The Power Of Teams How To Create And Lead Thriving School Teams

In education, resources and time are scarce, yet the demand for performance is sky high. School leaders invest money and labour into improving their schools, navigating trade offs along the way. But what if one of the biggest improvements we could make to our schools was something we already do? What if enhancing teamwork so that school teams thrive, was actually the secret ingredient to success? The Power of Teams explores evidence from across sectors, including education, to find out what high-performing teams share, and how we can adapt the most effective teamwork strategies to the unique environment of a school. The book outlines a model of teamwork factors that contribute to truly thriving teams, with theory, research, tangible actions for school teams, and a range of expert voices who contribute their experience in case studies. Effective teamwork leads to purpose, belonging, trust, learning, and, ultimately, high performance. When we better understand the nuances of how teams can thrive, we discover the real Power of Teams.

What are the causes of distrust? How do members of school teams discuss traditionally taboo topics? This field guide begins with personal exercises designed for leaders to use before they engage with staff. A variety of team exercises and a progressive series of strategies follow, to move the community toward a more trusting environment.

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. The benefits of successful teacher teams include: improved performance for both teachers and students; meaningful professional development; group adoption of a new curriculum; shared insights into student work; better classroom management; support for new teachers; new roles for teacher leaders; and opportuniteis for mentor support.School leaders will find guidelines, methods, and concrete steps for building and sustaining effective teacher teams. Also included is a DVD with video case studies and one CD with reproducibles. The most important reason for building teacher teams is to enhance student learning through improved instruction, and that story is at the heart of this book.

Interpersonal trust is the essential glue that bonds individuals into a unified team, enables collaboration, and motivates the members to create something more innovative together than could be achieved alone. It is the distinguishing factor between a thriving team and a troubled one. However, teachers are often placed into partnerships without any training on how to generate reciprocal trust. Master educators Anabel Jensen and Kathleen Gibbons combine their decades of teaching experience and their own research to define the key pillars of trust and the pitfalls that erode it. Their program offers effective strategies and assessment to develop this foundational bond as well as remedies to repair the relationship as team members continually move in and out of trust. TRUST or DOUBT guides team members to express their best selves so that their collective efforts amplify their potential. Reviews for TRUST or DOUBT "It is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve success without gaining the trust of one's team. TRUST or DOUBT is filled with valuable strategies and exercises to help people foster this vital competence." -Denise Pope, PhD, co-founder of Challenge Success, author of Doing School and Senior Lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. "Teamwork has never been easy and in recent years, it has become even more complex. Learning how to enable conditions that foster effective teamwork is critical. This book is a key resource to help you do just that." -Diane Ketelle, author of Tread Lightly, Lead Boldly and Dean, School of Education, Mills College "The ability to earn trust is the # 1 task for any administrator or educator. TRUST or DOUBT is a very practical and exemplary guide that lays out an easy-to-follow path to develop this important skill." -Susan Charles, Palo Alto principal for 15 years and educator for 40 years.

Educators face an often overwhelming set of tasks, including educating the whole child, preparing students for the future, meeting all students' daily needs, meeting multiple stakeholders' expectations, and being accountable to government mandates. In The Handbook for SMART School Teams (Second Edition): Revitalizing Best Practices for Collaboration, authors Anne E. Conzemius and Jan O'Neill offer a revamped edition of their groundbreaking resource to support educators and school teams as they meet these challenges head-on. Like the first edition, The Handbook for SMART School Teams (Second Edition) examines SMART goals goals that are strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound. This enhanced guide provides both theory and practical advice on how to create SMART teams in SMART schools. The authors draw on feedback from district administrators, school principals, classroom teachers, educational consultants, and even college professors to create a deeper understanding of school success and provide K 12 teachers and administrators with a more powerful tool for school improvement. The book is split into three parts. Part one lays the groundwork for building effective teams. Part two offers tools and processes to sustain effective teamwork. Finally, part three describes methods for schoolwide improvement. Starting part one, chapters 1 and 2 show readers how to cultivate an atmosphere of collaboration and define team roles. In chapter 3, K 12 teachers and administrators will learn the characteristics of building effective teams and of giving and receiving effective feedback. Part two starts with chapter 4, which focuses on planning, organizing, and executing meetings. Readers will also explore different types of meetings and their pros and cons. In chapters 5 and 6, educators will gather effective collaboration tools to better understand how staff, students, and stakeholders view their schools. Chapter 7 explores the power of data tools, and educators will examine how data are beneficial for more than identifying problems. Finally, part three begins with chapter 8, which offers methods for organizing all team members into a cohesive system. In chapter 9, K 12 teachers and administrators will learn a process for schoolwide improvement: selecting a leadership team, preparing the school for change, and isolating key questions to ask during the process. Appendix A provides additional examples and tools, and appendix B provides reproducibles to support SMART schools.

Conflict is one of the greatest sources of tolerated business expenses and loss. This is despite the fact that this expense and loss can, in most cases, be easily turned around to revenue and gain. In the nonprofit world one of the greatest inhibitors of mission success is not that there isn’t enough funding, or the challenging nature of the cause. It is the simple fact that teams struggle to work well together. What if conflict was the starting point for developing trust? What if it catalyzed a deeper, more meaningful understanding between team members? What if it was crucial for building stronger and more powerful organizations? Last of all, what if there were simple steps you could take to automatically help your teams communicate and work together more easily? This book shows you how.

From the New York Times bestselling author of My Share of the Task and Leaders, a manual for leaders looking to make their teams more adaptable, agile, and unified in the midst of change. When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter. To defeat Al Qaeda, they would have to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. They would have to become a "team of teams"—faster, flatter, and more flexible than ever. In Team of Teams, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be rel­evant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and or­ganizations today. In periods of unprecedented crisis, leaders need practical management practices that can scale to thousands of people—and fast. By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organiza­tion, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions. Drawing on compelling examples—from NASA to hospital emergency rooms—Team of Teams makes the case for merging the power of a large corporation with the agility of a small team to transform any organization.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Never Eat Alone redefines collaboration with a radical new workplace operating system in which leadership no longer demands an office, an official title, or even a physical workplace. “An actionable methodology for any team to thrive during the decade of exponential change ahead.”—Peter H. Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, bestselling co-author of Abundance, Bold, and The Future Is Faster Than You Think In times of stress, we have a choice: we can retreat further into our isolated silos, or we can commit to “going higher together.” When external pressures are mounting, and employees are working from far-flung locations across the globe, says bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, we can no longer afford to waste time navigating the complex chains of command or bureaucratic bottlenecks present in most companies. But when we choose the bold new methodology of co-elevation as our operating model, we unlock the potential to boost productivity, deepen commitment and engagement, and create a level of trust, mutual accountability, and purpose that exceeds what could have been accomplished under the status quo. And you don’t need any formal authority to do it. You simply have to marshal a commitment to a shared mission and care about the success and development of others as much as you care about your own. Regardless of your title, position, or where or how you work, the ability to lead without authority is an essential workplace competency. Here, Ferrazzi draws on over a decade of research and over thirty years helping CEOs and senior leaders drive innovation and build high-performing teams to show how we can all turn our colleagues and partners into teammates and truly reboot the way we work together.