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

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Ross Romano: Welcome in everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast on the Be Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. I'm pleased to bring you a conversation today about PLCs, about what they should look like, how to make them more collaborative and more effective.

It's a topic we've talked about here and there, but we're going to I'm going to dive into some new angles of it here with somebody who knows his stuff. So my guest today is Dr. Chad Dumas. He is a Solution Tree PLC at Work Assessment and Priority Schools Associate and an international consultant, presenter, and award winning researcher whose primary focus is collaborating to develop capacity.

for continuous improvement. [00:01:00] Chad shares his research and knowledge in his books, including Let's Put the C in PLC, which is what we're talking about today. Chad, welcome to the show.

Chad Dumas: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Ross Romano: So there's some, you know, content shared in the book indicating that It's been over 50 years that educators, you know, school leaders have known that the key to improving student learning is getting teachers thinking and working collaboratively. And you know, it's, but it still isn't happening in most schools.

Wanted to kind of dive into that a little bit. And first start with. The specifics on, you know, what specifically does this educator collaboration do for student learning? What are the, the outcomes that we are expecting that we'd be able to achieve if we improve the PLC process?

Chad Dumas: Right, right, exactly. So, so PLC is, as you [00:02:00] know, as your listeners know like it's a concept, right? It's a culture of who a school is. And collaboration by itself is outcome neutral. Collaboration can be really powerful and improve student learning. And it also can be toxic. and decrease performance, right?

So just because a group of people is collaborating doesn't guarantee Improvement. It's what a team is focusing on that will, that determines whether or not it will achieve improvement. And so the example I might give is, you know, we've all been part of groups, whether it's a community or faith based or school based group, where we leave Any type of collaborative meeting and we go, Oh, you know, I don't know if I'm a better person as a result of that meeting.

You know, I, I just lost, I just lost an hour of my life, but I'm never going to get back, right? Like the so, [00:03:00] so just because you're in a meeting with other people breathing the same air does not improvement make, right? It's what we're focused on. And so those teams have to be focused on the right stuff.

Now, there also has to be a culture in the school that's focused on this collaboration that recognizes that it's a, it's a we mentality, right? None of us, I love that there's a quote from Rick DeFore and Bob Marzano, two of the, you know, most influential leadership educational experts of our time. They say that no single person, no single person has all the knowledge, skills, or talent to meet the needs of every child in his or her classroom or school.

Right? And that's a, like, if you just unpack that quote, no single person has all the knowledge, skills, or talent, like, no matter how much you know, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how much innate talent you might possess, none of us, by ourselves, can meet the needs [00:04:00] of every child in our classroom or school.

So it takes all of us, right? And so you have to have this culture that then is focused on the right work. (ad here)

Ross Romano: Yeah. Can you tell us about some of the, the evidence of this, some of the research or, you know, the other examples that you have that would illustrate or, or indicate that, in fact, right, that, that collaboration is effective and you know, that kind of proves that out.

Chad Dumas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my first book that you referenced, Let's Put the C in PLC and then the subtitle is The School Leader's Guide to to gosh, I just blanked on that. A school leader's, a school leader's guide, a practical guide, a practical guide for school leaders. Thank you. Sorry. One of those things where you say it or know it so well that you're just like all of a sudden blank.

So let's put the C in PLC. And so what. What that book specifically focuses on is the role of a school leader. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it's principal, they do have a role, but it also can be assistant principal, teacher team leaders, etc. And what, what it elucidates is 10 elements of what it takes to build this collaborative culture.

And it came from, I didn't invent these [00:05:00] 10 elements, I scoured the research and the field, because as you mentioned, right, like we've got 50 years of research, maybe more. That says, if you want to improve student learning, get teachers working together, focused on the right stuff, and it's not happening.

And so, what do we, what, what's the role of school leaders in making that happen? And so I identified 10 elements from Todd Whitaker and Learning Forward and Rick and Rick DuFour and Bob Aker and just the list goes on, right? And these are things that a school leader needs to know. To be able to build this collaborative environment, right?

