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Christine M. Anderson
Leading a Narrative of Collective Efficacy
Now more than ever, leaders need to be purposeful in fostering positive school culture. Although current conditions present a unique set of hurdles, leaders can build and reinforce school identity and culture by intentionally discussing positive collective efficacy contributions. One way to do this is through the use of narratives. Everyone in the school creates narratives to find meaning in processing positive and negative experiences, and they are communicated continuously through words and actions. Especially during challenging times, teams look to their leaders’ narratives to help them process and resituate adversity as well as to inspire future courses of action. Both leaders and teachers can use narratives in their practice to purposefully strengthen the school climate and culture.
The idea of using narratives is not new. In fact, people have been using narratives as long as they have been using language itself, and the brain has evolved to seek narratives to create meaning in interconnected experiences. Anthropologist Clifford Gertz suggests that “culture is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Even in schools, narratives are cultural artifacts that speak to our emotions as well as have the potential to build confidence and hope while navigating uncertainty. The current instability can make it challenging to find the traditional hallmarks of success in the classroom, and the search for significance can be isolating in the absence
of a shared narrative for understanding struggles. However, when teams process hardships together, the narrative they generate has the potential to foster belonging (Bavel & Packer, 2021).
Collective Efficacy
Every school has collective efficacy beliefs. They are evidenced through teachers’ confidence in their collective ability to overcome obstacles and to have a meaningful impact on student leaders can weave together interpreting past experiences with present practices to craft a narrative that supports positive culture and student learning even as the environment continues to evolve. Moving past just the mere idea of collective efficacy, a collective efficacy narrative is a story an interdependent group purposely creates about their identity and the significance of the obstacles they have overcome with intention (Anderson, 2021). The goal of a collective efficacy
Collective efficacy is essentially a narrative people tell themselves about their team’s identity and what they are capable of in the future based on past experiences and present practices.
learning (Tschannen-Moran & Barr, 2004). Positive collective efficacy can accelerate the learning gained in a typical year by as much as three fold (Hattie, 2016). Collective efficacy is essentially a narrative people tell themselves about their team’s identity and what they are capable of in the future based on past experiences and present practices. The stories people tell and reshare with others create cultural vibrations throughout the whole organization that are felt all the way from the front office to shaping interactions among teachers and students. By channeling the components of collective efficacy, narrative is to make a team’s identity and competencies explicit as well as to reflect optimistically on where they are capable of heading next.
Conditions that Ground a Meaningful Narrative
Collective efficacy is not an accident when it is present in schools. Donohoo and colleagues (2020) synthesized a framework for environmental conditions that support collective efficacy, and these conditions can be conceptualized in two categories: multidirectional empowerment and habitual practices. Both contribute to efficacy narratives
by pointing out and reinforcing specific research-based relationships and systems in the school that support collective efficacy beliefs.
Multidirectional Empowerment
Teachers and leaders jointly exert multidirectional influence throughout an organization through shared purpose, cohesive practices, and iterative learning. Collective efficacy is strengthened results in student learning (O’Leary, 2021). The work of empowered teachers is the embodiment of the school’s collective efficacy narrative.
Collective efficacy narratives draw on multidirectional empowerment when they champion teachers’ contributions to bolster student learning. It also reserves space for every teacher to have membership in a shared vision.
The most important thing supportive leaders do is to empower teachers through reinforcing high-yield learning practices within teams; elevating the contributions of others; and creating space for teachers to enact agency in the school (Donohoo et al.; Dewitt, 2022; Hattie & Zierer, 2018).
through a partnership among empowered teachers and supportive leaders. The most important thing supportive leaders do is to empower teachers through reinforcing high-yield learning practices within teams; elevating the contributions of others; and creating space for teachers to enact agency in the school (Donohoo et al.; Dewitt, 2022; Hattie & Zierer, 2018). Teachers are empowered when they trust and rely on each other because they believe that their joint actions produce meaningful Narrative Considerations: • How/when do teachers have space to influence school-level decisions and processes to support learning? • How is teacher influence on learning and in the lives of students shared and celebrated?
Habitual Practices
Habitual practices that support collective efficacy occur when educators form shared mental models for what effective instruction looks like, collaborate in
meaningful evidence-based reflection focused on instructional improvement and high expectations for student learning, and share ownership over the direction of their work (Arzonetti Hite & Donohoo, 2021; Hattie et al., 2022). Habitual practices have maximum influence when teachers collaborate and reflect at regular intervals. They also benefit from the collective knowledge of their teams when they observe each other teach. As the pandemic continues, habitual practices are the support systems available for educators to overcome the present complications.
