Pillar I: Teacher Teams and Small Learning Communities

Home » About Talent Development Secondary » Four Pillars of Transformation » Pillar I: Teacher Teams and Small Learning Communities

Teams of teachers working with a common and manageable set of students, with time built into their schedule for collaborative work and receive initial facilitation to guide their efforts.

Talent Development Secondary encourages effective distributed leadership so that those in the school closest to the everyday realities of students and staff have the discretion and responsibility to make timely decisions on their behalf.

One tenet of effective distributed leadership is empowerment of teams of teachers who share a common set of students. Teacher teams must have regularly scheduled time to work collaboratively across disciplines (and within) to ensure that they are meeting both student needs and their own professional needs in a systematic and timely way.

To support the empowerment of these teams, each teacher team should be cross-disciplinary and should share a manageable number of students so that they can facilitate the progress of those students from multiple perspectives and in a way that aligns support and approaches across all subject areas and student support services.

Talent Development Secondary believes teacher teams must have access to EWI (early warning indicator) data at least every two weeks so they can work collaboratively on lists of students who are showing signs of falling off track.  These teams must also have access to school and community resources so that they can provide the right intervention and/or support service to the right student at the right time. Click here to learn more about Early Warning Indicator Systems.