The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Ventura: Hey Ross, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Real pleasure to have you here and talk about Achievement Teams. And I wanted to start here with just this broad question. What's the big idea of this book,

Steve Ventura: Yeah, the book is about implementing a collaborative protocol that has a little bit of consistency to it. So it wasn't a book that was trying to replace the term professional learning community. We think it's something to do in a professional learning community, but it's a four step process that guides teachers through specific steps to analyze assessment results and then reflect on their practice.

So at the end of the meeting, we should be appropriating new knowledge about [00:01:00] teaching and learning, not maintaining existing knowledge, and then During the meeting, sensitively challenging current thinking and practice. So it's supposed to just enlighten people and actually make them attracted to collaboration as opposed to, well we have this 45 minute meeting time, what are we supposed to do?

So we added a little some procedure.

Ross Romano: Right. And so, uh, and we will talk a lot about creating effective collaboration, right? And I'm sure most of our listeners can understand from experience or from intuition how Ineffective collaboration is a bad thing. It, Headaches. It's frustrating. It doesn't produce any results. It causes a lot of friction.

But I wanted to kind of set the foundation before we get into creating effective collaboration for just how critical do you believe collaboration is? Period, right? Before we get into making that collaboration work well, but how critical is the idea of collaboration among educators in generating student results [00:02:00] versus things be being less collaborative, more independent?

Steve Ventura: Yeah, well, I we watch some people work in individual silos, so they kind of limit their sharing of ideas. We think that collaborative learning and achievement teams or PLCs provides a platform for teachers to share ideas. and to learn from each other. There's a lot of experiences there. And of course when we share ideas, it leads to improved teaching practices.

So there's better outcomes for students. One of the reasons why we got into the book was to actually increase the exchange of collaboration, not just meeting. So I think collaboration is also a reflective piece, Ross, where people should be actually reflecting on the impact they're having, not just grading assessments, and then determining if some kids get it and some kids don't.

I think what we really should be doing, the power of collaboration, is to identify the areas where we need immediate implementation, and that actually could implement positive [00:03:00] changes in the classroom. So there's so many benefits, and there's billions of books written about it. But I think a school that has a strong collaborative protocol, tends to have higher student achievement.

I mean, we see this with our client schools all around, and we think this is likely because teachers are constantly learning and refining their practices, so they're better able to meet the needs of their students. So many advantages to get together, but ultimately the research around collaboration suggests that it positively impacts student achievement.

We wrote the book because we discovered a gap between what the research says And how collaboration is actually implemented.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah, and I would imagine you could. Certainly describe more about that research, but you'd see more consistency of higher student achievement across. I'm sure in a school with less collaboration, there might be pockets of high achievement where there is maybe a highly effective educator and other pockets where there's more inexperienced [00:04:00] teachers and students aren't doing as well, or there's just there.

You know, everybody has certain insights, strengths, things they're best at, things they might see, miss and sharing that and developing that collective efficacy is not only about raising the ceiling, but raising the, right, and having every student have access to that collective expertise.

So we can get more into that and the, so the extended title or the subtitle of the book is How a Better Approach to PLCs. Get improved student outcomes and teacher efficacy. You know, what are some of the causes generally of ineffective PLCs, which again, a lot of listeners maybe have experienced these.

Maybe they hear the term PLC and it kind of they twitch. But you know, what are some of the things that typically come up when we have PLCs that really aren't? aren't working.

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Steve Ventura: I think this is such a great question because I think what happens with PLCs is that it's a buzzword that's literally lost its meaning. This is why teachers cringe when they hear it [00:05:00] because they get, oh gosh, here we go, we have to collaborate again. But there's no structure and honestly, Ross, if it's not explicitly led by the school principal or some sort of administrator, Then it becomes an implicit initiative where people just try to fill in the gaps because they think this is what people want, but what we've discovered with the framework we've introduced is, this helps overcome these ineffective meetings where there is no protocol to follow.

There's not a beginning, middle, or an end of the meeting. Nobody leaves with anything new by the time they conclude the meeting, and many people conclude that it was a waste of their time. They'd rather be prepping with other teachers, I mean, rather be prepping in their classroom. Instead of meeting collaboratively, and so that's the biggest gap we see right now is just the lack of clarity from whoever really wants to have this in their building.

So we work closely with leaders to like, listen, you have to [00:06:00] lead this. It's not by chance. This is you monitoring and providing feedback to teams, but that's probably one of the biggest gaps we see with inappropriate or ineffective collaboration, the lack of clarity. There's no framework for it.

