A Tale of Two Teams

I would like tell you a story, a tale of two teams. The first team is a humanities team that I facilitated some years ago when I was a novice instructional coach working in a middle school that I'll call Wilson Middle School. (All names of people in this school are fictitious; see the note on anonymity following this introduction.) From my perspective, this team was disastrous. There was little trust, we didn't get much done, and I struggled as a leader. The second team was a team of coaches that I led after I'd had several years of experience as a facilitator. This team thrived, and I thrived as a leader. Based on many indicators, this team was a success.

Think of this tale of two teams as a serial: with each chapter of this book, I offer another episode from the stories to illustrate the art of coaching teams. So let me start the story—by starting at the end, with the successful team, so that I can offer you a vision for perhaps what might be. I'd like to transport you back to a typical Friday afternoon and offer a glimpse of what you might have seen in our small office.

For two years I was the manager of this team of coaches, and I felt that my primary role was to develop their skill, knowledge, and capacity to coach. When I created the model for our coaching program, I included an entire day of professional development every week. Monday through Thursday, the coaches were at sites—working with individual teachers and administrators, leading professional development sessions, facilitating department and grade-level meetings, participating in instructional leadership teams, gathering and analyzing data, and much more. On Fridays, without exception, we came together to reflect, learn, plan, and reenergize.

By the time I first met with this team in August 2012, I had a lot of ideas about how to create a highly functioning team. I knew that I'd be in a unique position with these eight coaches: although I was their boss, I viewed myself primarily as their coach, as the person responsible for helping them become the coaches and leaders that they wanted to be and that, ultimately, our students needed them to be.

We saw impressive results in the schools we supported, including growth in student learning, growth in teacher professional practice, increases in teacher retention, and improvements in collaboration among teams—all indicators of the work of an effective team of coaches. Perhaps most significant was what we learned about teams—about the utmost importance of teams and what it's like to be on a high-functioning team. Although many of us knew that teams were essential in transformation efforts, we hadn't experienced one that was collaborative and deeply caring and that got stuff done. The health of our team allowed us to go deep into individual and shared learning and into the scariest nooks and crannies—the ones where conversations about race and class, fear and despair, ego and emotions all reside. We challenged each other, pushed each other's thinking, celebrated learnings and growth, and encouraged each other to go deeper, go further, and then stop and rest. We all mourned when after two years forces beyond our control dissolved our team.

Now let me transport you briefly back to a meeting of the humanities team that I facilitated at Wilson Middle School some years prior.

I worked in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in Oakland, California, for almost 20 years. During that time, I was a member of many teams and a leader of a few teams. The humanities team was the most difficult team I led and also one from which I learned a great deal. It was a couple years after I led this team that I wrote The Art of Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013), in which I originally intended to include a chapter about coaching teams. As I drafted that chapter, however, it became apparent that the content deserved a book of its own. But there was another reason that I couldn't yet write a chapter on coaching teams. Although I had a plethora of ideas about how to build effective teams, I had never been a member of a truly transformational team of educators. I had never led a team to a high level of performance. I acknowledged that I couldn't write about something I had never experienced—not as a participant or as a leader.

Even though it's true that we can learn a great deal from our struggles, our moments of success also yield deep learning. It wasn't until my experience leading the transformation team that I truly believed great teams could exist—a conviction that was essential for writing this book. It wasn't until that experience that I became confident in my ability to acquire the skills of leadership—and if I was able to do this, you can too. And it wasn't until that experience that I could say yes, try this approach to team building, conflict management, decision making, adult learning—because I know it can work. I've seen it work. I believe that many of these strategies could have worked with the Humanities Team, had I known how to use them. I can now precisely name the conditions necessary for transformational teams to develop and attest to what's possible when they are in place. Finally, I can tell you that it's worth it—all the time and effort you'll put into honing your leadership skills, to designing agendas, to one-on-one conversations with teammates: there's little that can compare to the reward of bringing together a group of people in healthy relationships who do good work in service of children.

I am forever grateful to the members of OUSD's transformational coaches, a team that over two years included Noelle, David, Rafael, John, Anna, Manny, Angela, Han, and Michele. I think of these people as my professional soul mates. For our team to become what it did, it took their willingness to be vulnerable and courageous, to be fully present in mind and body, and to put forth their questions and contributions. They were my teachers in many moments.

What's in This Book?

This book is a how-to manual for building teams—how to design agendas, make decisions, establish communication protocols. Included are dozens of tools that you can use or adapt to meet your needs. All of the tools are available for download on my website (http://www.elenaaguilar.com). There you'll also find video clips demonstrating some of the strategies described in this book.

This is also a book about leadership. I hope to offer new perspectives on the kinds of leaders who can bring a group of people together to do hard work in service of others, work that in the process nourishes the minds, hearts, and spirits of all involved. I hope to offer you strategies to cultivate these adaptive qualities of leadership, including strategies to explore and boost your emotional resilience—the ability to understand your emotions, manage them, and use them to help you meet your goals and enjoy life.

Building teams requires us to hold both a macro and micro perspective. In this book, I'll take you back and forth between looking close up at elements including our emotions as leaders, meeting agendas, and language for difficult conversations and then back out to the macro structures including the alignment between teams in a school, leadership models, and organizational culture. For example, to offer suggestions for how to respond to someone who dominates a discussion, we need to look at the big picture and consider how systemic oppression impacts the development of trust among teachers and how communication and conflict are influenced by a school and district's adult culture. We'll explore how a leader can cultivate a team's emotional intelligence and how to deal with resistance. And we'll reflect on what leaders can say and do in the moment that someone is dominating a discussion.

