Team Building Learning Community

1. CollaborationCollaboration
Building TeamBuilding Team
By Michele PinnockBy Michele Pinnock

2. The School as a
Learning Community
• Vision - provides a sense of direction. What the school
stands for
• Values - provides the 'rightness' of the Vision
• Leadership - provides focus, courage and empowerment
• Clear Expectations - allows trust delegation and self
appraisal
• Teamwork - creates consistency and utilizes collegial
creativity and intelligence
• Continual Quality Improvement - growth against agreed
expectations
Bruce Hammonds

3. Creating A Learning
Community
• Establishing trust results in open communication, mutual
respect for people and opinions, and an eagerness to
participate.
• Developing common beliefs and attitudes will help create
productive teams which experience less conflict.
• Empowering team members will help them feel more
ownership in decisions that are made and more
responsibility in carrying out those decisions.
• Effective meeting management will improve the quality of
the meetings and of the decisions that are made.
• Providing feedback about team functioning is essential for
the team to improve its effectiveness.

4. Establish Trust.
• It is difficult to trust someone you do not know and
impossible to work collaboratively with someone you do
not trust.
• Trust affects all aspects of human behavior and is
especially evident in team work.
• When there is trust among team members, it is evident
in the way they treat each other.
• Trust among team members results in open communication, a
mutual respect for people and opinions, and a willingness
(even eagerness) to participate.
• Trust helps team members to see conflict both as inevitable
and as constructive.

5. Building Trust
• Trust builds slowly as people share parts
of themselves with others.
• Trust is crucial to the success of a team
and increases proportionately as the team
moves through the developmental stages.
• Trust must exist before there can be
honest feedback.

6. Develop Common Beliefs
and Attitudes.
• Effective teams must develop common beliefs
and attitudes.
• Less conflict will occur and a more productive
team will be developed if this unity of purpose
is created.
• An effective team needs to have a shared
understanding of the school's vision.
Conversations about the school vision are
essential for a team to develop a common
understanding.

7. Empower Team
Members
• Every team member should feel the
group has the knowledge and authority
to make important decisions.
• Team members must also be prepared to
assume responsibility for the decisions
that they make.
• Empowerment require that team
members assume various leadership
roles.

8. Empowerment
• reflect on empowerment and have
them share a story describing a
situation in which they felt
empowered. After everyone has had
a chance to reflect, ask each member
to list attributes of empowerment.

9. Effectively Manage
Meetings.
• Meetings ought to have a positive
purpose
• Persons involved ought to have roles

10. Provide Feedback About
Team Functioning
• Feedback is one of the best ways to
improve the effectiveness and
functioning of a team. Time should be
scheduled at the conclusion of each team
meeting for the team to reflect and
evaluate its performance. The group
members need to process how well they
did on achieving their task, as well as
how well they did interpersonally