PLC Blog

The Schedule Won’t Let Us Devote Time to Intervention

February 1, 2010

By Rick and Becky DuFour

The most effective school systems in the world ensure that all of their schools have a process in place to monitor each student’s learning on an ongoing basis and a systematic plan of intervention that provides a struggling student with additional time and support for learning (Barber and Mourshed, 2007). It certainly seems to make sense that any school that claims its mission is to help all students learn would have a plan for responding when some students don’t learn.

One of the critical questions all schools must address when they begin the PLC journey is “How will we respond when kids don’t learn?” We contend that every school should have a plan that guarantees students who are struggling to learn an essential skill or concept will receive additional time and support in a way that is timely, directive, and systematic. Furthermore, this assistance should not require the student to miss new direct instruction. Most of the educators with whom we have worked do not dispute our premise that a school that claims its mission is to help all students learn should actually have a coordinated plan in place for responding when some students don’t learn. Unfortunately, they go on to explain that “The schedule won’t allow it.”

This explanation has the benefit of demonstrating our good intentions—“We would love to intervene when kids do not learn”—at the same time it absolves us of responsibility—“Alas, it is simply impossible given our schedule.” Blame is assigned to an inanimate, abstract concept (the schedule), while people are exonerated for failure to act.

We find this position puzzling, and we offer these questions to educators across North America:

• Did you mean it when you said the purpose of your school or district is to help all students learn? Was that a sincere declaration of intent and priority or politically correct hyperbole?

• Do you recognize that some students will require more time and support for learning than others? We are unaware of any researcher who has concluded all students can learn if time and support are constants rather than variables in the learning process.

• Do you agree a school’s schedule should reflect its purpose and priorities?

• Have you created a schedule that ensures you have access to all students who experience difficulty in order to provide them with additional time and support for learning?

When we pose these questions, one at a time, to educators, it is disheartening to hear them say, “Yes, we are committed to helping all students learn; yes, we recognize some will need more time and support if they are to learn; yes, a school’s schedule should reflect its purpose and priorities; but, no, we do not have a system of intervention in place because the schedule won’t let us.” A school’s schedule should be regarded as a tool to further priorities rather than as an impediment to change. Our advice to educators is simple: Your schedule is not a sacred document. If your current schedule does not allow you to provide students with something as essential to their academic success as extra time and support for learning, you should change it!

The schools and districts listed under the “Evidence of Effectiveness” link on this site have all created schedules that not only allocate time for teachers to work in collaborative teams, but also provide time and support each day for students who need assistance. These schools rely on different schedules. For example, Adlai Stevenson High School has eight 50-minute periods per school day, with one of the periods reserved for lunch. Cinco Ranch offers a seven-period day with 30 minutes for lunch. Three Whittier Union high schools have six periods on Mondays, then alternate three periods on a block schedule Tuesday through Friday. Both Lakeridge Junior High School and Prairie Star Middle School operate a modified A/B block schedule, but their schedules are different in many ways. Jane Addams Junior High has a nine-period day. Boones Mill and Highland elementary schools’ schedules have some similarities, but they are not identical. Schedules can differ. However, schedules should (1) give school personnel access to students who are experiencing difficulty learning during the school day and (2) ensure students receive additional time and support for learning in ways that do not require them to miss new direct instruction.

It should come as no surprise that the “world’s best performing school systems” ensure that every school monitors the learning of each student on a timely basis and implements a systematic intervention plan to assist struggling students rather than let them fall behind (Barber and Mourshed, 2007). It’s time to acknowledge that if your school is not providing this level of support, it is not because the “schedule won’t let us;” it is because you have chosen not to.

Adapted from Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Karhanek)
© Solution Tree Press 2010

Recording and Handouts from Yesterday’s Webinar Now Online

December 17, 2009

You can view a recording of the presentation and download the handouts from yesterday’s free webinar hosted by Richard and Rebecca DuFour at go.solution-tree.com/webinars. These resources will be available for approximately 60 days.

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RELATED EVENT

If you benefited from the webinar, you will also enjoy this upcoming event:

Professional Learning Communities at Work™ Summit: New Insights for Improving Schools
February 23-26, 2010
Phoenix Convention Center
Phoenix, AZ

Featuring Rebecca DuFour, Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Guskey, Thomas Many, Robert J. Marzano, Mike Mattos, Anthony Muhammad, and Rick Stiggins

The book Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever It Takes is included with your summit registration.

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RELATED BOOK

The book Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever It Takes by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Gayle Karhanek is also available from Solution Tree. In it, you will find many more examples like those mentioned in the webinar.

Addressing Differences

December 3, 2009

By Rick DuFour

In my previous blog (see “Two Different ‘Schools’ of Thought”), I reported that one of my fans has made it quite clear that his perspective on the purpose of schooling, the responsibilities of educators, and the indicators of a quality school are very different than those I espouse. How might we explore those differences?

I could suggest that we work together to create ways to determine if some teachers in the school have discovered strategies that are more effective in helping all students learn so that teachers could learn from one another. He dismisses this idea by insisting, “There is no such thing as best practice.” Apparently, all practice is of equal value.

Perhaps we could examine the research. I have provided a comprehensive list of researchers who have endorsed each of the ideas I present. And that list is growing. Just this year, John Hattie reported the results of one of the most comprehensive syntheses or research ever conducted on factors that impact student achievement. Hattie’s synthesis considered over 800 meta-analyses and 52,000 research studies. At the conclusion of his analysis, Hattie advised that the best way to improve schools is to have teachers work in collaborative teams to clarify what students should learn, gather evidence of that learning through ongoing formative assessment processes, and use that evidence to inform and improve their practice. But our teacher rejects research supporting PLC practices as dogma rather than evidence and is “dumbfounded” by the popularity of the concept among researchers.

I could ask him to present the evidence that supports his assertions, but he does not feel compelled to submit any evidence. In fact, he admits there is no research that “well-funded think tanks, education professors, or consultants” subscribe to his view of how schools should be run. He insists that “professionals” pursue their own path. They are not required to justify their practice and are free to reject evidence and follow their own conscience.

Perhaps I could point out that virtually all of the professional organization and teacher unions in the United States have endorsed the idea that teachers should work as members of professional learning communities. Perhaps, as a high school English teacher, he can explain why the National Council of Teachers of English has created professional development kits titled, “Professional Learning Communities at Work” to “help educators zero in on the key issues confronting teachers and students in today’s English language arts classrooms.” Unfortunately, this is of no consequence to him since he rejects professional organizations as part of the “educrats.” He calls for teachers to “stand up to our unions” and “assert intellectual authority over the profession.”

Perhaps I could point out that my passion for the PLC concept is not that of a theoretician but of someone who spent 34 years in public education where I witnessed the power of the concept in my own school and, more recently, in hundreds of other schools as well. No matter. Much of my career was in administration and administrators are not to be trusted because they only exist to saddle teachers with the latest fads.

Perhaps I could point out the hundreds of schools and districts that have demonstrated significant gains in student achievement by implementing the PLC concept. He has an answer. The improved results are based on standardized tests that have caused a “narrowed curriculum and diluted intellectual rigor.” If I point to other indicators–lowered failure rates or improved graduation rates–he knows that these improvements merely reflect the lowering of standards.

Perhaps I could have him speak to teachers who have actually worked in high-performing PLCs. I have heard directly from thousands of teachers who say it has made their work more satisfying and rewarding and that they would never return to the days of working in isolation. He would dismiss them as “brainwashed” members of a “cult” who have been “willing to give up intellectual authority over their profession and allow themselves to be infantilized by condescending educrats.”

I could point out the overwhelming evidence that traditional practices simply are not working for our students or our society (as I did in my November 12 blog, “Where Will You Put Your Energy?”). He argues that those results are not attributable to educators but to “funding, bad policy, bad working conditions, social and economic phenomena, and [my personal favorite] the culture of constant change, gimmickry, and fad-chasing that educational ‘experts’ have been fostering in this country for decades in order to mask their own charlatanry and maintain their sham intellectual authority over teachers.”

I could argue that the model of higher education where universities are able to screen and select their adult students is not a viable model for a K-12 system that is intended to meet the needs of any child who walks in the door. I might point out that the university system he holds in such high regard has a 30 percent dropout rate after one year, graduates fewer than half of its students in five years, and has one of the highest dropout rates among college students in the industrialized world. But given his position that educators have no responsibility to see to it that their students succeed, I doubt he would be troubled by any evidence suggesting that perhaps higher education is not the paragon of success that he describes.

