FACILITATING CHANGE MINISERIES

Building a Guiding Coalition That Can Carry the Work

"Coalitions are not only about authority. They are about perspective."

Episode Description

Kotter’s second step is building a guiding coalition: a coalition of committed people from within the network who can guide, coordinate, and communicate the work. In schools, that means a cross-role leadership network with enough trust, perspective, and influence to move real change, not just approve it.

Key Episode Points

  • A guiding coalition is not just a committee, a title, or a slide with names on it.
  • Strong coalitions are cross-role, respected by peers, and positioned to influence real decisions.
  • Coalition design should begin with the work itself, not the organizational chart.
  • Family, community-facing, and workload-aware voices can reduce later friction and increase credibility.

Practical Actions

  • Map the work and major decisions before selecting coalition members.
  • Check whether the coalition includes classroom voices, support staff, leaders with authority, and people with strong informal influence.
  • Write a concise purpose statement clarifying what the coalition is responsible for leading.
  • Provide supports such as release time, reduced committee load, or clearer meeting boundaries.

Questions for Reflection

  • If staff named the people they trust most on student support and staff wellbeing, how many of those people are in the coalition?
  • If a coalition member left tomorrow, would their knowledge and influence remain in the system?
  • Does the coalition genuinely shape decisions or merely receive updates about decisions already made?
Podcast HOST

Heather Volchko

Heather Volchko is a school-based consultant and program evaluator specializing in emotional and behavioral disorders, contextual behavior analysis, organizational behavior management, and leadership psychology. She has been a coordinator, teacher, and paraprofessional in therapeutic, alternative, self-contained, resource, and correctional settings. Outside of her professional work, she has worked abroad with various international education organizations as well as stateside with organizations facilitating upward mobility. Heather is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst with her Bachelors in Special Education, Masters in Educational Psychology, and is currently pursuing her doctorate.
Watch the full episode here!
Change Mini-Series, Episode/Step #2:
Building a Guiding Coalition That Can Carry the Work

You’re listening to a special eight-part miniseries on leading change in public education, using John Kotter’s eight-step framework as a guide for our current moment in schools.

In the last episode, we looked at step 1: creating a sense of urgency, the work of helping people see why the current way of operating is putting too much strain on staff and too much inconsistency in front of students.

Today, we’re moving to step 2: building a guiding coalition, and we’ll stay grounded in two concrete examples throughout the series—strengthening MTSS and redesigning student support and discipline so staff can sustain the work over time.

In this episode, you’ll hear how a guiding coalition fits into the larger eight-step arc, why it matters in a school system under pressure, and what it looks like when a district tries to build a leadership network that is credible enough to move real change.

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In the first episode, the focus was urgency.

Urgency was framed as a shared understanding that the current way of working is putting too much strain on adults, producing too much inconsistency for students, and limiting the impact the system is trying to achieve. The message was not that schools need more pressure for its own sake. The message was that schools need a more honest case for change.

But urgency, on its own, is not enough.

If urgency lives only inside one leader’s head or one presentation deck, it fades. If urgency is voiced once at the start of the year and then disappears under daily pressures, it becomes background noise.

That is why Kotter’s second step is building a guiding coalition. Kotter describes this step as creating a coalition of committed people, drawn from within the network itself, to guide the work, coordinate it, and communicate its activities.

In simple terms, a guiding coalition is the group of people who help lead the change, not just approve it.

It is a cross-role group inside the system with enough influence, enough credibility, and enough trust to carry the work forward when the calendar fills, the politics heat up, or the initial excitement wears off.

In schools and districts, the guiding coalition is the human engine behind the work.

If your initiative is strengthening MTSS, redesigning FBAs and BIPs, building Tier 2 and Tier 3 programs, reducing removal-based responses, and making staff work more sustainable, the guiding coalition is the group that keeps those aims from turning into another set of untouched initiatives.

This episode is about how to build that coalition well.

The central question is this:

Given the complexity of public education right now, who needs to be at the center of the work so change has a real chance of taking root and lasting?

To answer that, it helps to start with a clearer description.

A guiding coalition is a cross-role group of people who are committed to the work, respected by their peers, and positioned so they can actually influence decisions, not just react to them.

It is not just a committee by title.

It is not just the same group that appears on every new charge.

It is not just a group that occasionally meets.

And it is not a list of names on a slide that gets shown in August and forgotten by October.

It is a leadership network.

And there are three key qualities embedded in a leadership network.

