Collective and Team Leadership: Preparation For Urban Schools

In this paper, we analyze the value of collective or team leadership as a result of multiple leaders attending the Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) at the University of California, Berkeley, a program that prepares leaders for urban schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In its fourteenth year, the PLI now has over 450 graduates, 88% of whom work in the Bay Area, with 50% in just four partner districts. This has led to the phenomenon of teams composed entirely of PLI alumni, ranging in number from 2 to 9. (Other programs that prepare individuals for a small number of districts, or even one large district, should find themselves in the same situation.) We wondered what difference it makes to have several PLI graduates, with the same preparation, on a leadership team. What specific kinds of commonalities are important to leaders functioning in teams? And what might that mean for the preparation of leaders, for the formation of leadership teams, and for district hiring and leadership development? In the first section, therefore, we examine what PLI graduates say about the benefits of common preparation, particularly for their ability to enact the principles and practices of their learning and experience.