I could refute his argument that attention to helping all students learn at high levels does not inevitably diminish the learning of high-performing students by sharing the experience of Adlai Stevenson High School. Since becoming a PLC, Stevenson has had the percentage of its graduating class participating in the rigorous Advanced Placement college-level program increase from 7 percent to 80 percent. I could point out that Stevenson students score, on average, 20 percent higher than the national averages on each AP exam despite the fact that only about 15 percent of the nation’s graduates wrote an exam in 2008. I could point out that the mode score of Stevenson students is 5, the highest possible score, that the school has produced more AP scholars than any school in Illinois, or that it has been named as one of the top Fine Arts Programs in America. I could cite the fact that the college graduation rate for Stevenson graduates has consistently been more than double the national average. Clearly this should demonstrate that the PLC concept does not foster mediocrity. He answers that other schools that have not implemented the PLC concept also perform at high levels and thus the concept has nothing to offer.

I could provide evidence from the 38 schools we feature in our latest book–schools from throughout the nation serving students of every socio-economic group–that have experienced tremendous gains in the number of students moving from “proficient” to “advanced proficient” in their state, but why bother.

This teacher has not felt the need to be consistent. He has criticized the PLC concept as a repackaging of old ideas that offer nothing new, something teachers have been doing forever. In the next breath he describes it as a dangerous new fad that will ruin the nation’s schools. He creates one false dichotomy after another. Schools must be intellectually rigorous or invested in the learning of all students. Schools must focus on gifted students or students who struggle. Teachers must be content experts or care about the success of their students. They can be creative and innovative if they work in isolation or mindless automatons if they work in collaborative teams. Schools can have “either obedient teachers or excellent ones.”

He has insisted that the goal of the PLC concept is to impose conformity and mediocrity on educators by demanding that every teacher teach in the exact same way. I have written thousands of pages on the topic, but he would be unable to cite one sentence to support that assertion. The PLC concept calls for teachers to be empowered–to have a greater voice in determining what is taught, the sequencing of content, and how students are to be assessed. It does not endorse lockstep, day-by-day pacing and specifically encourages each teacher to use the instructional strategies he or she believes will lead to the best results. There is no one right way to teach a concept, but not all ways are equally effective. Teachers in PLCs work together to consider the effectiveness of their strategies on the basis of student learning, as evidenced on assessments created by the teachers themselves. The entire process is based on a belief in the internal expertise of teachers and their ability to learn from one another.

I remain passionately committed to being a proponent for the PLC process because I believe it best serves students and our profession. I am convinced that we have a moral imperative to do everything we can to promote student success rather than failure, and that our collective adult efforts can have a very powerful and positive impact on student learning. I will always, however, be willing to consider evidence that points to more effective practice. Unfortunately, this teacher has not expressed a similar openness. He has emphatically asserted that he “will never submit to your silly ideology,” “I will not abide by your beliefs,” and that he is among the “self-respecting teachers that aren’t buying it and we never will.”

I guess it follows that teachers who embrace the PLC concept have no self-respect. I suggest that his insistence that he will do things his way regardless of what the rest of the staff elects to do and that his unwillingness to consider the point of view of others reflects the “bullying” and “dogma” he has attributed to me.

So be forewarned. If you agree with this individual that the job of teachers is merely to present content, that as professionals they should be left to work in isolation and with total autonomy, that they are not accountable for the learning of their students, that they have no obligation to work with or support their colleagues, that their schools promote excellence by doing nothing to help students avoid “the abject humiliation of failure,” and that you will never consider any ideas or evidence that are contrary to your own, my books, this blog, and my ideas will only serve to annoy you.

Two Different “Schools” of Thought

November 30, 2009

By Rick DuFour

The most frequent question we hear at our PLC workshops and institutes is, “How should we respond to skeptical colleagues who resist any effort to implement the PLC concept?” The answer we provide is:

1. Assume good intentions on the part of these colleagues. Recognize that from their perspective, there are very legitimate reasons for being resistant.
2. Seek to understand their perspective. Ask them to articulate their assumptions and concerns.
3. Seek to build shared knowledge of best practice. Present your assumptions and evidence, invite them to present any contrary evidence, and see if you can agree on the weight of the evidence. Always operate from the premise that if people of good faith have access to the same information, they are likely to arrive at common ground.

I believe this is very good advice, but I must acknowledge that it does not always work. Very rarely, we encounter someone who not only has no interest in engaging in collective inquiry, exploring assumptions, gathering evidence, or seeking common ground, but also resorts to vilifying anyone who does not agree with him or her.

No one illustrates this tendency better than a high school teacher in Texas who for the past several years has made it his mission in life to oppose the PLC concept in general and me in particular. He has, at various times, referred to me and others who advocate for PLCs as “mindless educrats”, “a crass, pompous, aristocratic guru class”, “charlatans”, “a charismatic cult”, “not to be trusted”, guilty of “hubris”, and a “parasite on the nation’s schools” who “peddle nonsense-driven snake oil”. Perhaps I am being overly sensitive, but I get the distinct impression that he does not think highly of me.

What have I done to evoke this reaction? I have argued that schools are more effective in helping more students learn at high levels when teachers work collaboratively rather than in isolation, when they commit to provide students with access to a guaranteed curriculum that ensures all students have access to essential knowledge and skills regardless of the teacher to whom they are assigned, when student learning is monitored frequently in an assessment process that includes team-developed common formative assessment, when the school has a plan for providing struggling students with additional time and support, and when teachers analyze actual evidence of student learning to inform and improve their practice.

The concept of schooling I present is abhorrent to this teacher. He believes that as a professional he is free to make his own determinations about how to conduct his classroom. He will not subjugate his “personal academic freedom” and “independence” to the “mindless,” “spineless” “group think” of “interdependent collaborative groups.” Schools are better served by teachers who “stand their ground, speak their mind, and follow their own conscience, regardless of what the larger organization thinks” because real professionals “will not be bullied.”

In the view of this teacher, schools should not be student-centered, but content-centered. As he writes: “It is the substance of learning, the hard material content of English, math, science, history, and the various electives that should be at the center of any school’s culture, not the teachers or the students.”

He is very explicit in rejecting the idea that educators have any obligation to help all students learn. Schools should “let students fail” because “it’s the best policy that any school devoted to excellence can pursue” and ensures “the failing student is better left to experience the abject humiliation that failure brings with it.” Furthermore, “the student alone holds the moral responsibility for his or her own education and its ultimate outcome.” Schools that attempt to monitor the learning of students and intervene in a systematic way when they are unsuccessful do “students active harm.”

This teacher argues that attention to all students can only come at the expense of bright students. “The most gifted and motivated students will have to be ignored because of the constant pressure on teachers to keep the low end of the student population from failing.” The K-12 system should emulate higher education, where students succeed or fail on their own because that system has worked so well.

Clearly, we have different perspectives on the best strategies for improving schools. How might we resolve these differences? I will address that question in my next blog.

Upcoming Webinar Hosted by Richard and Rebecca DuFour

November 24, 2009

Free Webinar

Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Doing Whatever It Takes to Improve Student Learning
Hosted by Richard and Rebecca DuFour

Wednesday, December 16, 2009
4:00 PM – 5:00 p.m. EST
Register today!

This webinar examines the practices of schools that have used the professional learning community (PLC) process to help struggling students become proficient and to enrich and extend the learning for students who are already proficient. Learn the big ideas that drive the work of a PLC, examine some of the necessary cultural shifts, identify the parameters that lead to effective intervention and enrichment, and review the results from elementary, middle, and high schools serving diverse student populations throughout the United States.

Where Will You Put Your Energy?

November 12, 2009

By Rick DuFour

I received an email from a teacher opposed to engaging in the PLC process at her school. She took the position that the concept represents an experiment and that she should not have to participate in experiments. Her rational is, “How do we know that this process works better than the old ways?” She suggested that she be allowed to continue to work in isolation and that the school use her students as a control group for the experiment.

Here is my response:
I would not allow a teacher to opt out of the PLC process under the guise that his or her students are going to serve as a control group. There is already abundant research that says the “old ways” of teachers working in isolation, following their own pacing, assessing what and how they want, and intervening (or not) dependent on their personal preferences are not effective. There is abundant research that says working collaboratively, having teams establish and implement a guaranteed curriculum, creating common assessments, and developing a schoolwide plan for intervention is in the best interests of students and leads to better results. We don’t need to conduct experiments in each of the schools in each of the 15,000 school districts in the United States before we act on what has already been clearly established as best practice. So, unless this teacher could present some clear and compelling research to support the old ways (which she can’t), she must join her colleagues in acting in the best interest of her students.

I also ask her to reflect on the results of the “old way” of schooling last year in the United States.