Cause before you can do, you have to know, right? You know, Maya Angelou says, once you know better, you can do better. But if we don't know, we can't do better. So we have to have to actually know. And so there's those 10 elements. And one of them, one of those elements is teaming teachers for effective collaboration.

And that's what, that's what most people go to when they think about PLC. And actually you ask, you know, you ask any group of educators, What is PLC? They'll tell you [00:06:00] 99 times out of 100. They'll tell you it's a place, right? We go and we meet and they say it's a time. It's two o'clock on Wednesday afternoons.

They say it's a group. It's my third grade colleagues. PLC is none of those things. Those are, those are collaborative team times, which is the, of course, the team is the engine of the process, but the PLC is the culture of who we are. And so, I think it behooves us to think about, Yes, teams gotta have them.

They gotta be focused on the right work and we have to have a culture of and systems in place to make sure that we are truly creating a professional learning community. (ad here)

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. To some of those points, that's kind of one of the things I'm wondering about is in, you know, some or, or many of these schools that are not doing the PLCs, are there some [00:07:00] who think they are, right? And, but what they're doing is not, not actually what you would define as, you know, an effective professional learning.

Chad Dumas: yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, Rick DeFore wrote a great article on this and he referred to it as PLC light. Right? Versus PLC right? And I know you had Anthony Mohamed on your show recently, and he talked about like that was, that was his charge from Rick DuFour was, we got to get over this PLC light, and we got to get into PLC right?

And, and PLC light is yes we meet. You know, we might even have agendas and norms and hey we've got a Google folder that we store it right? Those are things that that are like necessary prerequisites. And that's not the work of a team that's going to improve the student learning outcomes, right? It's when we actually get into the vulnerability of reflecting on our practice, of looking at student results on a small [00:08:00] number of things, essential outcomes that we have a team back against the wall, By golly, we're going to make sure every kid learns these things and no excuses.

Like we're going to get it done. What are we going to do to get kids across that finish line?

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess I would generalize, you know, the, the instances where, where schools are doing PLC light or some, you know, some form of teams that's not actually, you know, really representative of PLC principals as maybe in those cases, kind of, you know, You know, lack of know how, more, more learning to be done around how to make those effective.

What are some of the other barriers that are preventing this from being more commonplace if we do have this history, you know, history of knowledge that it is effective? And, you know, one of the, the quotes in the book, it was a school principal who I think the way he described [00:09:00] it was that it's not that the teachers don't want to collaborate, but it's that there's too many nuisances that prevent them from doing so, right?

What are some of those, those nuisances or those? You know, whatever the hurdles are to enabling teachers to do this more consistently, more effectively you know, that, that you're kind of hoping that you can help them work through,

Chad Dumas: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, I think the, the biggest nuisance maybe if like, if you were going to say that this is the umbrella, of the challenges that me and my colleagues that, you know, I get to talk with about the challenges that we see in schools. If I would put all of those under one big overarching banner, I would say it's clarity.

There's a lack of clarity. And we know that clarity I think Doug Reeves would say, clarity precedes competence. So, before I can be [00:10:00] competent at something, right? Before I can do something well, I need to be clear about what it is. And so, in schools, I don't know, I don't think there's clarity. So that we can be competent and it begins with what is PLC, right?

So like when we, when we refer to a team as a PLC right now, right off the bat, Anthony Mahmoud would say you're confusing the heck out of everybody, right? So, so like, like, that's just like, let's just start calling teams, teams,

Ross Romano: Yeah. Right.

Chad Dumas: Because, because all of the work of the school, if it's focused on learning, It's if it's done together with a sense of collective responsibility, and if it's guided and, and driven by what happens as a result of that, right?

Our results. Those are the three big ideas. If we're focused on learning, we're going to guarantee learning. Every kid, grade level or above, that's, that's big idea number one. It's huge. You can't get away from it. It's called big idea number one for a reason, and it has a, that's the most [00:11:00] important, right?

The second one is, second big idea is we're going to work together. We're going to make this happen, and we're going to take collective responsibility. It's not my kids and your kids. It's not the EL kids or the SPED kids or the title kids. All our kids are all our kids. And then the third big idea is we're going to use our results.