Leaders include habitual practices in their collective efficacy narrative when they celebrate and provide time for genuine collaboration among teachers. This is more than sharing resources for an upcoming unit. It is when leaders give space for teachers to partner in goal-oriented work surrounding student learning and trust each other enough to engage in difficult conversations when gaps appear among words and classroom practices (Dwyer & Hiscock, 2019; Fullan, 2007). Collective efficacy narratives are effective when they share how the continual improvement of present practices lays the foundation for a compelling vision of the future.
Narrative Considerations: • What does effective instruction
look like and when is it shared and challenged? • What evidence of learning reinforces effective instructional practices? When is it deeply discussed, challenged, and celebrated? • How will everyone understand their part and importance in improving instruction?
Affirming Identity through Strength in Past Experiences
Collective efficacy narratives highlight key experiences from the past to affirm the team’s competence and fortitude to persevere in the face of adversity. When narrating key experiences, leaders are tapping into two sources of collective efficacy: mastery experiences and social persuasion (Bandura, 1997).
Mastery experiences are the most powerful source of collective efficacy beliefs and describe previous situations where groups experience hard-earned success such as teaming to redevelop and successfully implement curricular changes. Social persuasion occurs when credible people share their confidence in the team’s competence to meet a given challenge well. Moments of social persuasion can be powerful both as they occur and when reflected on.
Key moments are missed opportunities if leaders do not slow them down and
celebrate them as evidence of the team’s identity and capability (Heath & Heath, 2017).
Narrative Considerations: • What hard-earned achievements is your team most proud of? Why? • How has your team collaborated and innovated to get better? How was it celebrated?
Leveraging Counternarratives
Compelling collective efficacy narratives are not authentically crafted in isolation. Rather, they are co-constructed by listening to teachers share their stories and by interlacing narratives with reflections on collective experiences and practices. Co-constructing narratives reduces isolation and nurtures an inclusive culture. This includes highlighting competencies while simultaneously not denying adversities in an attempt to recolor current circumstances.
When counternarratives arise, they must be heard with care and empathy and their orators pulled close. When teachers share reservations, they are signaling trust. A critical opportunity opens for leaders in attending to concerns as one of the most dependable ways to inspire people is to listen to them (Hedges, 2017). Counternarratives help leaders examine their own blindspots as well as name feelings and recurrent themes associated with teachers’ experiences. They can also identify obstacles to student learning that may be cleared out of the way. Naming and jointly processing emotions and recurrent themes gives teams power over them (Brown, 2018). Leaders can only foster total belonging in their collective efficacy narrative when their vision validates feelings and experiences as real before attempting to pivot them (Tschannen-Moran & Tschannen-Moran, 2020).
Narrative Considerations: • What recurring themes and emotions are prevalent in jointly unpacking the counternarrative? • How can the counternarrative become evidence of strength and belonging?
Inspiring Hope for the Future
Especially in difficult times, educators show up every day for students, and they want to be inspired by the meaningfulness of their work. They seek to impact student wellbeing and learning because at some point someone cared for them the same way. Collective efficacy narratives cue team members to recognize how their purpose lines up patterns of competency and significance in their work. They provide a safety net for teams to be open to how current circumstances will leave school systems changed for the
better because, together, they found the strength and flexibility to adapt and overcome. Ultimately, school culture is influenced by narratives surrounding its ability to innovate and persevere. This even reverberates down to how teachers and students interact in the classroom. Nothing can be more important now than communicating strength and trust from overcoming hardships together to inspire a pathway forward. Collective efficacy narratives are a powerful way to accomplish this.
References
Arzonetti Hite, S. & Donohoo, J. (2021). Leading collective efficacy: Powerful stories of achievement and equity.
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Anderson, C. M. (2021). Collective teacher efficacy and its enabling conditions:
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Bavel, J. J. & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. New York, NY: Little, Brown Spark.
Brown, B. (2017). Dare to lead. Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. New York, NY: Penguin
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CA: Corwin. Dr. Christine M. Anderson has been a curriculum leader serving multilingual learners in West Aurora School District 129 since 2012. She also serves as adjunct faculty for the Teaching Diverse Learners graduate program at Aurora University where she coaches experienced educators in leading teams through the curriculum development, evaluation, and change process and in creating a culture of inclusivity and belonging in their classrooms and schools. She spent the early years of her career in education first as an instructional technology graduate assistant at UIC and then as a public high school ESL/ TBE, English teacher for students from all over the world. She holds a master’s degree in Linguistics from University of Illinois at Chicago and is a recent graduate from Northern Illinois University’s Educational Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral program. Her postdoctoral work focuses on bridging research, policy, and practice as a member of the Emerging Education Policy Scholars 2022 cohort. Her ongoing research endeavors include collaborations to make collective efficacy research more accessible and actionable for practitioners.
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