1. For every 100 students who entered high school four years ago, 30 had dropped out before graduation. We rank 21st out of the 27 industrialized countries in terms of dropout rates. Those dropouts will earn 33 cents for every dollar a college graduate makes over their lifetime and 66 cents for every dollar a high school graduate will make. They will live a shorter life, they will be less employable in a volatile job market, and their children will have only a 1 in 17 chance of earning a college degree.

2. Of the 100 students who entered high school, 47 will enter college. One-third of them will need remedial courses. Thirty percent will not return to their college for the second year. We rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in terms of college dropout rates.

3. Throughout almost all of the second half of the 20th century, we ranked first in the world in terms of percentages of young adults (aged 25 to 34) with a college degree. By 1995 we had dropped to second. By 2008 we had dropped to 11th.

What the “old way” has done best is give us one of the highest dropout rates in the world, for both high school and college. Instead of this teacher wanting more evidence that the PLC process will be beneficial, she should provide some evidence to justify continuing with a process that has proven over time to be so ineffective.

My challenge to this teacher is this: I can show you the research in support of doing what you are being asked to do. In the absence of contradictory research and in the face of the evidence of the impact of the “old ways” on our students, how can a professional justify ignoring the evidence? It is time to put your energy into making our new process work rather than defending the status quo.

Which Quartile Should We Focus On?

October 27, 2009

By Rick DuFour

We received a question from a high school administrator who asked which group of students the school should focus on in order to improve the school’s achievement on the high-stakes tests administered by the state. He wrote, “We have received conflicting information about which levels to give the most attention. For example, should we concentrate more of our efforts on students moving from far below basic to below basic, from below basic to basic, or from basic to proficient?” We know that many schools are attempting to determine the best strategies for improving achievement on state tests, and so the question is not unique to this school.

Here is my response:

I received your question about which quartile you should focus on in your efforts to improve student achievement on the state tests your students must take. The answer is, you must focus on each and every student who demonstrates he or she is not learning. How you respond will be different, but your goal should be to give any student who struggles additional time and support for learning in a way that is timely, directive, and systematic.

For example, what is your plan for the students who are far below basic? At our high school, we adjusted their schedule so that they would have a double dose of language arts, with one period devoted to intensive reading instruction. We also built at least one hour per day into their schedule for intensive small-group instruction or individualized tutoring, even if the tutoring came from a member of the National Honor Society who was fulfilling a service requirement. Our plan was that by the end of two years, we would have the student achieving at grade level.

That didn’t mean we were inattentive to other students who were struggling to grasp a skill or concept in a particular course. Our goal was to monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis (every three weeks), and as soon as the student experienced difficulty that put him or her in danger of failing, we required the student to devote extra time to learning the concept in a way that never removed the student from new, direct instruction in the regular classroom. Again, this meant we had to create a schedule that gave us access to kids during the school day who needed extra support.

Your commitment must be to help all kids learn at the highest levels. You don’t pick and choose. Education is not a zero sum game. Helping one group of students learn does not take learning away from other students. A rising tide raises all boats. In our latest book, Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap, we looked at student achievement in 38 different schools that were using the PLC process (including a purposeful, systematic plan for intervention for any student who struggled). In every case, student achievement rose dramatically in each quartile. Students who had failed to demonstrate proficiency in the past became proficient. Students who were proficient in the past became advanced proficient.

Your question seems to suggest you are attempting to beat the state test, to game the system. That is very understandable given the emphasis put on state testing. But I encourage you to take another approach. Embrace the idea that in your school, collaborative teams of teachers will work together to ensure clarity on what students must learn, unit by unit, in each course taught. Teams will monitor each student’s learning on a regular and timely basis through a series of team-developed common formative assessments. Members of teams will use the results to inform and improve their own teaching by learning from one another. Finally, use the results from those assessments to provide any student who is struggling with additional time and support for learning, in a way that that is timely, directive (not invitational), and systematic (a schoolwide plan of intervention, rather than leaving the problem for each teacher to address). If you work at this approach, state test scores will take care of themselves.

The Need for Crucial Conversations

October 13, 2009

By Rick DuFour

Becky and I recently participated in a VoiceThread hosted by our talented colleague Bill Ferriter. Educators from around the country asked questions and shared their experiences with implementing the PLC concept (you can hear the conversation here). One of the most frequently raised topics dealt with the challenges of working with colleagues. One participant expressed frustration because his teammates didn’t agree with him, and he wondered if he should retreat to working in isolation and do what he felt was best for his students. Another participant asked why educators are typically so unwilling to challenge the beliefs and behaviors of colleagues. Yet another argued that such challenges are detrimental to a team and would be viewed as an attempt to impose our view on others.

So let me ask which if any of the following scenarios you would feel compelled to question or challenge a teammate:

• A colleague suggests student achievement can’t be improved in your school because of the increase in students who live in the trailer park.

• A colleague opposes a SMART goal of increasing the number of female students in higher level math classes because girls generally don’t do well in math.

• On the third day of school, a kindergarten teacher recommends a student for special education because he is far behind the other students and his older siblings were all in special education.

• A colleague gives students the option of not completing assignments the team has deemed essential. He gives those students a zero and argues that by allowing a student to be irresponsible (not doing the work), he is teaching the student to be responsible.

• Your team attends a workshop to learn new strategies for assessing students. Your colleague ignores the presenter and works Sudoku puzzles all day.

• A colleague opts not to give the team’s common assessment.

Not one of the scenarios presented above is fiction. I am convinced that until educators are willing to question such behavior, to challenge the assumptions behind those behaviors, and to offer evidence to support their challenges, we will continue to be a profession characterized by isolation and fragmentation. Not all behavior is professional. Not all ideas are of equal value. If the very essence of a team is people working interdependently (rather than in isolation) to achieve common goals (rather than individual interests) for which members are mutually accountable (rather than every man for himself; e.g., “I need only concern myself with what happens in my classroom”), then we must have the courage to engage in crucial conversations with one another. The culture of every organization is determined to a large degree by the worst behavior people are willing to tolerate.

I understand that it will be difficult to initiate these conversations in a traditional school culture, but until we do, the culture will continue to support the status quo rather than the PLC concept. For tips on how to engage in a crucial conversation, I recommend you review the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson and his colleagues.

So, here are my questions: Do you feel any obligation to urge a colleague to question his or her behavior or assumptions when you believe he or she is not acting in the best interests of students or what you regard as the standards of the profession? Can you cite examples of when you have done so?

It’s Not a Meeting; It’s a Way of Being!

September 29, 2009

By Brian Butler, PLC associate

I want to share the temporary soap box that I got on last week when addressing a group of teachers and administrators about the term professional learning community. If we continue to use the term PLC in the way that it is being used in many quarters, then it truly has lost its original meaning and power.

This is the most promising school reform concept ever (not just my words, but the words of many highly respected experts (see On Common Ground and Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work™, among others), but if we continue to treat the term PLC as something we have to do as opposed to how we do business, then it is reduced to an add-on, a meeting, or a program. We don’t need or want any more unnecessary add-ons, programs, or meetings in our already busy school days.

Assistant Principal Dawn Hendrick and I are still learning as an administrative team, but we do buy into the PLC concept. When I was an assistant principal at Lemon Road Elementary School only six years ago, I was taught by Principal Carolyn Miller and former Assistant Superintendent Ellen Schoetzau about what a true PLC is. I observed and learned from Dr. Robyn Hooker and Shirley McCoy, two other wonderful principals who truly understand the PLC concept. By listening, watching, and studying the words, work, and wisdom of Richard and Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Lillie Jessie (principal of Elizabeth Vaughan Elementary School) and others, I immediately knew this model or way of doing business made sense. I also found out that some of us wanted a quick fix, a program, a meeting, or a silver bullet that would cure all of our educational ills. The PLC concept is not linear and it is messy, but when done in a collaboratively focused manner around the right things, it is immensely rewarding.

Educators work too hard and do too many wonderful things in our schools every single day to allow this model or way of doing business to be reduced to a meeting as opposed to a way of being. Please don’t allow our efforts and great work to be overlooked because of a lack of will to, as Robert Eaker says, go from knowing to doing to being. In a keynote address that I had the privilege to witness, Dr. Eaker said that the term PLC does not even need to be used if a school is a true PLC. If you hold to the three big ideas (learning, collaboration, and results), and if you use the critical questions of learning to drive your conversations, then I say don’t even use the term PLC during the day.

