Gallery Archives - Rachel What If

group silhouette — Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

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

child looking at map — Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Alistair Freeman: https://www.pexels.com/photo/classic-black-eyeglasses-on-reflective-surface-33129357/

It’s been almost 15 years since my nearly blind eyesight was corrected through Lasik eye surgery. Although I had been told to keep my eyes closed after the surgery, I couldn’t help but sneak a peek in the recovery room. What happened next made me believe in actual miracles. I could see. I could see words on the wall, clearly defined lines where blurry had always been, and best of all: the details of my husband’s face. The ability to see is something I will never take for granted.

Being able to see things easily overlooked is a skill I continue to work toward building every day that I am consulting or coaching in a school community.

Coaching Is Not a Luxury, It’s a Lifeline

There’s one small school that has shaped me more than any other.
Tucked away on the Navajo Nation, it serves just around 25 students, kindergarten through eighth grade , and is led by three teachers who each wear about seven different hats. Some students live at the school during the week. Many come from long distances. All of them, in some way, have become part of my story.

I’ve worked alongside this community for five years now. It’s the only school that has stayed constant throughout my coaching career. I’ve watched students grow from shy kindergartners, some nonverbal or struggling with big emotions, into curious, confident middle schoolers. I’ve watched teachers build systems out of thin air, create lessons across multiple grade levels, and keep joy alive despite the isolation and challenges that come with teaching in a small rural setting.

But what’s most important isn’t what I’ve given them — it’s what they’ve given me.

What Coaching Looks Like When You Listen

When I first started visiting this school, I thought I understood what coaching meant: goal setting, modeling, reflection, planning. But this school taught me that real coaching begins with listening and paying attention.

It taught me that progress doesn’t always look like a new strategy or a new framework; sometimes it looks like teachers laughing again. Sometimes it looks like a student leading their peers. Sometimes it looks like a staff of three saying, “Let’s try it this way,” and doing it because its what they believe is best for their kids, not because its a district initiative.

The work I have done with this school community has helped me realize that coaching isn’t about bringing the answers into a school, but more about holding a mirror to what they are already doing that is working and amplifying those things. Coaching is learning beside people who are doing the hardest, most human work imaginable.

And because of that, my own practice has changed. I don’t walk into schools trying to fix them. I walk in trying to see them.

The Blindness Schools Don’t Know They Have

Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of visiting hundreds of classrooms across many districts. Populations could be small, large, rural, urban, and everything in between. What I’ve noticed is that schools, as caring and dedicated as they are, often develop a kind of unintentional blindness.

We all know that developing a rhythm of teaching and building systems that work is important. In doing so, its easy to lose sight of the world beyond the walls of the classroom, the one our students are actually stepping into.

And that world is changing faster than ever.

Too often, I see students who are compliant but not curious. They’re consumers of information, not creators of meaning. Technology, which could open endless doors, is mostly used for testing. And teachers, who entered this profession to inspire, often feel like they’re just trying to keep up.

That’s why coaching matters.
Not because it evaluates, but because it illuminates.

Coaching as Connection and as a Lifeline

When coaching is done well, it becomes the bridge between what’s happening inside classrooms and what’s happening in the world beyond them. It gives teachers a chance to step back and ask:

“What are our students learning that will help them live — not just pass the next test?”

In a system that’s changing too slowly for the times we live in, coaching is not a luxury. It’s a lifeline. It gives teachers time and space to think again, to reimagine, to remember why they started. It helps schools see what they can’t always see on their own.

The schools I visit don’t need rescuing , they need reflection, validation, and partners willing to walk beside them, ask the hard questions, and hold the mirror steady while they rediscover their purpose.

Reimagining Learning Together

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Navajo school I wrote about above, it’s that we get better together.

While our systems continue to build the future of education on programs and policies, we have to believe it will be built through people who are brave enough to reimagine learning together. People who can look at the uncertainty of the world and still choose to believe that joy and curiosity are worth fighting for.

My word for 2026 is capacity. I hope we can all be brave enough to really look at what we are doing every day and determine if its a checklist or a compass. Are we providing a model of presence and connection over compliance and perfection?

Education doesn’t need more programs it needs more perspective.
If your school or district is ready to reimagine learning and rediscover joy in the classroom, I’d love to be part of that conversation.

💡 Let’s learn together. Reach out at rachelwhatif@gmail.com, on Instagram @rachel3296 or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Galleries

What The Goonies Understood About Collective Efficacy