So, so like that's the, so using our results, like we're not just going to admire them. We're not going to use them as alibis and make excuses for why we're not getting real. We're going to use the results, right? I had, I had a principal 20 years ago now. So this is a little while ago. And just think about all the advancements we've had since then in the last 20 years ago.

High school principal, he said to me, Chad, in our school, we suffer from data ria, right? And now think about all the data now that we have in the last 20 years in our schools, right? Like, there is so much that, so much lack of clarity around data. So like, like, what are we going to actually hone in [00:12:00] on, right? Like, let's cut through all of this stuff. Sometimes I might refer to it as all this stuff.

What are we, what are the results we're going to use? And that's what's going to drive our actions. And of course, in the PLC at Work world, it's all about the common formative assessments. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's the most powerful. assessment data a teacher and a team is going to get, that's where we can really improve our practice.

So, I, I addressed a number of things and we can, there's, there's a few other areas I could go into too that I think there's a lack of clarity around, but in terms of like just a big overarching idea of what, what why, why aren't we getting further than we are? I think it comes down to a lack of clarity is the big overarching idea.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And I, and, and lack of clarity is an interesting element of what you were describing around data, [00:13:00] because think often in the name of clarity we actually create the opposite, and this is not exclusive to schools, but you know, it's around data in particular, right? That are we. You know, identifying and seeking meaningful data. Are we making meaning of the data that we have? Are we getting a real understanding of Why the data is the way it is, what are the factors that created it, what are the things that maybe we asked the wrong questions to begin with, what are the areas for improvement, what are the opportunities to build on that data with whatever the next endeavor is, right?

And, So much of that dialogue, I think, too often gets truncated because it gets categorized as Jethro making, or, [00:14:00] you know, some other kind of negative connotation other than saying, okay, let's try to actually figure out what's happening here, right? And so the person who says, nope, you know, it's black and white, it is what it is, would say, look, this is about clarity, and The data either adds up or it doesn't, you either hit the mark or we didn't, but and a lot of, you know, and certainly a lot of that is created by pressures coming from different you know, different levels of the system that are creating these mandates around data and benchmarks and so on, but that true clarity comes from understanding what does this even mean, why is this the way that it is you know, is the thing that we Was it an incomplete, I guess? query in the first place where, okay, this, this didn't come out the way we expected, but actually what we learned was something that is really clarifying in another way. Right. And, and [00:15:00] I think the overload the overload of data, the emphasis on a narrow definition of data, data as being exclusively quantitative, right.

You know, a lot of that creates. those types of situations, which are all opportunities, I would also think for an effective PLC to, to do a lot of these things, but maybe they're almost led to believe that that's not how they should be spending their time. Right.

Chad Dumas: right. Yeah. And, and I would just hone in on one of the last things that you said there. I think, I think this is where it begins, is clarity about what constitutes data in, in so many situations, people think that data has to be a spreadsheet, right? And it's gotta be fancy and color coded and sorted, and this and that.

Yes, that is data. And you know, what else is data? A stack of three by [00:16:00] five note cards. That each of us, as classroom teachers, had an exit ticket, and we gave the same prompt to all the kids, and as they went out to recess, each kid wrote on their exit, their little two by five note card, their response. And then I got a pile of those who got it, a pile who have this misconception, and a pile of those who have this misconception.

That is data, right? I was, I was actually just with the school district the last couple of days and focused on assessment. The whole focus for two days was on assessment, common formative assessment practices and the learning as part of the PLC process. And one of the questions that was asked was, can a performance task be a CFA? Now, now, praise God for that person raising that question, because that is a misconception that lots of us have, that an assessment, whether it's a common formative [00:17:00] assessment, has to be paper, pencil. If that's the case, my gosh, we're never going to get to higher levels of learning, right? Of course, a performance test can be a CFA.

It has to be a CFA if the target Dictates that, right? Like, the kind of target that we're going after dictates whether or not the assessment is going to be a selected response, an extended written response, a performance task, or teacher observation. And so, that clarity of what constitutes data.