Once you get to the point of being, as soon as someone walks in the front door of your school they will know that something is different. What they will notice are the cultural shifts. A school that operates as a PLC has, as cited in the book Learning by Doing, shifted from:

• A focus on teaching to a focus on learning
• Infrequent summative assessments to frequent common formative assessments
• Individual teachers determining the appropriate response when students don’t learn or already know it to a systematic response that ensures support for every student no matter who the teacher may be
• Isolation to collaboration around the right things
• Each teacher clarifying what students must learn to collaborative teams building shared knowledge and understanding about essential learning
• An assumption that these are my kids, those are your kids to an assumption that these are our kids
• An external focus on issues outside the school to an internal focus on steps staff can take to improve the school
• Teachers gathering data from their individually constructed tests in order to assign grades to collaborative teams acquiring information from common assessments in order to (1) inform their individual and collective practices and (2) respond to students who need addition time and support
• Independence to interdependence
• A language of complaint to a language of commitment
• External training (workshops and courses) to job-embedded learning
• Assessing impact on the basis of teacher satisfaction (Did you like it?) to assessing impact on the basis of improved student learning
• Learning by listening to learning by doing
• Using inaccurate language to define a PLC and its relating concepts (e.g., the inaccurate term PLC meeting) to becoming students of PLCs and collectively understanding and embedding its meaning and all the concepts surrounding this way of doing business

The deep understanding of this way of doing business has got to come from the bottom up. It will only happen when we become students of the term PLC, and realize that it is a continuous learning journey with no end.

However, I would suggest that you get rid of the term PLC in your daily conversations and start to build common language around the kinds of collaborative team meetings that you have every day. A PLC is a school made up of collaborative teams. Collaborative teams are not PLCs.

If you are reading this, then it is highly likely that you are interested in becoming or are already a student of the term PLC as defined by Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour. You are also most likely an educator who deeply cares about making sure your staff, students, parents, and community members get the most accurate information possible.

If a parent or another educator came up to you and said, I heard about this PLC thing. It sounds like a great way to do meetings, what would you say? Would you go along to just get along and talk about it as if it was a meeting? Or, would you take the time to build shared knowledge with this individual to help deepen understanding around what a PLC is and what it is not? Better yet, if Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour came to your school and asked you to make the case for your school being a true PLC, would you start by talking about your PLC meetings? Remember, precision in language is critical!

Would we, as teachers, allow our students to continue to incorrectly define a term without giving them corrective feedback? Why do we allow each other as professional educators to change, misuse, and redefine terms without holding each other accountable? We are too good for that! If we want to be taken seriously, let at the very least do our homework to ensure that common language, common knowledge, and common expectations are at the core of how we do business in our schools and districts.

A good place to start may be to say, It’s not a meeting; it’s a way of being! Then ask that person if he or she would be interested in learning about PLCs with you by reading and discussing an article or a book or by visiting a school that is well its journey.

What are you prepared to do?

Does Merit Pay for Individual Teachers Align With the PLC Concept? Part I

September 15, 2009

By Rick DuFour

The idea of merit pay for individual teachers has been touted as a way to improve student achievement. One state, for example, proposed a merit-pay system that would designate up to 25 percent of teachers in a district for a 5 percent merit-pay bonus on the basis of student achievement on the state assessments.

Let’s examine the rationale behind this proposal for merit pay.

1. Teachers are the key to improving student achievement.
2. Teachers are motivated by money and will work harder at improving student achievement if they are provided with the possibility of financial gain and the recognition that accompanies it.
3. If too many people are given this recognition it will diminish its impact and therefore no longer serve as a motivator. Therefore, merit pay must be limited to a select few.
4. We can determine the teachers who are most effective on the basis of a single test on a single day.
5. Because teaching is an isolated activity it is legitimate to award individual teachers who work independently of one another.

I agree with the first assumption, but I disagree with the next four. It is counter-intuitive to argue that someone who has entered the profession of education is motivated primarily by money. It is illogical that someone who is not motivated to do his or her best for students for $50,000 will suddenly be inspired to go above and beyond the call of duty for the one in four chance to make $52,500. It is not plausible that a system designed to ensure that 75 percent of its members will fail each year promotes organizational success. Most of all, we have a century of evidence that demonstrates merit pay for teachers does not improve student achievement.

In The Knowing-Doing Gap, organizational theorists Pfeffer and Sutton use merit pay for teachers as a classic example of people continuing to promote proposals that have repeatedly been shown to fail an illustration of the gap between what we know and what we do. As they write:

You don’t have to read the evidence from literally decades of research to spot the problems with merit pay for schoolteachers. That evidence shows that merit-pay plans seldom last longer than five years and that merit pay consistently fails to improve student performance. The very logic of merit pay for teachers suggests that it won’t do what it is intended to do (p. 23).

They go on to demonstrate that organizations that create zero-sum games where in order for some of us to win others of us must lose, create internal competition that discourages cooperation and mutual assistance and works against organizational effectiveness. A competitive culture makes the sharing of information and the mutual development of skills very unlikely because it is so counter to individual self-interest. An organization that expects people to share information, learn from each other, and work collaboratively to enhance overall performance will not rely on a system of internal competition that actually discourages those behaviors.

Over 25 years ago, Peters and Waterman considered the impact of reward systems on organizational performance in their book In Search of Excellence. They discovered that organizations that established reward systems to ensure lots of losers (for example, 75 percent of you will lose) were consistently low performers. As they said, if year after year a few people are winners and everyone else is a loser, eventually the losers start to act like losers.

Of course, there are logistical obstacles to merit pay. How will counselors, art teachers, special education teachers, and teachers of noncore curriculum be included if performance on the state test is an important variable? There is also the issue of defining “top performing.” If I teach in a high SES school where students excel on the state test but demonstrate little growth during the year, am I a high performer? If I help my low SES students show two years of growth but they fall short on the state test, am I top performer?

But those are logistical obstacles. There are two bigger problems. First, it works against the interdependence, mutual accountability, and collaboration essential to professional learning communities that represent best practice in our profession. Why would I, as an individual teacher, share my effective strategies with colleagues if by doing so I risk no longer standing out as exemplary and thus will no longer qualify for merit pay? Why would I help students in another classroom become proficient if by doing so I am taking money out of my own pocket? If I am motivated by money, I will hoard my most effective practices and hope for dismal performances from my colleagues. The second problem with merit pay goes beyond philosophy or sharing of opinions: we have decades of research and evidence demonstrating that it will not help more students learn.

A school that claims to value the big ideas of the PLC concept, a commitment to higher levels of learning for all students, a collaborative culture and collective effort to support that learning, and the transparency of results essential to improved professional practice, will recognize that merit pay runs counter to everything they say they value.

Finally, here is my prediction for the states that adopt merit pay for teachers: The next time the state has a budget crisis, the merit-pay plan will be abolished as too costly in light of its failure to improve student achievement. Politicians will blame teachers and teacher unions for the failure of merit-pay programs and will accept no responsibility for pursuing a feckless strategy that has been repeatedly proven to be ineffective in promoting higher levels of learning for all students.

DuFour Conversation Starts Today!

September 8, 2009

What Is the Sequence of Goal Setting in a PLC?

September 2, 2009

By Rick DuFour

We received a question about goals from someone who wanted to know if district goals had to be established before school goals could be created, and if school goals were necessary before team goals could be developed. He also asked how to establish a goal that would address all teams if achievement at different grade levels or departments were very different. Here is our response:

There is nothing sacred about the sequence of the goals. In fact, we have worked in many districts where there were no district goals, and so schools were left to their own devices in establishing goals. On the other hand, if a district establishes a goal, there is no chance it will be achieved if the schools reject it and head off in pursuit of their own goals. Similarly, a school will not achieve its goals if teams are free to ignore it. Once a goal is established, the people who are crucial to achieving it must adopt it as part of their own goals.

I think the best goals at the district and school levels are broad. For example, the district goal could be “We will raise the bar and close the achievement gap in all of our schools.” Elementary school goals should typically focus on math and literacy because those areas should be priorities at every grade level. On the other hand, if middle and high schools limit goals to math and literacy, teaches of other courses may feel they are not responsible for contributing. So we encourage those levels to include goals that are more encompassing, reduce the failure rate or increase the percentage of students who earn credit in the most rigorous curriculum.

An elementary school goal that says “We will increase the percentage of students who meet proficiency standards in reading on the district assessment or state assessment” is a goal that every grade level can address. If third grade had 84 percent proficient and first grade had 68 percent proficient, both know that their goal must be 84+ percent and 68+ percent. If the school establishes a more specific goal such as “We want to increase the overall percentage of students demonstrating proficiency to 80 percent,” third grade doesn’t have to improve and could even decline and still meet the goal. If a middle school says “We want to decrease the percentage of Fs,” a Physical Education team that had 4 percent Fs can contribute, but so can an Algebra team that had a 18 percent failure rate. If a high school says “We want more students demonstrating proficiency in our most rigorous curriculum,” the Spanish team can develop steps to encourage more students to pursue upper-level Spanish classes while the U.S. History team can create a plan to increase enrollment in AP U.S. History. The school and district goals can be general enough that every team can establish and contribute to more specific team goals.

