data collected from the inpatient general medicine services at a large academic medical center in Chicago, USA

Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers' ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers' effectiveness across classrooms. Recent research finds that teams can contribute to teachers' development and increased student achievement.

Child study teams (CSTs) are involved in making decisions about many aspects of the delivery of special services to handicapped students. However, a number of factors inhibit the decision-making process within CSTs. These factors have their origins in the implementation of the team process at the local education agency (LEA) level, the preparation of CST members to participate in team decision making, and in the difficulties encountered in communicating discipline-specific information.

In the school setting, teams are abundant, often serving multiple purposes, having various titles, and consisting of diverse members. Teams are considered an essential component of Response to Intervention (RtI) and are the vehicle through which data‐based decision making occurs at the school, grade, small‐group, and individual student level.

This report provides an overview of NYCLA’s flagship principal preparation program. Intended to help others involved in principal preparation think through important elements of principal preparation, including candidate selection, developing experiential learning opportunities, and funding, staffing and sustaining the program, the guide shares NYCLA’s successes and lessons learned during the 11 years we have delivered the Aspiring Principals Program in New York City, as well as through our work with various state and district partners nationally to adapt the program.

"More is better"--this precept lies behind the burgeoning use of work teams to handle problem-solving and decision-making in schools and school districts. Teams are said to build stronger relationships among those involved in education and, ultimately, to benefit students because more people with broader perspectives help to shape a stronger educational program.

The on-going efforts to improve Student Support Teams (SST) within a large, urban California school district are presented. The major goal of this reform has been to reshape the SSTs to focus on empirically supported interventions and data based decision making rather than student deficit and disability.

Drawing from video analysis of Distributed Leadership team meetings, this paper explores the work of the teams themselves, focusing on team priorities, organization, roles and authority dynamics, and decision making. The analysis focuses on the four Distributed Leadership schools that were in their second year of implementation in 2007-08.

This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement.

Teams and other collaborative structures have become commonplace in American schools, although historically school staff members functioned more independently from one another. In this article, we describe the growing influence of collaboration and teaming in a variety of school contexts, but focus on the empirical literature on problem-solving teams as reflecting the state of research and practice in the schools.

This essay seeks to help you put the hard-earned experience of others to use through a set of practical steps, prompts, and tips for matching the right evaluator to your need.

We highlight some of the key discoveries and developments in the area of team performance over the past 50 years, especially as reflected in the pages of Human Factors. Teams increasingly have become a way of life in many organizations, and research has kept up with the pace.

This latest volume in the SIOP Professional Practice Series was inspired by a Leading Edge Conference sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology to bring together leading-edge practitioners and academics to exchange views and knowledge about effective teams and help lead to better practice in that area.

In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board outlines critical actions that states, districts, universities and principals themselves should take as part of a systematic plan to address principal succession. The report makes the case for principal succession planning and describes six steps for succession planning that states and districts can implement to ensure they have the right principals for the job.

the purpose of this chapter is to review the science of teams and their effectiveness, extrapolate critical lessons learned, and highlight several future challenges critical for military psychology to address in order to prepare future military teams for success.

The present study explores conflict management as a team phenomenon in schools. The author examined how the contextual variables (task interdependence, goal interdependence) are related to team conflict management style (integrating vs. dominating) and school team effectiveness (team performance).

The role of the school social worker and school psychologist in the provision of mental health services in the schools has been in transition over the last decade. As schools implement Response to Intervention (RTI), Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), and Expanded School Mental Health (ESMH) programs, there is an increasing emphasis on the need for inter-professional collaboration in meeting the needs of children in the schools.

Traditional organizational theory mandates that organizations predict and stay in control in order to avoid chaos. This book proposes that members of organizations work at developing a new frame of reference for understanding organizational life

This study examines how high-quality professional development can promote the diffusion of effective teaching strategies among teachers through collaboration. Drawing on longitudinal and socio-metric data from a study of writing professional development in 39 schools, this study shows that teachers’ participation in professional development is associated with providing more help to colleagues on instructional matters.

There are many rationales for group, rather than individual, decision making. Theorized advantages include more information to contribute to the decision, more diverse perspectives to inform deliberation, and greater efficiency for implementation.

Perspectives on Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice in Educational Leadership provides educational leaders with practical steps for implementing multicultural education into schools. Drawing from multicultural scholars like James Bank’s it equips educational leaders with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to ensure that schools provide all students with equal educational opportunities.

While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies The Power of Teacher Teams demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership.

Current prereferral intervention team (PIT) regulations, prevalence, membership, goals, and intervention information from two national telephone surveys are reported. There was no clear school-based consensus on PIT goals. PITs most commonly recommended additional services, testing, or easy classroom interventions and seldom recommended substantive instructional modifications.

Research suggests effective professional learning communities (PLCs) enhance teacher collaboration and student achievement. Some studies indicate that these communities also predict greater collective efficacy, while others suggest teacher efficacy is predictive of teachers working together.

This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by the Aspiring Principals Program (APP) graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals.

This Considerations Packet is designed to support school leadership teams as they guide school improvement efforts. Topics include the rationale for using a team approach, team composition, and necessary skills and responsibilities of the leadership team.

The efficacy of using multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) for special education evaluation and programming is increasingly being questioned. Current research data provide only weak support for the continued use of MDTs.