Not Easier, Possible
How leaders can help a budding learning community team
What Jonathan Taught Me
Jonathan, whose permission I have to use his name, is still one of my favorite people on the planet, so what you’re about to read is written through a lens of admiration and appreciation.
We were the prototyping team, in a 3rd year of prototyping. We had finally maneuvered the right people, philosophically, together, and we were building the plane as we flew. It was rough and wonderful, challenging and invigorating. We had a year full of iteration and reflection. It was awesome.
But one of the biggest reasons was that Jonathan was our champion. I think he secretly made it his mission to not use the word “No” around us. What he may not have known was that that single act was the biggest gift he could have given us for our hard work. Avoiding the absolute certainty of “no” gave us hope that our crazy, forward-thinking ideas were possible, or at least possible for consideration.
There were ideas we presented that were met with hesitation, reservation, or which needed a lot of contemplation, but when he’d return to us, he would articulate the knock-on effects that our idea had led to and that things weren’t possible… yet.
The report card was our biggest bugbear. If I was teaching Donna in the current math group, I wanted to report on Donna. In my voice. In my writing style. With my ideas unaltered. We wanted the cohort's report cards to be tweaked so that a math comment for student Donna could comprise all of the people who were instrumental in her learning. If 3 teachers served as her math teachers during that quarter, we wanted all of our voices articulated. We also didn’t want to burden Donna’s homebase teacher with the added complexity of having to read through all of our anecdotal notes and then summarizing a math comment for Donna… someone whom she may not have taught math to that quarter. Jonathan understood. He empathized. And he came back with news we were dreading. But what he also did was share the reasons why… and they went far further than our school’s LMS system could handle. The biggest reason we weren’t ready…yet was the parent piece. Having a child in our prototype grade level was a big enough challenge. If parents were also going to get report cards that looked different for the different children they had in elementary school, that was a step too far. For now.
What Jonathan did that was so impactful for us was that he thought about it. He reflected. He looked at the different angles. And then he explained the pieces of the puzzle that we were missing from our community classrooms. Pieces that only a leader would have to contend with.
We understood, then, that our vision was out of reach. But then he offered us a lifeline. “I hear that what we’re asking homeroom teachers to do is time-consuming. So I have a proposal.” And then he gave us another gift. The gift of time. Each teacher would be subbed out for a ½ school day to work on reports. Uninterrupted work time where each of us could read through all the data on a student, and synthesize thinking from our colleagues.
Jonathan gave us all what we needed the most. Time and space to be heard and a thoughtful solution that didn’t add to our workload, but tried to make it more manageable.
The Timeline Problem
Every single decision a learning community team makes—how to meet, how to plan (alone or in clusters), how to teach all the kids, how to report, how to group—has to be renegotiated from scratch. These are time-consuming, sometimes confounding and challenging questions that the adults have to work through so they look seamless to the students. The time suckage of this problem is not teacher inefficiency but the actual work of having to unwind years, sometimes decades, of solo-teaching habits.
I think some leaders think that shifting to a learning community can happen as speedily as adopting a new curriculum or adapting to a new school schedule. But it’s not. The learning community model is asking teachers to relearn all they’ve learned and to do it with a bunch of other professionals who are relearning at their own pace.
What Goes Wrong
In my experience at schools adopting a learning community model, there seems to always be a teacher who says, “this is too hard” or “I don’t think this is right for kids.” At this point, it’s tempting—human, even—for a Principal to step in and support the educator in front of you instead of the research behind this model. I know this from experience. And it wasn’t weak leadership. It was empathetic leadership. But it also challenged, sometimes undermined, all the work that was being done for students. I would encourage you leaders to be like Jonathan. Listen with reflection. And return with an idea that helps move things forward.
The Research: Collective Efficacy
By now, you’ve heard me harp on about John Hattie's collective teacher efficacy research. It’s the research that is often cited behind learning community teaching models because of its comprehensive nature, showing that the shared belief of educators that together, working in coordination, can positively impact student learning. Even more than individual teacher skill. When a team member pushes back hard on the model or says it doesn’t match with their beliefs about education—remind yourself, and them, that this isn't a philosophy you're asking them to trust… It’s the highest-leverage factor available at the school, and you’re asking them to be part of it. It’s also the first thing that disappears when the loudest voice in the room says, “No” or “I can’t” or “I don’t believe it” because everything is eroded from there.
DO / STOP / UNDERSTAND
Leaning on my experience with Jonathan and other inspirationally supportive administrators I’ve worked with, here’s my suggestion of what you should Do, Stop, and Understand about teams who are building the learning community model in your schools today.
DO: Ask what the team actually needs and try to figure out a way to make it happen.
If it's a PD day to work through agreements, make it happen. If they need specialist times aligned so they have more co-planning time together, do it. If you can’t find them time this year, be creative: release them from duty obligations or individual goal setting (team goals are pretty awesome).
STOP: Adding to their plates
We know you had the best intentions to keep things manageable this year, but like all years, strategic planning or curriculum overhauls take over. Figure out a creative way to remove some of these barriers for your teams that are building the learning community model. They aren’t trying to do less work. They’re prototyping something big. And they need time to become efficient. So figure out how to take a few initiatives away from them.
UNDERSTAND: The work you’re asking them to do is hard.
You're asking a team to relearn elementary school itself. This is a big ask. It’s a heavy lift. And they may not know what their next steps are. Here's a place to start, coach: the ECIS Café protocols (thanks Nancy Lhoest Squicciarini)—Clarity, Connection, Consistency, Confidence—practical, facilitator-ready strategies for exactly this moment. It will also help the team figure out what “C” they really need to focus on first.
If there's any one concept I can leave you with, it's the thing Jonathan embodied every time he came back to us with a solution instead of a no: "I'm not going to try and make this easier. I'm going to try to make it possible."
*names changed to protect anonymity
Note: This post was edited with AI as an assistant to refine structure and readability. My ideas, voice, and words remain intact.
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