I would not have teams pick and choose among goals because then the school does not have a coordinated effort. If I couldn’t have every team in an elementary school focus on both language arts and math, I would rather have the entire elementary school focus on math or language arts than have some teams focus on math and others on language arts. Similarly, I would want all teams to contribute to reducing the failure rate than some focus on that while others pursue different goals. There is power in collective learning.

Finally, two more cautions. Avoid esoteric goals that are impossible to measure such as “We want our students to be lifelong learners.” A goal is not a goal until you can establish the indicators you will track to measure progress. The pursuit of goals should provide us with the evidence we need to monitor, adjust, and improve our practice. Finally, avoid such narrow goals that you can accomplish the goal, but students actually learn less. A team that says “Our goal is to improve student achievement in capitalization” can achieve the goal even though student performance in language arts actually declines. A goal like that is fine as an interim goal for a specific unit, but not effective as a team goal for the year.

Voicethread Tips for DuFour Conversation

September 1, 2009

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work(TM)

August 27, 2009

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

It’s still hard for me to believe that we’ll be spending four days in September (the 8th through the 11th) exploring the nuts and bolts of professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour.

Upcoming Conversation on PLCs with the DuFours

August 25, 2009

Bottom-Up Leadership Put to the Test

August 18, 2009

By Lillie Jessie, PLC Associate

At Elizabeth Vaughan Elementary School, the effectiveness of our bottom-up leadership depends on high-quality, top-down leadership direction and support. This past year, a series of unexpected challenges really put our bottom-up leadership to the test, and our teachers’ initiatives proved to be outstanding!

Medical absences at each grade level left us scrambling for subs, including one to replace one of my strongest veteran teachers. Resignations at two grade levels also put a pinch on school resources and staff sanity. In the meantime, school renovations and general lack-of-space issues forced us to combine a second-grade class and a third-grade class in the middle of the year.

This is when you find out if you have the interdependence Rick DuFour talks about so frequently. This is how our PLC used bottom-up leadership to pull through these challenges together:

Third grade Staff initiated a plan to take the students of the person leaving into their classrooms and use the sub as a support person. The new teachers who eventually filled a more permanent role received extra support during a two-week transition time and enjoyed a supportive environment throughout the year.

Fourth grade Staff created a different plan in which the sub taught science (nontested) and social studies, but the students floated to other classrooms for language arts and math (AYP content areas). All grade-level teachers and specialists worked with the students during testing.

Fifth Grade Staff developed a plan to take the leaving teacher’s students for a few weeks. Then, they diligently stuck with these larger class sizes while the new teacher adjusted.

All staff came to my weekly meeting with a problem and a solution. At no point did I ask them to do this. I did find it necessary to step in and temporarily reposition one teacher, but that is part of the top-down leadership that is so necessary for this collaborative culture to exist.

As a result of this bottom-up leadership and collaboration, we received our highest scores ever! Overall, we made 91 percent student achievement with 40 percent pass advanced. Third grade is above 90 percent in most areas with 100 percent improvement in pass advance in science. Fourth grade dropped a bit because of a last-minute emergency, but only to 91 percent with an increase in proficiency percentages. Fifth grade was off the hook with 95 percent in writing, 97 percent in reading, and 98 percent in math. These are just our preliminary scores. We are expecting even higher scores when the adjustments take place!

As principal of a school with more than 80 percent student diversity and Title I status, I can say without a doubt that bottom-up leadership within the culture of a PLC works.

What Are the Necessary Leadership Responsibilities in a PLC?

August 4, 2009

By Geri Parscale, PLC Associate

There is nothing like the beginning of the school year. Everywhere you look, new opportunities are popping up, new ideas are being developed, and school leaders are planning to best meet the needs of students. As one of those leaders, I, too, am planning for what works best.

In School Leadership That Works (Marzano, Walters, & McNulty), the authors identify 21 leadership responsibilities that have an effect on student learning. Albeit all are important, certain ones are essential for a leader who is fostering that razor-sharp focus on learning that is present in a high-functioning professional learning community.

The responsibilities that we at Fort Leavenworth believe to be vital for administrators working in a PLC include: change agent; communication; input; involvement in curriculum, instruction, and assessment; knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Focusing administratively on these responsibilities throughout the year will help learning leaders create a culture where all students learn at high levels.

Based on the words of Sir Josiah Stamp, “It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.” As learning leaders, we drive the culture of our school. We have a professional obligation to choose our responsibilities carefully so that we create a culture focused on learning and not on teaching. The five responsibilities mentioned above are vital if we want to move forward as a PLC.

I believe these responsibilities play an important role in developing and sustaining the culture in Fort Leavenworth schools. Our leaders lead with specific behaviors and characteristics identified through these responsibilities, and because of those behaviors, the culture is stronger and more well-defined. Identification of responsibilities (and the behaviors that correspond to them) help our administration keep the sharp focus needed as they start the school year.

As a school leader, what are your ideas about the necessary leadership responsibilities?

Are yours different than ours?

Please share your thoughts by commenting on this blog.

Team Leaders in a Professional Learning Community

July 22, 2009

By Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

Collaborative teams are the engines that drive professional learning communities. It is simply impossible to ensure high levels of learning for all students if teachers are working in isolation. The quality of work performed by teams depends on team leaders who join with their principal to direct the team’s work ensuring that the team is focusing on the right things and continually improving, laboring together to improve student learning. Just as district success depends on the leadership capability of superintendents and school success depends to a great degree on the leadership of principals, the success of collaborative teams depends on the leadership capacity of team leaders.

Ironically, the role of team leader is one of the least examined aspects of school structure and culture. How are team leaders selected in traditional schools? The answers include asking for volunteers and saying, “We’re willing to let you if you are willing to do it?”, automatically rotating leaders each year, voting, and using the role of team leader to provide leadership opportunities for all teachers. One team shared that they used the “huddle up” strategy. It went like this: “You have 10 minutes to huddle up with your department and pick your team leader!” In short, in many districts, the role of team leader what they are to do and how they are selected goes largely unexamined.

Compare how team leaders are selected with other aspects of schooling. For example, think about how the head football coach at the high school selects his coaching staff. He would give considerable thought to who should fill each role. He wouldn’t just rotate his offensive coordinators each year or simply search for volunteers! He would select the best person to fill the position, and the position of offensive coordinator would be well defined and the role expectations clearly communicated.

The first step in addressing the role of team leader is to collaboratively develop a position description. It is unreasonable to have expectations of team leaders without clarity regarding what the role entails. While each school culture is different, a few things would be consistent in schools seeking to function as professional learning communities. For example, team leaders are expected to lead the development and adherence to team norms, clarify and add meaning to essential learning outcomes for each subject or course, develop and utilize formative common assessments, analyze student learning student by student, skill by skill, direct students to specific additional time and support or enrichment, seek out and share best practice, and lead the team in a process of developing and monitoring the attainment of SMART goals. In short, the team leader fulfills the role of serving as the leader of the team!

Additionally, considerable thought should be given to the relationship between the principal and team leaders. Just as principals should be part of a high-performing administrative team at the district level, team leaders should play an integral role as members of the principal’s leadership team at the school level. Leaders of professional learning communities, whether at the district level, school level, or team level, are constantly and consistently modeling the work of high-performing collaborative teams; focusing on improving student learning; practicing, rehearsing, and modeling the work that ultimately will be expected of others; and developing a culture of continuous improvement.

Not only should thought be given to position descriptions and the team leader’s role as part of the school leadership team; considerable thought must also be given to the kind of training and support team leaders need in order to be successful. If we expect team leaders to perform their duties at a high level, they deserve the support, resources, and training necessary to successfully do the job they are asked to do.

Reflection

Simply organizing a school into collaborative teams, in and of itself, will do little to improve learning levels of students. The fundamental question is, “What do collaborative teams do, and how well do they do it?” And the answer to this question depends, to a great degree, on the role of team leader. How they are selected and what they are expected to do.

In the White River School District, in Buckley, Washington, considerable thought has been given to the role of the team leader. Below you’ll find the position description for a team leader that was collaboratively developed and is currently utilized across the district.

Position Description: Team Leader

A high-performing collaborative team of teachers is the heart and soul of a school that functions as a professional learning community, and a highly effective team is invariably led by an effective team leader. The success of the White River School District to achieve its mission of ensuring high levels of learning for all students depends to a great degree on the leadership capacity of the team leaders in each school. Thus, the selection of team leaders in White River is a thoughtful, informed, and deliberate decision of critical importance.

