With funding from the Wachovia Foundation’s Teachers and Teaching Initiative (TTI) grant, CTQ launched the Achieving School Success through Empowering Teachers (ASSET) initiative in 2005 to address the vexing issue of reducing teacher turnover in high-needs schools.

In the three years of the initiative, CTQ leveraged the thinking of forward-looking researchers, such as Ken Futernick, to tackle the challenges that arise with transforming any school culture, particularly those found in high-needs communities. Futernick’s (2007) concept paper utilized the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s (2002) “tipping point” theory as the foundation of a turnaround strategy for low-performing schools. Futernick suggests that if teachers are offered the right kind of administrative, community, and collegial support, then a school transformation process can be jump-started.

From 2005 to 2008, the ASSET initiative sought to provide just such a spark by increasing schools’ capacities in several key areas that Futernick identified as critical for transformation:

•    Teacher teams that can spread teaching expertise;
•    Teacher autonomy and shared governance designed to create ownership and commitment for necessary reforms; and
•    School leadership that knows how to build learning organizations and is rewarded for doing so.

One critical strategy in the ASSET partnership was to initiate and grow these skill sets through a virtual learning community, known as ASSET Online, which reversed the mode of professional development delivery that is primarily driven by external resources “from the inside out.” Instead, this online community focused more intensively on building the knowledge, skills and capacity of teachers within school buildings for strong teacher leadership, thereby creating a critical mass of invested educators necessary to initiate a “tipping point” for transformation in their school environments.

Learn more about the lessons learned from ASSET and how professional learning communities can help teachers move From Isolation to Collaboration in this final report resulting from this work.