Setting norms: A crucial step in collaboration

Working on setting up a collaborative culture and climate focused on learning?
Teachers collaborating in same-subject or grade-level teams within the school day?
Aligning to your mission and vision?
Focusing on aligning to the Professional Learning Community (PLC) 4 questions?

Sounds like you are on your way to a transformational change in your school.  For those of us on the PLC journey, we know it is not a destination, but reflective and result-oriented work that will change your culture from a focus on teaching to one of learning.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles, freedigitialphotos.com

One other extremely important step that is crucial to the success of your PLC journey is establishing norms to establish the conditions of collaborative work in same-subject or grade-level teams.

In Whole Child Blog, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Professional Learning Community," Steven Weber identified a lack of norms as one dysfunction of PLC teams.

He stated the "team norms are the foundation of a PLC." He continued, "When teams operate with norms, each member of the team understands how to communicate, how shared decisions will be handled, when to arrive for meetings, and how to professionally disagree."

In Learning by Doing, A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work, Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Thomas Many encourage schools employing PLC principles to have same-subject or grade-level teams set norms as one of the most important and initial steps in the collaborative process.

They state that as teachers work through a process to create explicit norms and commit to them, "they will begin to function as a collaborative team rather than a loose collection of people working together." (p.103)

Graphic by Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.com

At the beginning of every year, our same-subject teams each established norms.  Examples included each team member being on time and present, coming prepared, being active listeners, and adhering to the 4 PLC questions as part of each agenda, etc.

After several years of having teams set their own norms, some departments decided to create collaboratively common department norms for each same-subject team to use during our embedded collaboration time.  They also utilized these norms for departmental meetings.

In time, it became clear that our team/departmental norms, submitted via Google forms, overlapped.  As we met with our department chairs we then all decided to adopt common building norms for our embedded collaboration time as well as every other meeting we hold, including staff meetings, department chair meetings, department meetings and PLC collaboration time.

In order to accomplish this, each team submitted their team norms via a Google form which we shared with the entire staff.  We then asked each staff member to identify the norms most important to them.  At our next collaboration time, we then asked the teams to also identify the norms most important to the team. Eventually through a collaborative process, we culled the list of norms to 10 and then to between 3-5 norms.  We then had our department chairs submit the wording they wanted for the final wording.

We included the norms on every agenda and stated the norms at the beginning of each meeting.  The norms became who we were and how we did business.  In PLC work, teams will disagree.  As Steven Weber observed, "Some teams feel like they can operate without norms, but conflict or a dysfunctional team member usually highlights the purpose of norms."

In your PLC journey, it is important to continually remind everyone in action and words the alignment and adherence of all to the mission and vision of learning.

Establishing norms, publishing norms, and committing to norms is essential to transform your school through PLC principles and a focus on learning.