The educators who serve in this very important role are expected to coordinate and lead the work of their team. They will work closely with the Learning Improvement Coordinator within their building and report directly to the building principal. Additionally, team leaders serve as contributing members of the principal’s administrative team. Team leaders are expected to articulate and communicate to the administration faculty questions, needs, and concerns, while at the same time communicating and explaining the rationale and specifics of the administration’s plans and initiatives to the faculty. In short, the team leader serves as the key communication link between the administration and the faculty.

Team leaders are expected to enhance the capacity of their team to work interdependently to achieve common goals for which team members hold themselves mutually accountable. In fulfilling the role of leading their team, team leaders are responsible for such functions as leading the team in preparing and utilizing team norms, planning agendas, chairing meetings, serving as a direct communications link between the administration and the faculty, leading the work of teams in analyzing and improving student learning data, seeking out and experimenting with best practices, leading the collaborative development and attainment of learning improvement goals, and identifying and communicating professional development needs. Team leaders must work continually to enhance the effectiveness of their team by ensuring that the team focuses on the critical questions and practices associated with improving student learning in a manner that is reflective of the highest quality.

Educators who serve as team leaders must have a demonstrated record of effectiveness in their own teaching, and they must have earned the recognition and respect of their peers. Team leaders must have excellent planning and organizational skills as well as the ability to work well with others. In order to enhance the leadership capacity and effectiveness of others, team leaders must model a desire and willingness to continually learn, constantly seeking ways to first improve themselves so that they can more effectively lead their team.

In short, the White River School District is seeking outstanding individuals to lead building-level collaborative teams of teachers in order to more effectively impact student leaning levels, student by student, skill by skill, relentlessly and continually!

Three Rules Help Manage Assessment Data

July 7, 2009

By Thomas W. Many, Ed.D.

The following article was published in the March/April issue of TEPSA News. It has been reproduced on this site with permission from TEPSA News and PLC Associate, Thomas W. Many.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

We live in the Information Age, when never before has so much data on student learning been so readily available. It is the best of times…

And yet, to harried principals struggling to make sense of the mountains of assessment data, the Information Age may feel like the worst of times…

Mining those data mountains for information that teachers can use to improve student learning is a daily challenge for principals. The problem is not a lack of data, but rather managing all the data in a way that is meaningful to teachers. I am not aware of any guidelines about how to process all the information that is, how to decide exactly what information is needed or who needs the information to make decisions; however, I did encounter rules for using data during a conversation with Damon Lopez, former principal of Los Penasquitos Elementary School in San Diego.

Lopez believes that in order for teachers to maximize the impact of data gleaned from assessments, principals should honor three rules and ensure that data is 1) easily accessible, 2) purposefully arranged, and 3) publicly discussed. In those schools where making meaning of assessment data is a powerful experience, principals take responsibility for creating the necessary structures associated with the first two rules and insist that teachers commit to the last. Rather than working individually to make meaning of assessment data, the most successful principals have discovered it is far more productive to create the conditions under which teams of teachers can make meaning of the data.

Easy Access

For data to add value to our efforts to improve student learning, teachers access to the data must be timely. In addition to figuring out who needs to know what and when, the key question for principals to ask is, What is the most efficient way to get assessment data back to teachers?

As Kim Marshall, publisher of the highly regarded Marshall Memo, suggests, When turnaround time after interim assessments is long, the results are stale and outdated by the time teachers sit down and discuss them. Data loses its impact whenever it takes more than 48 hours to return the results of a common assessment to teachers.

Outdated information makes it more difficult for teachers to be effective in adjusting instruction, identifying students who need more time and support or coordinating remedial or enrichment programs among teachers on the team. To improve the accessibility of data, principals need to shorten the turnaround time for reporting data.

Purposeful Arrangement

The second rule for maximizing the impact of data calls for assessment data to be purposefully arranged, that is, for the assessment data delivered to teacher teams to be presented in a format that is complete, accurate, and straight-forward.

Data should be organized in simple not simplistic ways. There are many software packages that quickly, almost instantaneously, provide assessment results in tables, charts, or graphs and make it easy for teachers to digest the results of interim assessments. Author D. M. Griffith observed, “If the message the information is trying to communicate fails to get through to the reader, [the information] is useless. It’s better to be simple and understood than complex and ignored.” What is important is that the data is returned to teachers in a format conducive to further discussion.

From time to time, teachers may create their own tables or graphs or request additional formats for organizing assessment results, but the initial data should be received in an arrangement that allows teachers to focus on the results not the presentation format.

Public Discussion

While principals can address the logistics of making data easily accessible and arranging it purposefully, teacher teams are uniquely equipped to meaningfully engage in the public discussion of assessment data. Indeed, teachers and principals need to embrace the critical importance of publicly discussing the results of assessments. Each time they discuss an assessment together, teachers benefit from the collective wisdom of their team. Not only do they gain deeper insight into how their students are learning, but also reviewing results as a team has the added benefits of allowing teachers to deepen their content knowledge and to sharpen their pedagogy.

To paraphrase Griffith, assessment data and information on student achievement are relevant, and therefore needed, only if they are used to make a decision. In fact, nothing justifies the giving of an interim assessment and with it the associated loss of instructional time unless teachers discuss the results of the assessment and adjust their instruction accordingly.

The Age of Wisdom or Foolishness?

To be sure, the ready availability and discerning management of assessment data can go a long way in contributing to making this the Age of Wisdom for educators seeking to improve students learning. Principals who are successful focus their energies on ensuring that the data is 1) easily accessible and 2) purposefully arranged and insist that teachers spend their time 3) publicly discussing the results to ensure that all students learn.

References

Marshall, K. (2008, September). “Interim Assessments: A User’s Guide.” Phi Delta Kappan. pp.64-68.
Griffiths, D. M. (2006, March). “Are You Drowning in a Sea of Information? Managing Information: A Practical Guide.” Available at www.managing-information.org.uk.

During the course of a career spanning more than 30 years, Dr. Thomas W. Many has served as a classroom teacher, principal and superintendent all at the elementary level. With a passion for promoting the development of high performing schools, his district was recently recognized as one of the highest achieving – lowest spending elementary school districts in Illinois.

Should Homework Be Graded?

June 23, 2009

By Rick DuFour

I received an interesting question from a teacher regarding recommendations for whether or not homework should be graded. He described a scenario in which a student demonstrates proficiency on every quiz, test, and exam but refuses to do homework each day. If, on a daily basis, the student receives a zero for not doing homework, the student would fail the class. If, on the other hand, homework is optional, he fears most students won’t complete it. So, he asked, “How should I approach homework in determining grades?”

This relatively straightforward question actually raises several significant issues such as, “What does a grade represent in our school?” “Should homework be required or optional?” “Should homework be graded?” and “Is it appropriate to give a zero if a student does not complete a homework assignment?”

In most schools, what a grade represents remains in the eye of the beholder of the individual teacher. Some teachers grade homework; some do not. Some allow students to retake a test; some do not. Some provide students with additional time and support; some do not. Some provide extra credit for tasks unrelated to the curriculum; some do not. Some consider behavior, participation, and promptness in determining a grade; some do not. It is time for educators to grapple with the question, “What does a grade represent in our school?” in a more meaningful way.

I have asked thousands of educators across North America what they feel is the single most important criterion for determining a student’s grade at the end of a course. Their inevitably overwhelming answer is, “The student has demonstrated the achievement of a clearly defined standard.” If a team of teachers has clarified 1) what students must know and be able to do and 2) the indicators they will use to monitor student learning, the grade at the end of the course should be based on the student’s success in achieving the intended standard. Ironically, many of those same teachers would justify failing a student who clearly demonstrated mastery of the essential learnings because of missing homework assignments.

In his outstanding synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to student achievement, John Hattie found that homework can improve achievement, particularly for older (high school aged) students when the homework involves rote learning, practice, or rehearsal of the subject matter. He also found, however, it can actually have adverse effects unless the teacher carefully and promptly monitors each student’s work because homework often causes students to internalize incorrect responses and strategies and can actually undermine student motivation. The more complex the task or the learning, the less value homework offers. Furthermore, different home environments play a role in the varying ability of students to complete work successfully. My friend and colleague Bob Eaker elected to stop having all fifth graders in the school he was leading complete the annual homework project of building a replica of a frontier fort because, as he put it, “We discovered some Dads just built better forts than others.”