Ross Romano: Yeah, there's even some subtlety, I guess, semantically with the language around the name of the PLC versus a name like Achievement Team, where it's it's about the what or the who who's in the group versus what's the group supposed to be doing, right? Is it about a certain goal or a certain thing you're trying to work on or is it just about the concept of collaboration broadly but of course, collaboration is.

evaluated toward its its end goal. How would schools right now Who they have PLCs or other similar structures and groups and maybe they're trying to determine, should we try something new? How would they self assess how they're doing and if it's working for them?

Steve Ventura: I usually think in terms of a self assessment of where they [00:07:00] are and where they need to be, we actually usually ask people, what do you think is a high functioning team? Like, what are the qualities that make up a very high functioning team? You know, surprisingly, Ross, what teachers will say is what they really want, but what they're saying is not what they're getting.

So when I ask them, like, what's the ideal team for you? Well, there's relational trust. See, it goes much deeper than just, like, meaning, like, there's relational trust. There's the ability to maintain persistence and try things again, and there's the ability of teams to actually share with each other and not kind of keep things inside.

And we think that in some of the meetings when they can get to this root cause analysis, it's very personally and professionally rewarding. But right now I think when people self assess where they are with collaboration, we usually show them some criteria for success. Like In your POCs, do you get to this?

It's so funny because I'll start off normally when I do a keynote, I'll say, well, let me [00:08:00] show you some teacher team essential actions, and I'll explain to them with a visual. Here they are. And then I asked them to just turn and talk and compare their current collaborative protocol to the one I just demonstrated.

They will automatically tell you where the gaps are. Some will say flatly, we're not even close. Some will say, we're kind of there. We're we're knocking on the door, but normally what I've discovered with teachers is they're extremely honest when you ask them, where are you in this kind of continuum of collaboration?

If you show them an explicit model, they'll tell you, we want to be there. We're not there.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah, that makes me wonder because we will talk about some of the structure and protocols for how to execute with these achievement teams. But when it comes to the preparation for. building them and then putting them into practice what that looks like and how much of it is evaluating and understanding past [00:09:00] practices, how much of it is reorienting beliefs how much of it is logistical,

Steve Ventura: Yeah. Well just in the more. The bigger picture when we work with our clients, there's usually, there has to be some prerequisite skills in place or knowledge before you just tell people, now go start collaborating. And typically, Ross I was a building principal, a teacher, a superintendent.

Normally, if you're going to collaborate, it has to be about something that can considerably accelerate achievement, if that's what the goal is, right? So, typically, An essential would be to prioritize learning targets and understand that you can't meet around every single learning target, but there are some that have more impact than others.

And this is where teachers and leaders have to be really good consumers about, well, what can we collaborate around this year that'll help our kids, but it'll let our students enter next year's grade level with a confidence and readiness to learn. So usually it starts off with. What's an [00:10:00] essential learning target that kids need right now?

And that is the driver. So once the essential target is discovered, then the teams immediately start unwrapping it before they start teaching it. And then off you go.

Ross Romano: Yeah, excellent. So getting into The goals here, and we talked about student outcomes, teacher efficacy, and that will come up throughout the process. One of the, I think, overall kind of ways to kind of, tie it together was, is evidence into action, right? Getting the evidence, evaluating the evidence.

putting it into effective actions. And so there's evaluating the data to eliminate what's not working, do something different. One of the first get on that, what's not working piece, right? Because I recently, I mean, this comes up a lot, but it just. We recently had Michael Fullen here on the show and that came up in with a lot of things that school leaders are doing too, right, where it's [00:11:00] like, there's a bias toward action, there's an expectation, you were brought here to do a job, so I want to see you doing it and that leads a lot of times to doing the wrong thing because we feel like we have to be doing something before we've really taken the time to understand, well, what's going to work.

Not only is doing things that's not working, just continuing to perpetuate. Ineffective results, but it's there's an opportunity cause because that's time and energy and effort and psychic energy, right? That's put into something that doesn't generate outcomes that could be better used. What's the importance of starting here with the data and I'm sure there's.

There's a piece of kind of data literacy, right, and how to collaboratively interpret data that may be a step beyond what educators are always doing because if they're not if this is not always the focus of their PLCs, it could be a little bit new.