Permission, if you will. I think teachers many times, like, when I'm with them, I'm like giving them permission to do what they already know is best. But for some reason, over the years, through whatever, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, whatever, have come to get a very narrow sense of what data means.

And, and of course data I'm rambling. I see you've got something that you'd like to add.

Ross Romano: You know, and I, I do want to get to how we make these things happen and who is responsible for doing so and, and, [00:18:00] you know, beginning with the school leadership and the demonstration of, or demonstration of a lack of, I guess, curiosity, right, an

Chad Dumas: mm hmm, mm hmm.

Ross Romano: know, wanting to determine what's happening and why and how to improve it and all of these things that, again, when there's just an emphasis put on, this is like, I have this very straightforward.

report that I'm looking for. It sort of cuts a lot of that short, but who, yeah, who is who is responsible for making this? Let's say, okay, we've identified some of the challenges, some of the problems, some of what's not happening, and we want to make it happen. Does it begin and end with the school leadership or, you know, how do you define who has responsibility for, for making PLCs happen?

Chad Dumas: Yeah, yeah. Well, it is, it is like, It is a community, right? That's in the, in the term PLC, right? Community. So it is all of us. [00:19:00] And I think it was Bob Baker maybe it wasn't Bob Baker exactly maybe it was Roland Barthes, said that we've yet to find a successful school that, that does not have strong leadership leading the way, making the work happen, right?

So, like, it just, it, this. This doesn't happen just because the staff can will it. Now, the staff has an incredible role to play. PLC is not done to you, right? Like, that's kind of like the antithesis of community, right? If somebody comes in and does something to you, that's not community. Right? And so it is us together.

And we have seen many examples of Teachers within schools influencing up, right? To either build the capacity over time of the leader, or as soon as that leader goes, they're able to then be part of a process that hires in someone who can provide those, the, the, those structures and systems and [00:20:00] processes and support, right?

Because we know that just like, just like all of us, none of us last forever, right? And so same with school leaders and. Sometimes there's even a perception in schools of like, this too shall pass, right? I, I've out, sir, I've outlived how many principals? I'll outlive you too, right? And so if there's an ineffective reader, they're going to be gone at some point, just like the effective readers will.

And so we, we've got to so, so all that to say. Leadership, school designated leaders, really important, and that does not give a free pass to everybody else to say we don't have to worry about this, right? So school leadership is absolutely important. It starts there.

Ross Romano: For the leader what makes them effective, or what's required to be effective? I guess, is it personality driven, skills driven knowledge driven? What, what are the, the factors that, yeah, that, that enable a leader to [00:21:00] effectively create a culture of collaboration?

Chad Dumas: Yep. Yep. So, from the, this book, Let's Put the C in PLC, it identifies ten elements. They are not listed in order of importance. I did not find anywhere in the research that says this is the most important. This is the least important. Chad Dumas philosophy is the number, the first one that I list is the most important.

And that is that charismatic leadership is not necessary for long term success. So, right, and we know about the charismatic leader, right? Like they're able to win people over and sell things and here we go. And that's not necessary for long term success. And actually from the research, it has the, opposite effect, right?

They might get a short term bang, but as soon as they leave, which they do leave, just like all of us, right? They're going to be there, there will be a negative turn. So what is necessary for long term success then if you're, if, if [00:22:00] charismatic leadership is not necessary? Actually, before I answer that question, I think this idea of charismatic leadership not being necessary for long term success gives those who do have charisma, It gives them insights into, okay, so I can't rely solely on my charisma, right?

It's okay. Be charismatic. That's, that's you. Be you. And don't rely on that solely. And then second of all, for those of us who are not charismatic at all, it gives us like, take a deep breath. It's okay. Like, you don't have to be, try, try to be them. You be you, because you can be highly effective. And so without charisma, what is, what is necessary?

And Michael Fuller refers to it as relationships. Relationships, relationships, none of this works goes any, none of this work goes anywhere without relationships, right? You've heard the saying, I don't care how much you know until I know how much you [00:23:00] care, relationships. And so there are skills associated with that and I enunciate several in the book around how you build those skills. What's fascinating to me is we all think we're good at building relationships. Okay. I've, I've yet to meet someone, I'd love to hear if there's a listener of yours who says, you know what, I'm crappy at it.

