Collective Teacher Efficacy!

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

The quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker, although there is some doubt that he ever said it) is simply saying that having the right culture will lead to doing the right things (= a strategy will emerge) whereas having a great strategy is useless without a culture capable of implementing it.

I have written before about Collective Teacher Efficacy (see here and here) but not in the context of a school culture that is capable of taking our education systems through the transformation that is slowly gathering pace.

The outline of this transformation has become clear. It is about individual learning – autonomy, competence and connection.  It is about the learning of the whole person – body, mind and spirit.  It is about learning collaboratively - to nourish creativity and innovation, build trust, trustworthiness and understanding.

The culture that creates this learning environment for students will create these learnings for the adults, too. The reverse is also true, a culture that creates these learnings for adults will create them for students. That is the meaning of the observation that Individual Teacher Efficacy rises as Collective Teacher Efficacy goes up.

Anders Zorn - 1860 - 1920 Swedish Impressionist painter

We learn best as adults when we feel valued and we can regularly exercise our strengths.  We feel valued when we have deep, reciprocal relationships with our colleagues.  We can regularly use our strengths when we have some measure of freedom over how we go about doing our work and we have access to feedback that indicates our level of competence and points us towards greater competence.

This is a culture of performance and of learning. This is a culture that eats strategy for breakfast and raises student learning and outcomes sustainably over time.

Building deep, reciprocal relationships is the key to Collective Teacher Efficacy.

 John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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