Steve Ventura: you know, it, I just saw an article about the top [00:12:00] 10 buzzwords that teachers are getting tired of hearing. One of them was data driven. And so what Michelle and I, because she co authored the book with me, is like, we tried to minimize just assessing the And you led into this beautifully, where it's a more holistic approach to collaboration.

We do need a piece of evidence, Ross. We have to talk about something. Well, we might as well assess something that has extreme importance. But rather than spend most of the time organizing data, looking at data. What I think the majority of the meeting should be doing is reflecting on the practices that led to that, those results.

And then this is when we reflect on practice. I always tell teachers if you feel uncomfortable when you get data back that tells you your students aren't not making progress, that tells me that you're a high level teacher, like very efficacious, because in achievement teams, we just try to turn that discomfort into teacher actions that change the outcomes.

[00:13:00] So we want people to have a little bit of a nudge, like a little bit of, like, we're just not getting where we need, but with that kind of motivation and that kind of honesty, then we try to show people how to turn it around. But we, I started off very data driven, Ross, like, it's got to be data, and I discovered.

Not everybody has a passion for just data. People want to talk about other things besides it. So we do a short cycle assessment, seven to eight items just to get the conversation flowing. But the rest of the meeting is just analyzing this and then looking at how do we turn some of these gaps into better processes so we elicit better responses.

And I feel like it's much more accepted from teachers. When you show a little more empathy to them about how much of data they do have to go through, and so our whole goal is, yes, we want you to give a pre and post assessment, because we want you to compare the two, right? But we also want you to talk about your own [00:14:00] advantages and disadvantages in terms of how much time you have.

When does this make the most sense to implement and will it truly add value to the way you collaborate? Those are some of the things that we try to do with our clients now instead of just saying, you know You're gonna give a pre assessment. You're gonna analyze the data and then we're gonna judge you.

Ross Romano: Right.

Steve Ventura: Completely moving away from that.

Ross Romano: right. And I mean, it's in all kinds of settings, right? I mean, some of the big pieces around data are. Is it asking the right questions in the first place? So whether or not it's accurate or valid, I mean, is it accurate according to something that really matters and something that we should be assessing?

Then is it contextualized? Do we actually know how this data fits into the big picture in our practice? And then can I do something with it? Is it, or is it just spitting out a result and okay. In that way. Very similar to feedback, right, [00:15:00] where when we talk about feedback and particularly school leader to teacher feedback, if it's not actionable, and it's not based on, okay, well, here's a couple ideas, then.

It's not really worth giving because then it's just critical and it's leave it there and what's the end result and you know, I would imagine that's a big piece, let alone the overwhelming amount of data that sometimes can be out there and also the. Maybe unfair expectations about what can be done with it, or or what should be done, right, as the next step.

It's also maybe a skepticism around, is this data even telling us anything useful,

Steve Ventura: 100 percent agree. And I so as I, I feel like some teachers have a little data phobia because they've been burned by it so many times even as a new principal, I would go and rank order scores instead of the person when I work with leaders [00:16:00] now, and they want to know, like, well, what's the best way to lead this?

And my advice to them is if you're a leader, I'd love for you to shift your attention from focusing on teaching to more focus on learning. That's what we're really doing here. And when you do that, then you emphasize a separation from the person in the practice. I'd much rather have us talk about learning and the practices we use than focus on the teaching and the person that taught that.

And so these are some of the things that we try to get into when we get into achievement teams. But one of the things. I've noticed, too, about teachers is, i. e., this is my expectation, this is confession for me, Ross, here we go. My expectations for teachers was that they should be expertise in instruction, data analysis, and motivation.

It's not true. Like, in fact, what I found was, is the teacher who's a master in curriculum and instruction may lack emotional intelligence and those skills, right? And by contrast, a teacher who displays empathy, and social awareness [00:17:00] may not have everything lined up in curriculum and data. So to me, I think this is a complementary team.

It's the perfect, it's the perfect mix now. We have an environment where each person is empowered to bring their strengths to this meeting. And so we shouldn't just diminish people who aren't good at everything. I mean, there's got to be those pots of success for people. And then all of a sudden this increases the trust now.

Yeah, you don't have to be a master in everything. Let's share what you're good at and we'll combine it with everybody else's strength, then we have some good collaboration.

Ross Romano: right? And so that's it starts out with the evidence piece and that's part of a cycle, right? Evidence, inference, impact and cycle being keyword because it keeps recycling, right? It's not just a one way one time directional, but how do the, how does one lead to the next? How does that cycle look?

