We have all been there. Perhaps we are a newer teacher and our principal asks us to be on a leadership team. We both have had the experience in which our principals asked us to join the school leadership team and we found a spring in our step and thought that our leader saw leadership potential within us.

Peter, though, found out soon that being a part of the team was really just window dressing. He was given the message to sit and agree and be careful what insights he might offer, especially with parents on the team.

This is not a new experience for many teachers, regardless of whether they are rookies or veterans. Schools and districts often tout collaboration as a cornerstone of their culture. From school improvement committees to professional learning communities, teams are positioned as vehicles for shared leadership and collective growth.

Yet, despite these messages of collaboration, many educators, even leaders themselves, find participation in these teams frustrating, disempowering, or simply draining. For example, the two of us are often called into districts to focus on instructional leadership with principals, and the districts that excel at fostering instructional leadership in others are the ones that model what they want to see in schools. In these latter kinds of districts, school leaders may be mandated to join committees, but they feel they have a voice in the team process.

Too often, leadership teams are designed to foster collaboration but end up leading to disengagement. So, how do we turn it around? Some clear and easy steps to increase engagement on the part of teachers or leaders is to:

• Define roles
• Foster agency among members
• Understand power dynamics
• Foster connection rather than cliques
• Focus on workload

Clear Roles and Expectations
One of the most common frustrations educators face on teams is a lack of clarity about their role. When people are invited to the table, they need to have a clear understanding of why they were selected, what they are expected to contribute, or how decisions will be made.

Meetings may occur regularly. Those regular meetings need to have a clear agenda, success criteria, and process for input. We have both helped create teams where members know why they are on the team and what role they are supposed to play.

A teacher needs to know they are there to offer solutions, they are a representative for their grade level, and they have ideas that are valuable for the success of the team. This will help ensure the team doesn’t have ambiguity and will help prevent disengagement. Not only will teams look collaborative on paper, but they will have authentic participation in practice.

Psychological Safety and Agency
Even when roles are defined, many educators feel hesitant to share their honest perspectives within a team. What can turn this around? Engaging in effective practices of psychological safety, which is the belief that one can take risks, like sharing alternative ideas or asking critical questions, without fear of retaliation or alienation.

In education, power structures, which are common among school and district teams, can make psychological safety fragile. It’s important for leaders, whether they are at the district or building level, to foster an atmosphere where members of a team can respectfully challenge each other without a concern for the other shoe to drop. Challenge can bring about deep reciprocal learning.

Consider Power Dynamics and Leadership Presence
Leaders have status. Even their offices have status. Everyone remembers being called to the principal’s office! Both of us understood that as building leaders, and, in Michael’s case, as a district leader. We made it a common practice to go to teachers’ classrooms to have discussions because they often found comfort in their own classrooms.

When we work with teams, we find that the other members of the team wait for “what the leader thinks” before anyone else speaks up. Or they might quickly rally behind a leader’s idea, not because they agree but because they assume disagreement isn’t welcome. In these moments, collaboration gives way to compliance, and that creates a subtle erosion of the team’s purpose.

As leaders, understand the role of status. Great leaders raise the status of those around them. Provide opportunities for members of the team to share their voice, whether it is through sharing their ideas at the meeting, creating sketch notes with their interpretations of the topics discussed at the meeting, or providing time to reflect through the use of protocols.

Identify Challenges to Inclusion Within the Team
Even when formal power structures are absent, informal hierarchies emerge. Teams can be at risk of developing micro-cliques, which are small groups that form alliances, establish inside jokes, or make pre-meeting decisions that others aren’t privy to. This can erode how a team functions.

When Peter was a school principal, he asked a parent if she would consider attending the next PTA meeting. The parent answered, “No. The PTA is for the popular parents, and they seem to be a closed group.” He was shocked and asked the parent to reconsider. She came to the meeting, and one of the regular attendees made an inside joke. Instantly, Peter saw what the hesitant parent meant.

They identified the behavior that made them a micro-clique and began working on getting rid of those behaviors so they could be more inclusive to new members. Effective teams find methods to call out negative behavior through the use of norms or expectations.

Consider the Role of Burnout
Over the years, there has been an abundance of research showing that the workload of teachers and leaders has increased. The two of us work with teams, teacher and leadership teams, using cycles of inquiry. We engage in the following:

• Define a problem of practice focused on student outcomes
• Create priorities based on that problem
• Engage in joint work through defining theories of action
• Highlight leading and lagging data that teams can collect and use that matches with their theory of action

Through that process, we also define which data don’t need to be collected anymore or what strategies or initiatives no longer need to be used. De-implementation is the process of “abandoning existing low- alue practices (van Bodegom-Vos L et al.” Impactful teams do not just focus on new strategies to engage in but consider strategies that no longer serve students and can be let go.

Rethinking Team Culture
Teams are meant to be the vehicles for school improvement, so their design and facilitation must foster clarity, agency, equity, coherence, trust, and follow-through. Too often, people want team meetings to go away, but what effective teams understand is that those times they meet are opportunities to learn from one another, build shared purpose, distribute power intentionally, and ensure all members have a voice.

In our meetings, we ask: “Whose voices are missing? How are decisions really being made? What barriers keep people from participating fully? How are we closing the loop between planning and implementation?” So many teachers and leaders are looking for ways to connect, and teams meetings can provide an important opportunity to connect and have impact on student learning at the same time.