Elisa MacDonald’s first day as a teacher in the mid 1990s was unusual.
She had applied for a job with a public school in Boston but never heard back. That is, until the school’s secretary frantically called her, asking: “‘How fast can you get dressed?’ she asked me,” said MacDonald, recalling how she learned that she had the job. “That was my first day.”
The surprises didn’t stop there. Early in her first week, MacDonald was asked to lead a team meeting with unfamiliar colleagues and assigned to lead the group for the whole year. MacDonald was told to simply “slap an agenda together,” but she knew that wasn’t the best use of teachers’ time. As she led more meetings, MacDonald realized that team meetings needed a revamp—shifting from a boring, bureaucratic exercise to a space where adults could learn, practice new skills, and share experiences.
She wanted to reframe those gatherings to encourage “professional learning for continuous improvement” and focus on the outcomes of that learning. Would it have a positive impact on student achievement?
MacDonald distilled three decades of teaching and coaching experience into two books—The Skillful Team Leader and Intentional Moves—to help team leaders, teacher leaders, and principals turn meetings into professional learning opportunities for educators. MacDonald’s books were part of EdWeek’s ultimate PD reading list released in July.
“The [teaching] profession can be isolating, the demands overwhelming, so being a leader who can facilitate authentic collaboration in ways that actually shape you and your colleagues’ instructional practice is worthwhile,” MacDonald added.
EdWeek asked MacDonald how leaders can transform their team meetings.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve taught theatre, English, and been a literacy coach. How did you transition to writing books?
I was in the public school system in various roles, and then I started to do a little bit of consulting. I was being called for professional learning community work. What I started to see were real challenges ... I realized it’s your approach as a leader that’s going to really make the difference. And so, I started writing my first book, which was really about all the mistakes that I made and that I saw others making. I would collect all the leadership questions every time I had training or when I’d coach others. Those became the basis for my first book, The Skillful Team Leader.
Your book is centered on the idea that meetings should be reimagined. How can leaders do that?
We need to stop looking at teams as if they’re useful, or not. We also must look at the impact of that collaboration. Did that meeting make a measurable difference for kids? In the meeting, do we have evidence that there was some achievement for the students who are struggling, whom teachers are trying to target or serve? What are the learning outcomes for teachers? Is there a change in practice? When you start to shift your lens to both function and impact, that’s where great teams emerge.
The first thing I tell team leaders is that ‘You’re not facilitating an agenda. You’re not facilitating a meeting. You’re leading learning for adults.’
How can leaders optimize learning conditions?
Everyone’s given the same ingredients, and everyone must produce the same outcome. Two people can follow the same recipe, have the same ingredients, but how things turn out are going to depend on the leader and the team that they’re with.
As a school or district leader, you’re going to think about who you are bringing together. Oftentimes in teams, there’s not a lot of choice there. It’s dictated by schedule. But you can make decisions about, for instance, is the math interventionist available for a grade-level meeting about improving math scores?
Leaders also need to think about when the team meets, how frequently, the duration of each meeting. If I really want teams to engage in collaborative inquiry, which involves looking at data and maybe even some peer observations, I need to make sure that teams are meeting frequently enough that they can move through phases of collaborative inquiry.
How can leaders ensure that teams pick specific outcomes?
The most important condition [for teams] is setting very clear priorities. It might be some measurable things like we’re going to improve X points in reading on the state test. But it could also be about improving inclusion or co-teaching models. That gives everybody something to go by.
How can leaders invite productive dissent in a team? And how do you stop that from spilling into negative conflict?
Leaders must understand their relationship with conflict ... When you have permission to, invite dissent.
When everybody says yes, you’re not done. That’s when you can interject an alternate viewpoint, an extra data point. So, it’s not my opinion versus your opinion. We’re looking at the data source, and we’re having a conversation about the data that we’re seeing together. We’re arguing with the data point.
The other thing to do is establish clear protocols about how the team dissents. If we’re all working on a problem, different people are charged with thinking about that problem from a particular lens ... Protocol allows teams to know ahead of time [that] we are going to have disagreement. That takes the onus a little bit off the leader because they’re just following the protocol. Conflict is a necessary part of group learning, and protocols provide the initial parameters for people to feel safe with one another
