Chapter 2. Building Trust and Buy-In

Professional learning communities are about as ubiquitous in education these days as Chromebook laptops and interactive whiteboards. Most schools have some form of teacher teams that foster collaboration and team planning. But the good ones—the ones I refer to as authentic PLCs—engage in pursuits more serious than simple collaborative planning. Members of these PLCs look critically at student and teacher work, offer constructive feedback to one another, design quality common assessments, review and respond to all sorts of student data, and respond with action when students aren't learning. These are the high-functioning PLCs, the ones whose members embrace differences in opinion, are willing to ask the hard questions of one another, and have built a level of trust and candor more common in family units than in groups of teachers with common planning time. These PLCs are interdependent systems, and their individual members credit the team for their successes. Teachers in these teams make quick progress in honing their craft and improve themselves continually.

The bedrock of all high-functioning PLCs is trust. But trust doesn't happen just because teachers of a given subject or grade level are granted a common planning period. In this chapter, we'll look closely at both impediments and contributors to trust and its close kin, buy-in.

The Nature of Buy-In