First, it is cross-role.

If everyone in the coalition has the same job type, the same vantage point, or the same daily experience, the group may move quickly but it will miss something important. Real change in school systems touches classrooms, offices, hallways, services, and homes. That means the coalition needs people who understand life in each of those spaces.

Second, coalition members are respected by peers.

They need relational trust. When they speak with colleagues, those colleagues should think, “this person understands my reality,” not, “this person is just carrying the district message.” Without that trust, communication from the coalition will feel distant or scripted.

Third, coalition members are positioned to influence.

They need some access to real decisions. That can mean formal authority to approve or redirect work. It can mean informal influence over how teams interpret expectations or how buildings translate policy into practice. Either way, the coalition cannot be made up entirely of people who care but have no way to shape what actually happens.

Those three qualities distinguish a guiding coalition from many familiar patterns in schools.

In some districts, improvement work lives mostly in one or two roles: a director, a principal, maybe a coach. When those people leave, the work resets.

In others, improvement teams exist mostly on paper. Names are listed, meetings are scheduled, minutes are taken, but members leave without a clear sense of what they own or what’s actually supposed to be happening.

Kotter’s second step is meant to counter that. The guiding coalition is constructed so the work can survive individual role changes, leadership transitions, and shifts in external pressure. It spreads real leadership across the network.

This matters in a particular way right now.

Public education is carrying overlapping demands: heightened student needs, staffing challenges, local scrutiny, ongoing debates, and pressure for visible progress. No single leader, and no single department, can carry that alone.

At the same time, trust is fragile in many places. Staff have lived through repeated initiatives that did not deliver. Families have seen shifts and reversals. Some communities are skeptical of central decisions. In that environment, change can feel like something done to people rather than with them.

A strong guiding coalition helps shift that.

It says the work is still hard, and the pressure is still real, but there is a group of people from across roles, across schools, and across perspectives who are actively shaping how this goes.

This is where step 1 and step 2 connect.

Urgency answers, why this and why now.

The guiding coalition begins to answer, who will help lead this across schools, across roles, and over time.

That question becomes especially important when the work touches not only leadership teams and central office staff, but also teachers, counselors, school psychologists, social workers, paraprofessionals, front office staff, and families who experience the system from different angles.

And if the district is serious about sustaining the work, it also helps to involve voices that can reduce later friction—trusted family connectors, local-facing staff, and in many systems, association or union voices who understand how change lands on workload and working conditions.

Now the question becomes: how do you build that coalition for your specific work?

For this series, the anchor work includes implementing MTSS, redesigning FBAs and BIPs, building Tier 2 and Tier 3 programs, reducing isolation measures, and supporting staff so they can sustain effective practice over time.

The first move in designing a coalition for that work is to start with the work, not with the organizational chart.

Before choosing names, name the work.

Ask, what decisions will this change effort need over the next one to three years?

For example:

How will students move from initial concern to concrete support?

How will data be reviewed, by whom, and how often?

How will intervention menus be chosen, tested, and refined?

How will discipline responses and support plans be aligned so students experience a coherent approach rather than a patchwork of reactions?

How will staff time be protected so meetings and interventions are not just layered on top of an already maxed-out schedule?

Each of those decision areas points to people who need a voice.

Once the work is mapped, ask, who currently has influence in each of these areas, formally or informally?

A strong guiding coalition for MTSS and student support might look like this.

From the district level, there is usually at least one senior leader who can clear obstacles and align policy. That might be a superintendent, an assistant superintendent, or a central leader with direct access to those roles. There is often also a teaching and learning or curriculum leader who understands how academic and behavior supports intersect, because MTSS is not just an academic structure or just a behavior structure. It is both.

From the school level, the coalition often includes several principals from different contexts: perhaps an elementary principal, a secondary principal, and a leader from a school with unique needs. They bring different vantage points and signal that the work is not confined to one site. One or two assistant principals or deans may also be essential because they live in the daily reality of student support, discipline, and scheduling.

From student support roles, a school psychologist, counselor, social worker, or behavior specialist can bring a system-level view of patterns that may be invisible at any one school.

From classroom roles, at least two teachers known for steady credibility matter a great deal. Not only the early adopters who join every new effort, but people whom other staff quietly watch and trust. When those teachers say this is worth our effort, it carries weight.

And depending on district context, a coalition may also need a special education representative, a family or local liaison, a respected office staff voice, a paraprofessional leader, or an association representative who can speak to the way change interacts with working conditions.