Therefore, I submit the following propositions:

1. Homework should be given only when the instructor feels it is essential to student learning. If, for example, the teacher believes that by practicing a skill and receiving prompt and specific feedback students will learn at higher levels, homework is very appropriate and should be assigned.
2. The teacher then has an obligation to monitor the homework carefully and provide individual students with precise feedback based on their specific needs.
3. If the work is deemed essential to a student’s learning, that student should not have the option of taking a zero but instead should be required to complete the work. This necessitates a coordinated, schoolwide approach to responding when students do not complete their work because there are limits as to what an individual teacher can require. The schoolwide response should be timely, directive (non-invitational), systematic (not left to the discretion of individual teachers), and should never require the student to be removed from new direct instruction. (For examples of such a systematic approach, see Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don’t Learn by DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, and Karhanek and/or Pyramid Response to Intervention: RTI, Professional Learning Communities, and How to Respond When Kids Don’t Learn by Buffum, Mattos, and Weber.)

Let me offer two different scenarios regarding homework. In the first, the teacher is attempting to help students learn how to write a research paper–a very complex task. After providing instruction on the various elements of this task, he assigns students to complete a draft of the first two pages of their research paper. He assigns this work because he hopes to 1) determine the levels of understanding of each student, 2) provide each student with specific feedback regarding his or her initial efforts and offer strategies for improvement, and 3) identify any areas where many students seem to be struggling so that he can reteach those areas with a different instructional approach. He believes this assignment is vital to student success in this very essential skill. He does not grade this work because it is initial practice, nor does he allow a student to take a zero instead of completing the assignment. Because it is vital to learning, the student is required to do the work.

In the second scenario, a high school math teacher tells students that she will be assigning homework each day because she believes the daily practice and prompt feedback are essential to their learning. She also advises them, however, that students will not be required to continue practicing each day when they have demonstrated they are mastering the content. There will be daily homework for all students for the first two weeks of school, at which time a unit test will be given. Students who earn an A or B on the test will not be required to complete daily homework during the next unit. For them, homework will be optional. All other students will be required to continue doing their daily practice. This procedure provides an incentive to students to become proficient. Students with a B will work hard to maintain it from unit to unit; students with a C+ will put in extra effort to raise their grade. The goal for these students becomes proficiency in essential skills rather than completing homework to avoid punishment. Once again, students who had not earned the prerequisite grade would be required, not invited, to complete homework through a schoolwide system of intervention.

I contend the approach to homework of these two teachers is aligned with the commitment to learning and focus on results of a PLC. I hope more schools will begin to adapt their homework practices accordingly.

Getting the Most Out of Common Assessments

June 9, 2009

By Mike Mattos
Principal, Pioneer Middle School, and PLC Associate

Like most schools that begin implementing PLC practices, the faculty at Pioneer Middle School learned about the importance of common formative assessments and decided to utilize this powerful tool to help us focus on learning.  Unfortunately, as time progressed, our departmental teams experienced varied levels of success; some teams felt they gained significant benefits from their common assessments, while other teams were far less enthusiastic with their results.  As principal, my first thought was to question whether every team was truly using common assessments, or were they just going through the motions to appease me.  After asking these questions at a faculty meeting, I was pleased to find that every team was frequently administering common assessments–in fact, every team said they also use our site assessment software, which produces powerful reports to analyze the results.

At this point, I was perplexed. If every team was giving common assessments and had access to the same types of disaggregated results, then why were our teams experiencing such varied outcomes?  Upon further consideration, I realized that I was asking the wrong question; that is, it was not a question of “Are we giving common assessments?” but “What are we doing with our common assessment data?”  When we discussed this question, we found great differences from team to team, with some teams digging deeply into their common assessment data and other teams doing almost nothing with the information.  Based on this revelation, we discussed why we give common assessments and determined that common assessments provide essential learning information that enabled each team to:

• Identify specifically which students did not demonstrate mastery of essential standard(s). Because we give common assessments to measure student mastery of essential standard(s), common assessments should identify students who need additional help and support.  Additionally, if an assessment measures more than one essential standard, then the test results must provide more than an overall score for each student and also delineate specifically which standards each student did not pass.
• Identify specifically which students did demonstrate mastery of essential standard(s). Because we give common assessments to measure student mastery of essential standard(s), common assessments should identify students who met or exceeded our mastery target.  Those students will be provided with extension and enrichment learning experiences.
• Identify effective instructional practices. Because our teachers have autonomy in how they teach essential standards, it is vital that common assessment data help validate which practices were effective.  This can be done best when common assessment results are displayed in such a way that allows each teacher to compare their students’ results to other teachers who teach the same course.
• Identify patterns in student mistakes. Besides using common assessment results to identify best instructional practices, this data should also be used to determine ineffective instructional practices.  When analyzing the types of mistakes that failing students make, patterns emerge that can point to weaknesses or gaps in the initial instruction.
• Measure the accuracy of the assessment. Through a careful item analysis of the assessment, a team can determine the validity of each test question.  Over time, this will build a team’s capacity to create better assessments.
• Plan and target interventions. The ultimate goal of any PLC is to ensure high levels of learning for all students.  If a team uses common assessments to identify students in need of additional help, determine effective and ineffective instructional practices, and measure the validity of the assessment, then they should have the information needed to plan and implement targeted interventions to assist the students who need help.

Once we realized that giving common assessments is not an end in itself, but instead a means to better measure our teaching and student learning, we decided that whenever a team reviews common assessment data, they would ask the following guiding questions:

• Specifically, which students did not demonstrate mastery?
• Which students met or exceeded our mastery target?
• Which instructional practices proved to be most effective?
• What patterns can we identify from the student mistakes?
• How can we improve this assessment?
• What interventions are needed to provide failed students additional time and support?
• What will we do to extend and enrich the learning of students who demonstrated mastery?

By asking these questions, we believe that we can get the most out of our common assessments, which, in turn, allows us to give the most to our students.  In the end, we learned from this experience that the power of common assessments comes not from giving them, but from what we do with them after we give them!

Pioneer is one of eight schools in the nation featured in the video The Power of Professional Learning Communities at Work: Bringing the Big Ideas to Life. Pioneer’s standardized test scores rank first of all the middle schools in Orange County and in the top 1 percent in the state of California. Additionally, Pioneer was named a California Distinguished School in 2003 and 2007 and a NCLB National Blue Ribbon in 2008.

Is This Candidate a Good Fit for a PLC?

May 26, 2009

By Rick DuFour

We received a question from an educator interested in the kinds of questions she might use to determine if a candidate is a good fit for a professional learning community. We suggest that you ask questions that would get at the person’s alignment with the Big Ideas of a PLC. For example:

A. The purpose of our school is to ensure that all students learn, rather than are taught.

1. I’m going to present you with four statements. Which is closest to your personal philosophy? “I believe all students can learn…

- based on their ability.”

- if they take advantage of the opportunities we give them to learn.”

- something, but it is more important that we create a warm and caring environment than fixating on academic achievement.”

- and we should be committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure all students learn at high levels.”

2. If at the end of the first semester, you discovered that 50 percent of your students were failing, would it trouble you? (Then drop the percentage how about 25 percent, 15 percent, 10 percent?)

3. We have all run into a student who simply does not want to work, but is not a behavior problem and is not interfering with the learning of others. How have you responded to that student?

4. One of your colleagues states that there is little a teacher can do to help a student who is just not interested in learning. Would you respond, and if so, how would you respond?

5. How do you respond to this assertion: “The major causes of learning do not fall within the teacher’s sphere of influence. Student learning will be determined primarily by factors such as innate ability, parental support, the socioeconomic conditions in which the student lives, and the beliefs and behaviors of the student’s peer group.”

B. If we are to help all students learn, we must work collaboratively and collectively.

1. Which of these statements is closest to your personal philosophy?

- A teacher is a professional who deserves wide-ranging autonomy regarding what to teach, how to teach, how to assess, and how to run his or her classroom. I would not presume to advise another teacher how to run his or her classroom and I would not be receptive to a teacher offering unsolicited advice to me.

- The challenge of helping all students learn demands a collaborative and coordinated effort. Teachers need to stop thinking in terms of “my kids” and “your kids’” and work interdependently to promote the success of “our kids.”

2. Think of a time when you were part of a group or team that led to better results for its members and a more satisfying professional experience. Think of another time when you were part of a group or team and it was a negative experience. What factors contributed to the difference?

3. If you were assigned to a teaching team and encouraged to collaborate, on what questions or issues do you believe the team should focus its efforts?

C. It is important to focus on results, rather than intentions.

1. What is your understanding of the term “formative assessment”? Can you cite examples of when and how you have used formative assessment in your teaching experience?

