There’s a scene near the end of The Goonies where a group of kids who’ve spent the whole movie being underestimated — by their parents, their town, each other — finally find what they’ve been looking for. Not because any one of them was the hero. Because Mikey couldn’t do it without Mouth, and Andy couldn’t do it without Steph, and none of them could do it without believing, together, that finding the treasure was actually possible in the first place.
That belief is the whole engine of the movie. Not the map. Not the skills. The belief that we, collectively, can do this — even when everyone on the outside has already decided they can’t.
Turns out there’s a name for that in education research, and it might be the single most under-discussed lever a school has.
The Thing That Outranks Everything Else
It’s called collective teacher efficacy — a staff’s shared belief that, together, they can move the needle for students, including the kids everyone else has already written off. John Hattie’s Visible Learning research, drawing on a meta-analysis by researcher Rachel Eells, ranks it at the very top of everything ever studied for its relationship to student achievement.
It’s one of the strongest predictors we have, and it’s also one of the few big levers on that list that a school actually has the power to build.
Psychologist Albert Bandura, who did the original research on self-efficacy decades before anyone applied it to a whole staff, found that belief in your own capability changes what you actually attempt and how long you stick with it when it gets hard. Scale that up to an entire building, and you get a staff that doesn’t throw in the towel when things are tough.
No one thinks they are giving up, but it shows up in our excuses: “The kids are too distracted.” “There’s no support at home.” Or, how about the one I hear most often: “I just don’t have time for that.”
When a teacher says “I don’t have time for that,” what they mean is, that’s not important to me. I get it. The problem is how do we know we are making the best decision about what the kids need, when we are the only one making the decision?
One of the best scenes in the Goonies is when Mouth decides to take back all the wishes he made in the well. That says a heck of a lot about who he is, and what he wants in his own life. Let’s not forget to ask the kids and include them in the collective efficacy we are trying to create.
Build the Conditions for Collective Efficacy
Here’s where a lot of schools get stuck: you can’t just tell a staff to believe in itself. Collective efficacy isn’t a mandate, it’s a byproduct of specific, buildable conditions. Researcher Jenni Donohoo has spent years studying what those conditions actually are, and a few of them are the ones I lean on hardest when I’m working with a staff that’s stuck:
Teachers actually shape the decisions that affect them. I’m not talking about a survey. I’m talking about a collaborative discussion and decision-making protocols. A staff that’s just being informed of decisions never gets the chance to feel collectively responsible for them.
The whole staff agrees on where they’re headed. Not every method, but the actual goal. It’s hard to feel like “we” can do something when half the room privately disagrees about what “it” even is.
Teachers value what’s happening in each other’s classrooms. One of the biggest hurdles to collective efficacy is the pervasive mistrust that exists between teachers. We have to believe that we are all doing the best we can with the knowledge, tools, and resources we have available to us.
Leadership responds instead of just directing. A staff notices fast whether their leader is actually listening or just running meetings. Responsive leadership is what makes the first three conditions feel safe enough to attempt.
None of these require a new program. They require structure, repetition, and a leader willing to go first.
What This Actually Looks Like on a Tuesday
I’ve built this into more than one small, rural staff who felt exactly like the Goonies did before they found the map — isolated, a little written off, mostly working alone behind closed doors. The shift never started with a new curriculum. It started with three small, unglamorous things:
- A protocol, so conversations about student work stay grounded in real evidence instead of vibes. Something as simple as “here’s what we’re seeing, so what does that mean, now what do we do about it” walks a team through noticing, interpreting, and acting without anyone getting defensive. I love this free resource with loads of protocols to apply to your team meeting, student engagement, or goal setting.
- Structured, low-ego time to see each other’s practice Just fifteen minutes of dropping into a colleague’s room with a specific, agreed-upon thing to notice does more for trust than a full-day PD ever will.
- A real answer to the question “is it safe to admit this isn’t working?” Anonymous ways to surface a struggle, a leader who names what’s going well before diving into what isn’t, a team that’s agreed in advance that honesty gets met with support, not a look. Psychological safety isn’t the soft part of this work. It’s the prerequisite for all of it.
Do those three things consistently, and something shifts. Teachers stop treating a hard class as their own private failure and start treating it as a shared problem the team is actually equipped to solve.
Believing Before You Have Proof
Here’s what gets me about the Goonies, every time. They didn’t have proof the treasure was real. They had each other, a map with some pretty big gaps in it, and a refusal to believe the adults who’d already decided the whole thing was a lost cause.
That’s what collective efficacy asks of a staff, too. A belief they can move a number they haven’t moved yet, based on nothing but each other and a plan they’re building as they go. It’s not blind optimism. It’s a bet, placed together, backed by structure instead of just hope.
The schools I’ve watched pull off real, lasting change were never the ones with the most resources. They were the ones who decided, as a group, that they weren’t done yet.
A big part of my world view (see this post for more info) comes from not just watching the Goonies over and over again, but believing I was one, ahem, am one. Its not that they weren’t independent. Data, Mouth, Chunk, even Brand, had definite main character vibes. Its that they sometimes needed to know that they weren’t alone. I have main character vibes, but I love the adventure we are on together to make education better every day.
💡 If your staff is ready to build that kind of belief, I’d love to join your tribe to get there. Reach out at rachelwhatif@gmail.com, on Instagram @rachel3296, or connect with me on LinkedIn.