Steve Ventura: Yeah you know, the evidence, obviously, I mentioned before, thank you for bringing that up, the evidence comes from an assessment, not a test, [00:18:00] something that isn't graded, something that teachers want to know how are students doing with this particular skill or concept, and the evidence drives the rest of the meeting, because once we get it, then we start making inferences about what that data actually says, but the best part of the meeting, is when we get to the impact.

When we show we've got this arsenal of research based practices now, and we show teams based on visible learning research John Hattie wrote our forward, and I worked with Professor Hattie, we show people what has the probability of considerably accelerating achievement, and this is another reflection piece, because we show people what are the high yield strategies, some are new, some are not, some are very validating, but We never, you'll never hear us talk about homework and worksheets as a way to considerably accelerate learning.

It's a deeper than that. It's more engaging. And so the evidence piece drives the entire meeting. But [00:19:00] as I mentioned before, we don't want people to feel guilty about whatever the data yields. We want them to use that data. to improve practice and not worry about being judged. And so our other thing to teachers, it's very, it gets a little bit more difficult with our secondary teachers, but we tell people these assessments you're giving are not to be graded.

They're used for feedback on your practice. If you grade an assessment, it's academic malpractice. There's no reason why you should be giving kids a letter grade for you trying to determine how effective your teaching was. Does that make sense?

Ross Romano: Yeah. I mean, totally. And, and And I think that is You know, it's important for the students, of course, right? It's important for the teachers, too to understand that that it's iterative, that we're making an inference about what's not working or what would work better, and then testing that inference, right, and trying it and then evaluating again and [00:20:00] saying, did this work better?

Did it not? Do we need to try something new? And also viewing it as A relationship between educator and student, and not just placing a grader and evaluation on one or the other and saying, okay, you're an ineffective teacher or you're a poor student. And then you look, we need to find the thing that's working in our dynamic here.

What are the things that I can do to help you learn? What are the things what are the ways that you learn? A healthier mindset, I guess, of looking at it and amid all of course the various time pressures and accountability and all these things trying to maintain perspective on the fact that most things don't work the first time in the real world.

Steve Ventura: Exactly.

Ross Romano: And there is re, I mean, there's a lot of research behind this, right? With visible learning and what is some of that basis that kind of led into the way that you've structured the achievement team,

Steve Ventura: You know, I've had a, about a 14 year, 15 year career now in consulting, and I [00:21:00] started off with another organization called the Leadership and Learning Center that was founded by Dr. Douglas Reeves, a great mentor of mine, and we ran around the country doing something called data teams. And data teams was very data based and I loved it because I was a very concrete sequential person and I delivered it that way.

But when I moved over to Corwin Publishing and started learning more about visible learning, I became one of 25. Certified Visible Learning Trainers, I discovered that even though John Hattie's work comes with a ton of criticism and he always responds to it, there was, there were super factors within that research that makes sense to embed in collaboration, like goal setting, like collective efficacy, like, multi tiered responses to learning.

And so the book was based on John Hattie's work. On some of these findings, and it wasn't like the top 10 Ross, it was like, well, what matches well with a collaborative protocol? And then we built in our [00:22:00] protocol around some of those findings because the probability was very high that they would make a difference.

Ross Romano: Well, excellent. So as we talked about earlier on, right? One of the main causes of ineffective PLCs being kind of a lack of structure, lack of beginning and end time and. clarity around what we're trying to do here. That's not the case here with the Achievement Teams, right? There is a structure, there's a protocol, there's a step by step approach.

Talk me through that a little bit, how that's set up how those steps are designed and kind of how they fit together.

Steve Ventura: Absolutely. So, the first step is organizing the assessment results. It's not analyzing, it's just organizing the assessment results by the teacher selecting cut scores, like who's excelling, who is progressing, who might be beginning. And, That is the least amount of time we should be spending on it.

We have the data, we're good at data, we organize it. That's the first step. It's just [00:23:00] collecting and charting your assessment results. We provide a lot of tools to help teachers do that. But step two is goal setting. I read so much research about goal setting for adults and students. Goals apparently motivate people to exert extra effort in line with a specific task.

So, we ask teachers to create a goal for, like, say, their grade level or content area between a pre and post assessment, and we show them how to do that. But we also ask them to start introducing self determination theory to their students, where they are actually taught how to set a goal between two assessments in time to try to predict how much more proficient they would like to be.