I do not build relationships well. My experience is everybody says, yeah, I'm great at building relationships, but the reality is, is very few of us really are truly good at building relationships. And so there's skills that really help with that to be successful in building those relationships so that we can have this culture.

That will improve student learning, right?

Ross Romano: right. Yeah. And well, yeah, to that point, it's, it's kind of a separate topic, but I don't know necessarily that the hiring culture and, you know, the culture of, of selecting who is in the roles is if it incentivizes uh, honesty and reflection around [00:24:00] those things, right? The expectation and the demand is that a leader is always fully formed and that's not the case really for anybody.

I mean, it can't possibly be the case for somebody who's new to a role if we're being realistic about it. And even in any case I would imagine those that are continuously learning and improving and going a level deeper are going to be more effective in the long term. You mentioned the charisma piece, and I think, you know, charisma is augmentative.

It's augmentative if you have good ideas and good practices, and that, Charismatic approach helps you to get buy in and get people excited about them, but then you're following it up with a strong foundation. Charisma is also augmentative of the opposite, right? It, it's, you know, it, it augments a lack of a, a good approach or, or it augments bad ideas.

I mean, there's plenty of [00:25:00] charismatic leaders in, you know, in the world today who get people to buy into, you know, not so not so great objectives. Right? So it's a, it's a thing that it's a, it, it's good depending on the circumstances and, but Any leader who relies exclusively on their charisma and fails to build the skills, the approach to follow up with that is unlikely to last.

They're probably more likely to move from place to place once that wears off. They're certainly not building a foundation for sustainable success to say, Look, I don't know how long I'm going to be in this position, but my job while I'm here. is to help everybody here develop the skills to be effective.

And that way, whenever I'm no longer here, they still have the skills, they move on, and then another leader comes in and helps them from there. But yeah, I mean, so it's, it's not [00:26:00] about, right, that there's not some benefits to that, but it's, it's the fact that one, yes, there's, it doesn't, it's not a requirement that the that leadership has to look a certain way or a leader has to have a certain personality to in order to make this happen is not necessarily so that people are smart enough to pick up on authentic knowledge and an approach to practices that that clearly work, right?

Chad Dumas: Yep. Yep.

Ross Romano: But also, you know, one of the questions that I think is interesting, it's something that we ask about students a lot and our student learning objectives, but can and should apply it to to leaders, to teachers as well, is in order to have a, you know, thriving, successful culture of collaboration in a school.

And in order to create and lead that you know, what does a principal need to know and know how to [00:27:00] do, right? And when, what are the things that tangibly you need to be able to really know how to do in order to create that, to build that, to onboard teachers into it And that that really is, is about understanding the approach, what makes it work, what, what makes it ineffective or kind of superficial.

And that's all things that are, are learned and are going to be learned through research, through reading, through education, through experience, right? That nobody is necessarily going to be just predisposed to, to automatically understanding all of that.

Chad Dumas: Right, right, exactly. And, and that's what my, my first book does, right? It lays out these 10 elements, and at the end of each chapter, there's a checklist for folks to be able to, like, it pulls together everything, all the knowledge in that, in that chapter into one checklist. That's a, and [00:28:00] it's a self assessment to be able to say, yes, I know it.

No, I don't know it. I need to learn some more about this. And there's a fourth category too. I don't know what it is exactly off the top of my head. But those checklists for your listeners are available for free. You don't have to buy the book. You can just go get the checklist if you want. Of course, I would love it if you bought the book, but if you don't want to, just go get the checklist, that's fine, on my website tinyurl.

com slash putthecnplc, which I think you'll probably have in the, in the show notes, putthecnplc, tinyurl. com. And there's several resources there. There's some things for my upcoming book that comes out in September, but then there's also a study guide for this. Let's put the CMPLC. There's like a two page overview that just kind of gives you a snapshot, and then there's these 10 self assessments, one self assessment for each of those elements in the book, and those are all totally free.

