Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement: Collective Leadership Strategies for Schools and Districts

Meaningful improvement in schools and districts is just small shifts away. How can administrators and teachers work together in ways that lead to significant-and sustained-improvement over time? How can schools accomplish this goal without adding to the work of overstretched educators? This practical guide answers these questions with recommendations for small, practical, powerful shifts that educators can make to their daily practice.

In Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement, P. Ann Byrd, Alesha Daughtrey, Jonathan Eckert, and Lori Nazareno define collective leadership, a set of practices through which teachers and administrators work together to improve teaching, learning, and innovation. They explore the seven conditions of collective leadership and their corresponding shifts that, when effectively implemented, make a difference:

- Adapting, not adopting, a shared vision and strategy,

- Building co-ownership, not buy-in, through supportive administration,

- Mindfully aligning resources and capacity,

- Developing supportive social norms and working relationships to build culture and continuity,

- Growing shared influence authentically and organically,

- Creating an orientation toward improvement, and

- Structuring an intentional work design to support sustainability.

The authors share stories of real schools and districts that have implemented the shifts and provide useful tools that educators can use as they begin their own efforts. Both informative and inspiring, Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement supports leadership work that will advance how administrators and teachers collaborate, learn together, generate solutions to longstanding challenges, and make those solutions stick over time.

P. Ann Byrd serves as Executive Director and Lead Strategist for SC TEACHER, a research and resources initiative housed in the University of South Carolina's College of Education. Having formerly served the leadership team of Mira Education (then the Center for Teaching Quality, or CTQ) for 17 years as well as spent 13 years teaching high school, her work continues to be grounded in activating the collective power of educators to propel impact and advance the profession. Byrd earned her doctorate at the University of South Carolina in 2007.

Alesha Daughtrey serves on the leadership team of Mira Education, accelerating partners' work to design, implement, and sustain strategies that build collective capacity in schools and P-20 education systems. Over the last 10 years, the team has supported more than 100 other leadership teams at the school, district, and state levels to craft teacher leadership systems, redesign supports for principals and leadership teams, improve professional learning and coaching, and develop effective and inclusive approaches to leading complex change. Before coming to Mira Education (then the Center for Teaching Quality), she served in a range of roles as a community organizer, grant maker, policy analyst, writer, and advocate, which continue to inform her approach to transforming education.

Jonathan Eckert is the Lynda and Robert Copple Professor of Educational Leadership at Baylor University. He came to Baylor with more than two decades of experience in education, including 12 years of teaching near Chicago and Nashville. After completing his doctorate at Vanderbilt University in 2008, Eckert was selected as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education. Previously, he was a professor at Wheaton College for 10 years. He is the author of Just Teaching and Leading Together. Eckert has also written and cowritten books, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and papers that draw on his more than 10 years of collaborative research and evaluation work with the Center for Teaching Quality (now Mira Education).

Lori Nazareno is the Design Lead at Mira Education. She is a former science teacher with 25 years of experience at the high school and elementary school levels. During this time, Nazareno led a team of educators that designed and launched a collectively led school in Denver that served some of the district's most historically underserved students and families. She has National Board Certification in Science for both Adolescents and Young Adults and Early Adolescents. She served six years as a member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards board of directors, was a member of the National Education Association's Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, and served on the Teacher Advisory Council for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.