4. Cohesive Staff

"Cohesion is defined as the degree to which teachers agree with each other on fundamental and organizational issues" (Fuller and Izu, 1986).

When a staff has a high level of cohesion, it increases the likelihood for them to have effective consistent collaboration with each other. This collaboration is an essential foundation for building the perception of collective efficacy among their fellow staff members (Donohoo, 2017).

Transcript for Recording

An important step to building Collective Efficacy is building a cohesive staff. In order to build a cohesive staff, focusing on team-building strategies is essential. This includes providing opportunities for teams to build a high level of trust to encourage collaboration with each other, which includes meaningful dialogue that will challenge each other's thinking and building connections with each other to find a common goal for their students. The information on this page outlines how it is designed to help you better understand what cohesion is and strategies for building and reining cohesive teams. The ASCD article recommends using data-based strategies to determine goals that are aligned with what students need and are likely to lead to strategies that have the most impact on student learning. Also included are strategies for refining teams and continuing to build connections. The video from E real outlines approaches to refining teams including focusing on either personality, activity-based or skill-based approaches to build team cohesion depending on team needs or desired outcomes for the team.

"The single most untapped competitive edge is teamwork" (Leadersharp Group, 2022).

Essential elements of highly functioning teams include the ability to trust one another, engage in conflict around ideas, commit to decisions, hold one another accountable and focus on achieving collective results.

Creating Cohesive Teams

Read this article from ASCD (2022), which includes four steps for building stronger, more collaborative teacher teams. The guidance includes beginning with data and using it to set SMART goals to encourage a unified focus for your team. Creating baseline evidence statements about the data requires the team to summarize data and make inferences that are likely to drive them to select high-yield instructional strategies. Achieving these steps comes from providing support and encouragement by praising the effort, not the achievement, ensuring teachers feel valued, and investing in teachers, not programs.

Refining Cohesive Teams

Watch this video from e-reel (2014), (7:56 minutes) which includes perspectives and approaches to refining teams once they are established. Making observations of your team, determining their needs, and reflecting on your goals for productivity can be helpful in improving team cohesion.

The three outlined approaches include:

• Personality Based approaches are designed to support team members in understanding and communicating with each other using such resources as personality assessments.

• Activity-Based approaches include arranging for tasks that include non-work-related challenges designed to build problem-solving, risk-taking, and trust-building.

• Skill-Based Team-Building approaches would focus on building workplace skills as well as skills such as conflict resolution strategies and providing clear and appropriate feedback.

To explore more resources about Cohesive Staff now, click this button. When you are finished exploring these resources, use the buttons provided on that page to return to this page to continue this module. If you prefer to wait until the end of the module to explore additional Resources, you will have the opportunity to do so.