This is not an exhaustive list. It is a design principle.

The coalition should be large enough to have reach but small enough to move. In many systems, that means somewhere between six and fifteen people, not thirty.

And one simple test is this:

If everyone in the room draws their paycheck from the same department, it is not a coalition yet. It is just a meeting.

Beyond representation, coalition members need three things.

They need credibility. When they speak, people should believe they are grounded in real practice, not only theory.

They need access. They must be close enough to decision-making to shape schedules, policies, processes, or resource allocations.

And they need a willingness to speak honestly. A coalition that cannot name what is not working will struggle to design anything better.

This is where a range of perspectives matters.

Homogeneous coalitions can produce smooth meetings but fragile implementation. Varied coalitions often produce more tension at the front end and stronger designs later. In the early stages, conversations may feel slower or messier. Over time, that honesty pays off.

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Imagine two districts, both trying to strengthen MTSS and student support.

This district builds its guiding coalition almost entirely from central office and principals. They are thoughtful people. They care deeply about the work. They design a comprehensive set of forms, meeting structures, and data routines. On paper, the plan looks solid.

But as the school year begins, cracks show up quickly.

Teachers were not meaningfully involved in the design, so the coalition underestimated how crowded the school day already was. The schedule leaves no realistic time for some of the meetings the plan assumes. Intervention roles are attached to people who already feel overloaded. Classroom staff begin to experience the new system as one more layer, not a more coherent way of working.

At the same time, the coalition’s message does not travel very far. Staff hear about the work in presentations, but not from people they trust in their daily context. There is no para in the room to say what transitions actually look like. No office staff member to explain where communication is bottlenecking. No family-facing voice to describe how the process sounds on the other end of a phone call.

By February, the plan has not exactly failed. But it has become thinner than it looked in August.

Now imagine the other district.

It also includes central leaders and principals. But it adds teacher leads, a counselor, a paraprofessional voice, a family connector, and a respected association representative who can speak plainly about workload and buy-in.

The early meetings are slower.

People disagree.

Some ideas that central office expected to move quickly get challenged.

A teacher asks whether a proposed meeting structure will actually fit inside contract time. A counselor points out that one support pathway depends on staff capacity that does not yet exist. A para describes how a hallway or cafeteria plan that looks clear on paper will likely break down at a particular transition point. A family connector notes that some communication templates are technically accurate but hard for families to understand.

At first, this can feel inefficient.

But it is not inefficiency. It is design quality.

Because those conversations happen early, the district makes better decisions. They simplify some parts of the process. They delay others. They drop two standing committees to make room for the coalition’s work. And when communication goes out to staff, it comes from people in multiple roles who can explain not only what is changing, but why it is being shaped this way.

That second coalition is not stronger because the people are better people.

It is stronger because the coalition is built to see more of the system.

That is one of the most important truths in this step.

Coalitions are not only about authority. They are about perspective.

And if the coalition cannot see enough of the system, it cannot lead the system well.

There are a few common pitfalls worth naming here.

One pitfall is filling the coalition only with formal leaders.

If everyone has a title but few have strong relationships with rank-and-file staff, the coalition’s messages will not travel very far.

Formal authority matters, but in schools, informal influence matters too. The person others turn to in the hallway, the colleague others watch for cues, the staff member who can say this is hard but worth trying, can be just as important as someone with an official title.

Another pitfall is building a coalition of passionate volunteers who have no real authority.

If everyone cares but no one can adjust schedules, revise procedures, or influence resource allocation, the coalition becomes an advisory circle. It may generate ideas, but it cannot remove obstacles. Over time, that becomes frustrating for the group and for the staff who were promised change.

A third pitfall is creating a symbolic coalition.

This group exists on agendas and in slide decks, but has no clear charge. It meets occasionally, reviews updates, and adjourns without clear next steps. Members leave asking themselves, “what do we actually own?”

A fourth pitfall is building a coalition that looks varied on paper but functions like a rubber stamp.

People from different roles may be invited to sit at the table, but they are not genuinely shaping decisions. They are informed of decisions already made. In those settings, staff quickly learn that the coalition is performative, and trust erodes.

And a final pitfall is ignoring burnout inside the coalition itself.

If the system is already stretching people thin, inviting them into a guiding coalition without adjusting expectations elsewhere can backfire. Coalition members may feel honored and overwhelmed at the same time. They may become the first people to burn out under the weight of the new work.