Whether or not you buy the book, doesn't matter to me. Access them, use them, help, use them to help support your own leadership development and journey.

Ross Romano: So, [00:29:00] so let's talk, you know, self assessment, then a reflection for a moment. I don't know if this is particularly part of that self assessment or not, but it relates you referenced earlier the relationship building piece and you haven't, you know, nobody says they're not. Good at this, but of course the people on the other side you know, are not uniform and saying, yes, my leader is great at developing relationships.

How might a leader get a real understanding of and, and think about, okay, how am I doing at relationship building and what do I need to do to make this a strength?

Chad Dumas: Absolutely. So, what I identify in chapter one is, first of all, the there's a gentleman that seems not very well known anymore amazing book called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's an amazing book and it's incredibly dense, like it is really hard to read. So that's maybe why he's not as well known, but [00:30:00] his name is Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire was Brazilian and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed was written in the 60s. You can access the whole thing online, free though, if you just like Google Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And in chapter, I think it's chapter three, he has these six gems that he says these are the six principles of effective dialogue.

Principles of effective dialogue, six principles. And so those six principles are like, First of all, they're really profound. Again, if you read his actual work, it's really dense. I've taken in my book and like just pulled out some snippets of it that I think maybe are more accessible for folks. But these six principles really form the foundation of being able to have effective relationships.

And the first, the first one is love. And it's not a love that's like a You know, a romantic love, but like, do I, do I have sincere benevolence, if you will, [00:31:00] for all who cross my path? Like, do I sincerely, truly love them? Not because they're doing something for me. But because they're a human being, and as a human being, they're endowed with potentialities that, that are unique to them.

And so, I, as a fellow human being, as a fellow sojourner on this path together, right, do I truly love the people I come in contact with? Like, that principle by itself, I think is revolutionary. If every human being, if every school leader, let's just narrow it down to school leader. If every school leader loved the people they were serving and treated them with that love, spoke about them with that love, spoke with them with that love.

Talk about a change in culture, just like, that's just one of those six principles. Oh, man. Yep. Yep. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Ross Romano: yeah. It's

Chad Dumas: Mm hmm.

Ross Romano: yeah, that, that I, I'll [00:32:00] put that in the show notes as well. 'cause that's something to, to look into and, and to think about what, yeah. How even that principle applies to all aspects of the, of, of, particularly this profession, right. And the, the mission of it. And the way in which we may represent, the demeanor around our care for the outcomes that we're trying to achieve, right, around student learning, student success and opportunity, and there's that. One, I guess more I guess it's a more inclusive way of doing versus I don't know how to describe it other than maybe a hard headed, strong willed approach that kind of views it as inclusive.

oppositional to outside forces, which there are those forces outside of, but the people inside our building, we want to believe that they [00:33:00] are on our team, right? But I think we all probably can picture somebody we've worked with or crossed paths with who it just felt like everybody else was in their way, right?

And, and, Ultimately, it can't, you can't do it alone and, but, or the, the leader who says I'm here because this is what I want to do, and I love the people I'm trying to help, and I, and I love the pursuit of it, and I know that everybody here wants to be a part of that, and it feels like that, and it, you know, and it's it's from the same starting point that maybe comes a, you know, a more effective approach, and an approach that enables relationship

Chad Dumas: Mm hmm. Mm

Ross Romano: people to even see the possibility of having a relationship with you when you have that [00:34:00] openness to let's do this together.

So an interesting, yeah, place to start. Wanted to circle back to something that you talked about at the beginning, which is the subtitle there, A Practical Guide for School Leaders. I think that practical piece is important. You know, and that's the preventative factor of all kinds of Things, right.

That are designed to solve or teach or do this in schools is, okay, well, there's a practicality around it as far as time and demands and constraints. What, like, how like when you're presenting this, writing the book, thinking about how this can be done what are like the typical challenges to practicality that you're addressing in designing this to be practical?

Chad Dumas: Yeah. Challenges to practicality. Yeah. So I, I tried to front load, if you will, the practicality with things like these checklists, right? [00:35:00] What checklists do. So there, there was a few years ago, I think it may be about 10 years ago now, maybe 12 years ago, a book called the checklist manifesto. Maybe you're familiar with that.