And it's funny because when students create their own goals, they may be much more motivated to attain those goals as opposed to somebody else who said, well, this is where you have to be. I think, let's say I gave a student 10 question assessment and they got three out of 10 correct. And then I asked them, now I'm going to be going over the results with you.

We're [00:24:00] going to be doing some teaching. You'll take the assessment again. How many more items would you like to be correct at? Where were you struggling? So they're reflecting and they pick a growth target and maybe they don't get 10 out of 10, right? You know, maybe that's the goal, but I always want students to see progress and achievement go hand in hand, but I love kids who go from.

Honestly, Ross, if they were beginning on the pre assessment and they got to progressing on the post, that is something to be celebrated. It's a short cycle, so we would need more time, but so step one is organizing the data. Step two is getting people to look at goal setting for both the adults and the students, right?

Those two steps. are about 20 percent of the meeting. 80 percent of the meeting should be around Step 3 and 4. We call Step 3 Baseline Evidence Statements, where teachers get into root cause analysis. We have specific questions for them to use. The prompts are there. We use a fishbone [00:25:00] diagram, but we want people to evaluate how much impact they're having by answering specific questions.

Once the questions are answered, it usually helps them determine gaps and strengths. The last step is selecting the strategies that should be implemented between the pre and post, the corrective instructional strategies, not teaching slower or louder, but implementing something that meets the gaps that they identified in step three.

And then that's it. And then they go out and implement those strategies and then post assess and that's a cycle.

Ross Romano: And and one of the things that I do think is interesting about it is, About the feedback and the goal setting steps, right? That there's goals for teachers and goals for students. And of course we know that the teacher's efficacy is the major impact on student outcomes, but it's setting specific goals for each.

Can you [00:26:00] illustrate a couple examples of what those goals might look for each of those groups?

Steve Ventura: Sure. So, say, let's say you and I are two 5th grade teachers. We're a small team. You and I are together. And you have 25 kids in your class. I have 25 kids in my class. And we gave the pre assessment. We decided we give the assessment. When we get the results back, we want to know. The percentage of kids that are, were proficient on that pre assessment, like who was, who's already achieving, and then look at the students that are not, and then you and I would decide, well, you know what, Ross, our current level of proficiency is around 26 percent out of these 50 kids, so about half.

Realistically, what would be an attainable goal? A SMART goal? Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely? What would be a realistic goal for us to set for ourselves so when we give the assessment two weeks from now, we could show progress? Now, we have an algorithm built in our spreadsheet, but most of the time, you [00:27:00] would look at your kids and decide who is most probable.

Of moving to achieving divided by the total number of your kids. I would do the same thing for me and we would develop a goal, say, from 26 percent to 42%. And that's for the that's for you and I to kind of look at. Well, where could we get our kids right? But with the student goals, we would give them a reflection worksheet.

a chart for them to fill out, to draw their own histograms to be aware of where they were on the first assessment, knowing that they get a second opportunity. And then goals have to be explicitly talked to students, taught to students, before they can actually write a goal, Ross. So it's not an inherent skill they have.

But we have kindergarteners who understand what a goal is and where they'd like to be, as well as seniors in high school and beyond. So the goal setting piece is very high effect, so much [00:28:00] research around it, and we wanted to incorporate it in the process. We think it's a huge piece.

Ross Romano: What so after the four step cycle here, what comes next? So at step four, you're selecting the high impact strategies that are targeted to the student needs and that you've identified, and then you're post assessing to see what did and didn't work. Yeah,

Steve Ventura: here's where it goes. So the majority of the work is done between the pre and post. So I always tell teachers, if you really want to get an accurate reflection on the first assessment, then pre teach first. That way we're assessing our teaching. So let's give them three to five days of teaching on this target, in addition to the other things we're going to be Wanting them to learn.

And then when we get the results back. You and I should be able to make some inferences based on our teaching, not just giving a cold assessment, like, well, here's ten questions, we know you don't know how to do any of this, we just want to make sure you can't do it ten times. I [00:29:00] mean, I'd rather introduce the content first, then assess it.

This is the bulk of the meeting, then we start assessing, like, well, how did they do after we pre taught? And I thought I did it pretty well, and apparently it didn't work. In that meeting is where the goals are set, where the strategies are selected, and where the root causes are identified. Then you and I implement the two or three strategies we decided would best meet the gaps.

Do that for two weeks or so, and then post assess. And I always tell teachers, you get the post assessment, and you get your results back. We have no more paperwork for you to fill out. It's reflection time. It's time for you to decide who needs more buffer instruction. But the majority of the work happens in between the two assessments, and after the second assessment, it's reflection.