This is especially risky when the initiative itself is focused on sustainability.

You cannot credibly say we want to reduce overload while adding major responsibilities to the same small set of people without any relief.

So what does it look like to build the coalition in a healthier way?

It starts with giving the coalition a clear purpose.

The coalition should have a short, plain statement that answers three questions.

What are we responsible for leading?

What is in our scope and what is not?

And how will we know we are making progress this year?

For a coalition focused on MTSS and student support, a purpose statement might sound like this:

This coalition exists to design, test, and refine a more coherent MTSS and student support system that reduces removal-based responses, improves timely access to supports, and makes it more sustainable for staff to do their best work.

That statement is not idealistic. It is useful.

From there, the coalition needs clear operating rhythms.

In many systems, that begins with a more frequent rhythm in the early stages and a slower rhythm later as the work becomes more stable.

For example, in the first six months, the coalition might meet every two weeks to build shared understanding, examine a small set of data, and design foundational processes. Later, it may shift to monthly meetings focused on monitoring, learning, and adjusting.

Within those meetings, structure matters.

A simple rhythm might begin by revisiting the shared urgency and purpose. Not a speech, just a quick return to the core question: what are we trying to fix, and why does it matter for staff and students?

Then the coalition might review a few concrete pieces of information: a snapshot of referral patterns, a summary of FBA or BIP timelines, a set of staff feedback about existing processes, or a look at how schools are using support meeting time.

From there, the group can move into real design work: refining Tier 2 pathways, clarifying decision rules for more intensive supports, simplifying a process, or planning communication.

That last part matters too.

A guiding coalition is not a private club.

It is a relay point.

It sits between district decisions, building realities, and staff voices. Coalition members listen in all directions and carry messages both ways: up, down, and across.

To make that real, it helps to assign communication roles.

One member might carry updates to principals.

One might share with teacher teams or grade-level leads.

One might carry learning to student support staff.

One might help shape communication for families or the board.

When those roles are clear, the coalition’s work does not stay trapped in the room. It moves through the system in steady, coherent ways.

All of this can sound structured, and it is, but the structure exists for a reason.

Without it, two things tend to happen.

First, the coalition becomes reactive, always responding to the latest fire rather than steadily advancing the core design work.

Second, the coalition’s effort becomes invisible. Staff are told that a group is working on MTSS or support redesign, but they do not see evidence of it. Over time, they assume that little is actually changing.

So how can a leader begin strengthening or building a guiding coalition?

One useful first step is to map the work before mapping the people.

Take a blank page and write down the specific changes the system is trying to make around MTSS, Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports, discipline practices, and staff sustainability. Under each, list the decisions and routines that will need leadership attention. Only after that list is clear should you start writing names.

A second step is to draft a first membership list and then check it for gaps.

Are classroom voices present?

Are student support staff present?

Is there someone who understands schedules and can speak to what is realistic?

Is there someone who can align policy, not just suggest ideas?

Is there someone with relational trust but no formal title whose voice would increase credibility?

If the answer to those questions is mostly no, revise the list.

A third step is to write a concise purpose statement for the coalition.

Keep it to a few sentences. If the statement could describe any committee in the district, it is too vague.

And a fourth step is to identify one immediate support for coalition members.

That might be release time, reduced expectations in another committee, a clearer boundary around meeting times, or direct support from a leader in managing competing demands. The signal is simple: your time matters, and this work is important enough that we will make space for it.

As I close this episode, consider a few questions:

If you listed the people in your system who staff trust most when it comes to student support and staff wellbeing, how many of those names are in your guiding coalition?

If a classroom teacher stopped one of your coalition members in the hallway and asked, “what is this group actually doing,” would that member have a clear, simple answer?

If a coalition member left the district tomorrow, would their knowledge be captured anywhere? Or would the work they helped lead disappear with them?

If the answer to those questions feels unsettling, that is useful information.

It may simply mean that the guiding coalition is not yet fully formed, or that it has not yet been given the clarity and support it needs.

Kotter’s second step is not about perfection. It is about seriousness. A volunteer network, in his framework, needs a coalition from within its own ranks to guide, coordinate, and communicate the work.

Urgency opens people’s eyes to the need for change.

The guiding coalition gathers the people who will help lead that change.

In the next episode, we will focus on forming a strategic vision for these initiatives.

Once the urgency is clear and the coalition is in place, the next question becomes: where are we going? And what specific moves will take us there?

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