And what. The researchers did was look at the impact of check checklists, and one of the foundational elements of this study was in hospitals, and they found that in hospitals, if they used checklists, billions of dollars. A year and tens of thousands of lives, I think was the number. I don't remember the exact number on the lives.

Don't quote me on that. So listeners, you go pick up the book, look for yourself. But it's like a lot of lives, even one life saved is worth it, right? And billions of dollars would be saved simply from having checklists, right? And. I travel for my work, right? I'm a consultant. I fly over all over the place.

Do you know what pilots do every time they get in the cockpit? They go through a checklist. [00:36:00] Every single, it doesn't matter if these pilots have a hundred thousand hours of experience, they follow a checklist. Checklists make it explicit. What are we looking? First of all, yeah, first of all, it makes it explicit, right?

What are we looking for and what do we need to make sure accomplishes? But second of all, it makes sure that we don't forget things. Right? Because we're human beings, and I want my pilots not to be thinking, did they forget something on a checklist, I want them to be thinking about any issues that might come up in the air, right?

I want them to be spending their expertise and skills on potential challenges.

Ross Romano: Mm-Hmm. . Yep.

Chad Dumas: So checklists are really helpful for that. So in the book, when there's a checklist, this is like a summary. This is all the content. It's the most important content. It's for you to think through, am I addressing all these things, right?

You could use it as a self assessment. You also could use it as a, here, I'm going to share this with my, [00:37:00] my team, with my staff. Want to get better. Tell me, where I'm going. Now I wouldn't hand them 10 checklists, right? Because each one of them is quite lengthy, right? Each one of them has, I think the shortest one only has like four or five things on it, but some of them have 10, 15, 20 items for each element.

So, so checklists just by itself makes things really practical because now we're getting into the nitty gritty, just like the pilot getting into the nitty gritty, just like Too Bad Healthcare hasn't got on board yet with those checklists, but the checklists really make it, make the work practical.

Ross Romano: Yeah, but the the resource allocation consideration, and I think that certainly ties into the practicality as well about resources are limited and then they're not you know, they're interrelated. Right? And one thing affects another. How, how should a leader approach that? [00:38:00] Priority, you know, prioritization and so forth.

Chad Dumas: so, so you're talking about element seven which is about allocating resources. And so I, I differentiate between two kinds of resources, which I think is the first practical element, right? Because typically people only think about resources like time, the, the, the tangible resources like time, place, equipment, those types of things like, right?

So where are we gonna meet? What do we need when we meet there? Who needs to be there? Those are all tangible resources, and we address that as part of the book and training. What is as important, maybe even more so, though, is intangible resources. And as a school leader, we've got to be thinking about intangible resources as well, like access to new ideas, trust.

Like, these are some really important things that we don't think of in terms of, you know, Resources necessary, necessarily, but they absolutely [00:39:00] are. So how do you help build trust on your team? How do you make sure that they get access to expertise in addition to the tangible resources of time, place, resource physical stuff. (ad here)

Ross Romano: Yeah. So, Chad, as we are getting toward the end here, there's there, there is actually the final line in the forward that Todd Whitaker wrote that I wanted to touch on and kind of get your, Your thoughts around it. And I think it's an interesting idea for teachers, which is don't just have an impact make a difference.

And he writes about right, how, how effective leaders do things differently. They're not just it's not just about good, bad, you know, better, worse. But it's, it's about what you're doing. different and what that looks like. And yeah, I'm just interested in your, [00:40:00] you know, how might you expand on that idea?

How might you apply that and relate that to what we're talking about here and looking at, you know, the, the nature of how collaboration typically shows up or doesn't in schools, what we want to do differently and, and that there are a set of Curving approaches and the checklist, right? The frameworks, the ways to do it how it should be done, but also unique contexts and leaders with different styles, different strengths, different faculties.

You know, if we were to kind of use this as, you know, call to action as it sort of is to our, to our listeners here to dive in. Yeah, just however you want to expand on that idea.