So we have a few more things, and then they decide how successful they were on that cycle. I hope that makes sense, because we don't want to overcycle these teachers to death. We want them to leave with, like, Okay, next time we do this, we [00:30:00] understand this process a little bit better and that we're reflecting and really sharing with each other, how can we be more dynamic and how can we improve practice?

Ross Romano: right. And one of the things you referenced earlier with respect to teachers would say an effective team looks like, and one of the things that's critical to it is relational trust. How is that established through this process? And then how does it contribute to the success?

Steve Ventura: You know, it's huge to have them trust each other. We've looked at so much on data about relational trust. I was, you Berk and Schneider who found that schools that had strong levels of trust had a one in two chance of making significant improvements in math and reading. By contrast, they discovered that schools that had weak relationships had a one in seven chance of making gains. [00:31:00] Relational trust is again very holistic. We have a relational trust scale that we use from these two researchers. where the staff answers questions and then they're analyzed together about well here's where we are this is what we said about some of these items. It's a great starting point for the client schools that we work with that use it.

It is feedback straight up in your face. I mean it is literally telling you where the area is. But relationships usually are forged through expectations and norms and usually People who are collegial. I mean, it's really hard to say how do you and I like each other more. What I would rather have is how can you and I be professional together and work towards a common goal.

So sometimes I may not have you as my best friend, but I trust you and I like collaborating with you. I think it's it's something that we want teams to feel more comfortable about. [00:32:00] We also discovered that. Schools that were performing, teachers that were performing higher levels of achievement had leaders that were actively involved in the discussions that they were actively involved in.

So, leaders have an opportunity to build a lot of trust themselves by saying what they, by doing what they said. Teachers are very skeptic sometimes about new initiatives. Like, they'll just think like, oh, here's another pet project from the principal. So there's a lot of ways to introduce the trust piece, but I feel like.

Looking at the culture of the school pretty much tells us we always tell people don't start achievement teams if your culture is not healthy you're gonna, you're gonna have to address some other things before you ask people to collaborate.

Ross Romano: Yeah. And on that note, I did want to finish with kind of your case for the call to action on this how do you communicate to a leader out there that this is not just something you can do. It's something you [00:33:00] should do.

Steve Ventura: Yeah, well, we usually tell our leadership friends that to maximize the impact of collaboration would really take a cold, honest, hard look at what kind of progress you're making and then decide, basically, what are a couple of goals or visions that you have for your school that you're leading in terms of improving learning.

And I think when we work with our instructional leadership friends, we encourage them to learn with teachers, not sponsored learning for others. So we make a big point if we get asked to come in and work with schools. Honestly, Ross, we ask principals like, where will you be sitting when we do the training?

Because we need you in the room because the optics are huge. When you learn with your teachers, in fact, we know that Vivianne Robinson's research said that when principals learn with teachers, the effect of having the school improve is much, much higher. So, we help leaders try to assess where they currently are in terms of achievement, in terms [00:34:00] of collaboration, and then they in turn take a look at the process and say, okay, how can we roll this out step by step?

Step by step, so it's a pilot year and then a really good implementation year. I hope that makes sense.

Ross Romano: Yeah, excellent. So listeners the book is Achievement Teams. You can find it from ASCD or wherever you get your books. You can also learn more at SteveVentura. com. We'll put all those links below. Steve, anything else you're working on now or anything else listeners should check out?

Steve Ventura: Yeah, we just got approved for our our second book through ASED. The outline was been approved and it's leading the collective how to maximize teacher team essential actions. That's the title right now, Ross, you never know. But we're working and I would assume that maybe give me another year because with book publishing where we wait for feedback.

And then when we get the go ahead, we start writing, but we're excited about that. And the point of that book wasn't to be just like, well, you can't read this book if you didn't have achievement teams. This [00:35:00] is a little bit broader in terms of leading collective teams, but it doesn't mean you have to have achievement teams.

It's just a really good way to foster deeper levels of collaboration.

Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, maybe we'll hear from Steve here again when the new book comes out in the future. But listeners, in the meantime, yes, do check out Achievement Teams and the website and we'll put the links to all of those things below. Please also do subscribe to the authority. If you're not yet for more in depth author interviews like this one, we have new ones out every week and visit the podcast.

network to learn about all of our shows. Steve Ventura, thanks again for being here.

Steve Ventura: Thank you so much, Ross. This is an absolute pleasure.