Building the Foundation for Sustainable School Improvement

This blog is part of our Unlocking Collective Leadership: 7 Conditions for Lasting Impact series, highlighting the conditions that help P20 systems move from individual effort to shared leadership. 

What is Capacity and Resources?

Collaboration becomes more than a buzzword when schools have the right resources in the right places and the flexibility to use them well. It becomes a daily habit.

Capacity and Resources is the third condition of collective leadership. It’s about how people, time, funding, space, and expertise are leveraged to support shared goals. When this condition is off, progress can feel like pushing uphill.
Some questions to consider:

• Do your structures match your goals?
• Are you investing in people’s ability to lead, or asking them to figure it out on the margins?

Without a clear foundation for support, even the strongest teams can’t sustain momentum.
One school that tackled this head-on was Walker-Gamble Elementary, where rethinking how time was used became a breakthrough for both student growth and teacher collaboration.

Capacity and Resources in Practice

When schools rethink how they use what they already have, like time, talent, and trust, big things can happen. In our partner work, we’ve seen how capacity unlocks stronger collaboration and smarter problem-solving. 

Walker-Gamble, a school we’ve partnered with through the South Carolina Department of Education’s Collective Leadership Initiative, was committed to seeing its students grow. For their team, this meant prioritizing the amount and quality of instructional time in each day’s schedule. Through a time auditing process, their team reimagined their bell schedule together to protect planning time and provide additional time for cross-team collaboration. 

The result? A sharper focus on instruction, stronger team cohesion, and national recognition. Walker-Gamble was named a 2023 National ESEA Distinguished School for Exceptional Student Performance and Academic Growth and continues to see steady gains in student outcomes and staff engagement.

Curious what this looks like in practice? Read more about Walker-Gamble’s collective leadership journey.

Pressure or Possibility? A Team Check-In on Capacity

When the work starts to feel unsustainable or stalled, it’s often a signal that something deeper needs adjusting. Use these questions to reflect as a team:

• Where does leadership work currently happen in our schedule, and where does it get squeezed out? Naming this openly can reveal the invisible toll it’s taking on your team.
• Do our structures and staffing models support distributed leadership or reinforce traditional hierarchies? You might find it’s time to rethink who has protected time, decision-making power, or access to information.
• What are the “unspoken” resource barriers our team faces, and how are we addressing them? Whether it’s time, tech, PD, or trust—naming these gaps is the first step to closing them.

Collective leadership requires shared effort, but it also requires shared investment. These questions can help you identify what’s missing and where to begin making real, structural shifts.

Resources for Capacity and Resources

Ready to take a closer look at your own team’s capacity and resources? Use this tool to explore the structures that support or limit your team’s capacity. We recommend using this tool with a cross-role group and identifying one small shift you can make to increase shared leadership by reallocating time, tools, or support.

Download the Capacity and Resources Reflection Tool

Want tools, examples, and reflection prompts delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to the Unlocking Collective Leadership email series to dig deeper into each condition and explore how to bring collective leadership to life in your school or district.