Chad Dumas: Yeah, so, when we know better, we can do better, as Marianne Chiodo said. So, but you have to know first, right? Like, I can't do differently if I don't know. [00:41:00] And this book is the know. What do you need to know? And so, once you then know, then you can do. And so, just like, like once I know that I have, I shouldn't eat a donut for breakfast, then once I know that, then the choice is up to me whether or not I do that. So, as a school leader, once I know that there's ten elements of what it takes to build a collaborative culture, now it's up to you to do it. I did write a subsequent action guide that, then it's called an action guide to put the C in PLC. And it has Challenge Exercises, Reflective Questions, and Planning Tools.

To help with that, but it starts with knowing, like we got to know what we need to do, and then once we know, then we can do, and that action guide really can help galvanize the work so that we can, we can help, we can ensure that PLCs truly become [00:42:00] PLCs and provide the promise that they, that they can, right, that they offer to us and to our students.

Ross Romano: there's like, you know, the cognitive metacognitive cycle, right? Know, know what you know, what you don't know, and for what you don't know, learn it. Ask, get help, get support, get knowledge, and to say, you know, if you know, when you know better than you can do better. Be accountable for for the fact that I didn't know any better is not an excuse.

At a certain point, you have to own that and, and be able to confront what you don't know and don't know about, and then learn it. And that's the learning continuous learning of leadership and and, and that enables each. leader to make difference, right? And a difference in your, your organization, [00:43:00] community and, and to have that opportunity to fulfill some of this promise and achieve some of these goals that are laid out and, and to, you know, to, to not have those barriers be preventative of doing something that, you know, You know, will be beneficial and and if we're, if we're supposing and laying out that there's widespread and longstanding knowledge about what works that need to figure out how to eliminate anything that's preventing us from doing that.

Chad Dumas: Absolutely. And I think there's a great quote from one of my colleagues, Breeze Daniels, who wrote a book on singletons. And she says in there, and I love this. She says, you know, many times we hear something or learn something and we say, [00:44:00] yeah, we already do that. But in reality, we don't. We kind of do that.

So that might be like maybe a final charge for folks is whether they're reading my book or any book or in any conference or anything, if we start to hear ourselves saying we already do that, just shift the language. We kind of do that. What, what do we need to do? Like, you know, just a little bit differently to really get the full bang for the buck, whether that's in the work of PLCs.

We kind of do that. What do we need to do differently? Right. Or in the work of our work of teams. We kind of do that. What do we need to do a little bit differently? Or with our guiding coalitions, our leadership teams, we can, oh yeah, we have, eh, we kind of do that. What do we need, like, what, no matter what it is, instead of thinking through the lens of we already do that, use Breeze Daniels advice and think about it as, We kind of do that.

Ross Romano: Yeah. We thought about doing that.

Chad Dumas: And we thought about it.

Ross Romano: Chad. So, you know, when [00:45:00] this publishes listeners, when listeners get this episode, you'll have a new book coming out in September. You have other things you're working on. Yeah. What, what can listeners check out or can they learn more?

Chad Dumas: Yeah, so I've got a website, which is nextlearningsolutions. com, nextlearningsolutions. com. And on my the book publishing side, there's Those three resources I mentioned earlier, and then I just created a little tiny URL, so tinyurl. com, slash, put the C in PLC, people can get to everything that I do from there.

I also do a lot on Twitter and my, it, I must have got on Twitter early enough, or I guess it's X now. I always forget that it's X. When I got on, I was early enough, because there's no numbers, no underscores, anything. It's just, you know, At Chad Dumas. Two D's in there. At Chad Dumas. Nice and easy.

Look me up. Reach out. I love to hear from folks and serve in any ways that I can.

Ross Romano: Excellent. Listeners, we'll put those links below to where you can find the book, to Chad's website, social media accounts, so if this is a [00:46:00] topic that you want to dive further into, you can find all those resources there. To learn more about it, please do. And also, if you have not already, please subscribe to The Authority for more author interviews like this coming your way every week, or visit bpodcast.

network to learn about all of our podcasts. Chad, thanks again for being here.

Chad Dumas: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.