The Power of Efficacy

Resources our leadership program has used for PD and training at Linn-Mar.

Our teacher leaders engage in a variety of professional development.  Cognitive Coaching, the work of Pete Hall, Growth Mindset, Visible Learning—just to name a few.  The concepts often touch on the toes of each other. With all these resources at coaches’ and teachers’ fingertips, it can be overwhelming.  This week we took the opportunity to dive deeper into the connections that collective teacher efficacy has with Cognitive Coaching, Growth Mindset, Visible Learning, and the work we are doing in our schools at Linn-Mar.

To help promote discussion among our coaches we implemented a strategy known at chat stations.  This strategy is credited to the Cult of Pedagogy and an in depth explanation of how to use this strategy in your classrooms and schools can be found here.  At each of our chat stations coaches were given the opportunity to think and reflect on their own efficacy and the efficacy in our Linn-Mar Schools.  They answered such questions as:

What does efficacy look like and sound like? 

Who are the efficacious people in our lives? 

What might be the behaviors he/she exemplify that has impacted us in our work? 

What types of questions might help produce efficacious thinking in our schools?          

A final piece of the experience was to discuss this article, by Jenni Donohoo.

Some of the discussion that stemmed from this article was the belief that teachers have about how students learn and how teacher provide intervention.  We discussed the Six Enabling Conditions (Donohoo, 2017) presented in this article.

Six Enabling Conditions of Collective Efficacy

1.      Advance Teacher Influence

2.      Goal Consensus

3.      Teachers’ Knowledge about One Another Work

4.      Cohesive Staff

5.      Responsiveness of Leadership

6.      Effective Systems of Intervention

Our final question to our coaches was:  Which of these conditions do you have the

greatest influence over in your role as a teacher leader?  The responses varied from the

types of coaches and depending on the work they do in each of our ten buildings. 

This is a reflective question I plan to ask myself often, as a Program Coordinator.

If you have not read this article it is a short read and we highly recommend it.  The bottom line in all of this is:  Do you believe you have the power and willingness to make a difference in your students’ learning?  Because this article says Hattie’s research shows that CTE (Collective Teacher Efficacy) has three times more influence on student achievement.  It’s a no-brainer.  The way we believe and think about how we teach and how students can learn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—either positive or negative.