If you lead groups that primarily engage in learning together—perhaps a professional learning community of coaches, a department, or a grade-level team—then the content of this book will help you establish the conditions so that adults can learn together. Over and over, we'll return to the conditions in which effective groups of educators work and learn together. There's a tremendous amount that you can do to create optimal conditions.

I encourage you to read this book in the order that it's presented because each chapter builds on previous ones. However, Exhibit I.1, located after the introduction, will help you identify where in this book you'll find answers to your most pressing questions about building teams. A tool you might want to look at and use right away is the facilitator core competencies (Appendix A). This tool identifies the set of skills that a facilitator needs and offers an opportunity to reflect on your abilities. Although my intention in this book is to boost the massive skill set laid out in the facilitator core competencies, you'll also find many resources to strengthen these competencies in my book, The Art of Coaching.

When I began writing this book, I asked one question of everyone with whom I came into contact in workshops I offered as well as through social media. I asked, “What's the hardest thing about coaching a team?” I received more than 1,000 responses and grouped them into the categories in Exhibit I.1. One of the most common responses was, “Dealing with one person who dominates conversations.” I remember when that was also my most pressing question about managing group dynamics, and even though I wish I could offer five easy steps toward managing the verbal dominator it has in fact taken an entire book to answer that question in a way that leads to lasting change. As I hope you'll see, my intent is to offer a transformational approach that will allow us to create the kinds of healthy adult communities that will be able to serve the social, academic, and emotional needs of all children.

Who is This Book For?

This book is for anyone building, leading, or facilitating teams—and for those who hope to build the capacity of others to do so. This is for instructional coaches, professional learning community facilitators, grade-level leads, data team coaches, department heads, committee leads, and anyone else in a formal or informal leadership position. This book could be considered the companion to The Art of Coaching since it expands on many of the approaches described for working one-on-one with another educator.

The Art of Coaching Teams will help principals who seek to be a lead learner, as described by Michael Fullan in his book The Principal (2014). Fullan makes a compelling case for principals to focus their energies primarily on creating cultures of learning in their schools and to work with teams rather than individual teachers. His argument is backed by research conducted by the highly respected educators Richard DuFour and Robert Marzano, who argue, “Time devoted to building the capacity of teachers to work in teams is far better spent than time devoted to observing individual teachers” (2009, p. 67). Principals, imagine if you could reduce the number of observations and one-on-one conversations you have each week and see even greater impact on student learning. I hope this book might help you strategically develop teams of learners.

Administrators in all corners of our education system build teams: instructional leadership teams, culture and climate teams, student behavior teams, curriculum teams, and many more. This book is intended for those site leaders, directors, managers, coordinators, and superintendents who seek to strengthen their teams. The material offered in this book is relevant across roles wherever someone holds an intention to bring a group of people into healthy relationship with each other to accomplish something in the service of children.

Toward a Beloved Community

I am often daunted by the amount of change we need to see in our schools. The progress we've made feels slow. So many children are not receiving the education they need, they aren't treated with the love and kindness that all children deserve, and they aren't in communities where they can thrive. I've been working in education for 20 years, and sometimes it feels like little has changed.

However, when I think back on the places where change was made and children got more of what they need and deserve, those were uniformly places where the adults at the site worked in high-functioning teams together and where there was respect and trust between teachers and between teachers and administrators. In those places, when storms hit (and they did), the communities of adults and children weathered them well and emerged stronger than before. At the schools where I experienced this, teacher and administrator retention was high, institutional memory was preserved, and a culture of learning was maintained. Above all, people liked coming to work—there was laughter and meaningful conversations and sharing of resources, experiences, ideas, and accomplishments. In these contexts, creativity was abundant and evident—teams collaborated on projects and initiatives in innovative ways and with admirable results. At those moments, from within those healthy communities, I observed firsthand the positive impact of good teams on our children.

My purpose in my work is to interrupt the inequities I see in our education system and schools. Every morning I awaken hoping to contribute to building equitable schools where every child gets what he or she needs in school every day. My vision for a transformed society extends beyond what children experience in school—I hope to contribute to creating a just society where acceptance and kindness exist between all people of all ages, to creating a beloved community. While providing children with a different kind of experience in school, I also strive to create the world that they'll one day be a part of as adults.

I know that we can't create what we want to see for children without also attending to the adults who work with them—we just can't separate these two things. At the same time, I recognize how building healthy communities of adults is also working toward a more expansive vision of society. For some, I've found that this notion poses a challenge that we can and need to work toward both ends at the same time: what our children need and the larger picture of transformation. We can't do one without the other. Building high-functioning, healthy teams is a means to an end—to being able to improve student learning—but it is also the end itself, because at the core of a high-functioning healthy team is a beloved community.

This poem, “An Elephant in the Dark,” by Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet and mystic, offers a metaphor for the potential of a team working well. It was brought to my attention by Anna, one of the coaches in the team I led, when she offered it on one of our Friday learning sessions. That day, I remember the wave of gratitude I experienced as I took in this poem's meaning: alone we can only see one part of the big something we can't understand, and if we each hold a candle, we might be able to see what we cannot even yet imagine. In that moment, I also recognized that had it not been for this team and Anna's presence on it, I may not have come across this poem. Anna offered us each a candle.