2. What is your reaction to this statement: “Teachers of the same course or grade level should use common assessments so each member of the team can determine the achievement of his or her students compared to other students attempting to acquire the same knowledge and skills.”

3. What is your reaction to the statement: “Teachers and students benefit when evidence of student learning is easily accessible and openly shared among members of the teaching team.”

4. Have you ever participated in a process where teachers worked together to establish the criteria by which they would judge the quality of student work and then practiced applying the criteria to examples of student work until they were certain they were providing consistent feedback? What is your reaction to that process?

Tech Tools for Teams: Using Voicethread

May 12, 2009

By Bill Ferriter

I’ve got an interesting admission to make: I’m a HORRIBLE guy to have on a learning team!

Kind of strange, isn’t it? I mean, how could a trained Solution Tree associate and author who has written about the beauty of professional learning communities for years possibly be bad to have around the ole PLC meeting table? You’d think that somewhere in the thousands of pages I’ve churned out, there’s got to be at least something valuable to learn.

Ask my colleagues and they’ll tell you that my knowledge of the learning community process isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s my complete inability to keep my mouth shut for more than 30 consecutive seconds during meetings!

You know the type: We’re completely wired 24 hours a day. We’ve got ideas (read: strongly held opinions) about EVERYTHING! We’ll tell you exactly how we feel about lesson planning, student assessment, parent conferences, font styles, student schedules, locker assignments, homework policies, discipline plans, remediation, enrichment, after-school activities, teacher certification, state budgets, the Major League Baseball steroid scandal, the wisdom of wearing white after Labor Day, Oprah’s Book Club, Brangelina…

(Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?)

And while there’s nothing inherently evil about our incessant desire to share everything that we know with anyone who will listen during the course of every single meeting, it sure makes it difficult to get a word in edgewise!

You dance around us, don’t you? Sometimes, you’ll poke your way into our one-sided conversations with a comment or two when we pause to catch our breath. Other times, you decide that it’s best to nod your head and agree just for the sake of getting through the meeting agenda in less than an hour.

The problem is that when faculties let a handful of individuals dominate conversations, it’s difficult to build consensus and community! Bright people end up sidelined and feeling marginalized while bloated filibusters like me ramble on for hours. Eyes ALWAYS roll when schools rely on “the loudest voice wins” approach to decision making.

Which is where Voicethread “a free digital tool that allows a group of users to engage in ongoing, asynchronous conversations about topics of interest”comes in. While digital dialogue may seem initially strange in a profession driven by human relationships, I’d argue that electronic forums can make conversations on challenging topics more approachable to all faculty members.

So what exactly can a Voicethread conversation between members of a learning team look like?

Check out this Voicethread presentation that is being used to focus conversation around the vision statements of a learning community:

(click image to open conversation in a new window)

Pretty powerful stuff, huh? Did you notice how the participants in the conversation were freely challenging one another’s thinking? That is the kind of collective dialogue that is often missing from full staff faculty meetings. Also interesting is how some participants chose to use their real names, while others chose to work with pseudonyms and how participants used text, audio, and video comments to make their points.

Why does this matter?

Digital conversations can provide the members of your faculty with multiple avenues for participation that align with their personal levels of comfort both with technology and with their peers. Digital conversations also allow school leaders to get a better sense of the general thoughts and understandings of their entire faculties and provide teams with a permanent record of their developing thinking and collective decisions.

By structuring Voicethread conversations around key decisions, schools can level the playing field between the assertive faculty members who aren’t afraid to speak out in conversations and the more reserved minds who are seldom heard.

Think about how similar conversations can benefit the work in your building.  Would your teachers embrace digital opportunities to interact? Would having time to think through responses and interactions result in more meaningful contributions to your building’s professional conversations?

Do some members of your learning team end up isolated in full faculty discussions by more assertive teachers? Do you find that teachers shy away from sharing controversial opinions for fear of alienating colleagues? Would participating become “safer” electronically?

Or am I just crazy in thinking that digital conversations can play a meaningful role in the work of professional learning communities?

Wide Range of Abilities

April 28, 2009

By Geri Parscale, PLC Associate

This is the time of year when we move into interview mode in schools. Having just exited one of these, something the candidate said caused an aha! moment for me.

The question to the candidate had to do with a dream classroom and if given the choice, what level would he teach. His response was profound for our school, which operates as a PLC. To paraphrase: I believe that within each classroom, teachers have students with a wide variety of needs, at different levels, don’t they? As a teacher, I must be prepared to meet the needs of the children where they are, using data to guide instruction. So, I cannot say what my favorite grade would be as I will be working with students whose needs will be from all grade levels. WOW, I could not have said it better myself! But, that comment begs the question, How ARE we going to address the needs of each student, from where they are, and ensure high levels of learning for each student? For schools operating as PLCs, we have the vehicles to take our students to those levels.

In a PLC, our essential learning should be clearly outlined by professionals at each grade level/subject area. What standards have leverage, what standards have endurance, what standards provide readiness…these questions are answered by teachers so they have a firm footing in what each student must learn. Once indentified, teachers can go about the all-important job of teaching our students using best practices. From early identification and pre-assessment to post-assessment for a specific unit of study, we can effectively answer question 2 of a PLC: Are the students learning?

From an educator’s standpoint, I believe schools have taken some initial steps to address these questions. Look at any set of state standards or at curriculum guides and curriculum mapping tools, and there is evidence that some attempt has been made to identify what students should learn. Report cards purport to answer the question, Are students learning? However, in most schools the questions that are rarely considered on even a superficial level are questions 3 and 4 of a PLC: What are we going to do for students who don’t learn? How will we extend the learning for those who are already proficient? Effective PLCs give us an excellent process to address these two questions, which aides us in the identification of what students need.

Schools must begin building protocols for teachers and using them to look at student data. Then, educators can move past questions 1 and 2 and into what we do for children (i.e., provide directive, specified, timely interventions). It is not enough to speak to all children learning. To quote Rick DuFour, “What are you DOING for these students when they don’t learn?” If teachers, individually and collectively, subscribe to the attitude that our young interviewee had, that working with students whose needs will be very different in any grade level, and if schools operate as true professional learning communities to create the structures to support both teachers and students, how powerful the learning would be. We would truly be ensuring that all students learn at high levels.  The interview question regarding a dream classroom would be obsolete.  It would be great to mark that from our list.

A Rose by Any Other Name: Professional Learning Communities

April 15, 2009

By Thomas W. Many, Ed.D.

The following article was published in the January/February issue of TEPSA News. It has been reproduced on this site with permission from TEPSA News and PLC Associate, Thomas W. Many.

When visiting a school in the early stages of developing Professional Learning Communities
(PLC), I heard the principal explain, “Our PLC teams meet twice a month.” He continued proudly,”When our PLC teams are meeting on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month, our school is totally devoted to the idea that all kids can learn.” I am confident this principal did not intend for his statement to spark my curiosity, but it made me wonder what his teachers are totally devoted to when they aren’t meeting in PLC teams.

I have never understood the rationale behind designating a team as the “PLC” team. Paul Farmer, a national consultant on developing Professional Learning Communities, observed that once faculty title a team meeting a “PLC” meeting, teachers talk about those meetings as if they are “magical” but the notion that labeling a team or team meeting is somehow transformational misses the mark.

The truth is that teachers are members of all kinds of teams: grade-level teams, departmental
teams, job-alike teams, child study teams, problem-solving teams, and a myriad of other teams. Simply adding “PLC” to the team name does nothing to improve a school. All it does is create another team!

When I asked this principal why designate these new team structures as PLC teams, he suggested that labeling the teams serves to create greater clarity around their purpose. Though in theory this approach sounds good, in practice it has just the opposite effect. When we create separate labels for teacher teams, we invite confusion, not clarity.

Creating a new team structure inevitably generates questions. Teachers wonder, “Who will be on the new team?” “When will these new teams meet?” “What will the new team do?” All of these questions come from the teachers’ legitimate desire to understand how this new PLC team will affect their professional lives.

It takes time to articulate, clarify, reiterate, and respond to all of the questions. In fact, people create their own reality and if their questions and concerns are handled poorly, misinformation and misunderstanding can result. The upshot may be too much ambient information floating around the school.

Michael Fullan states, “Information overload breeds more confusion and clutter, not clarity”. (Fullan, The Six Secrets of Change, p. 94) Sooner or later, the debate begins about whether the issue at hand is appropriate for the PLC team or some other team. Confusion and frustration seem to follow inevitably, along with cynical observations like, “See?…PLCs don’t work.”

What is clear is that meaningful changes in practice not labels are the reason teams in a PLC are more successful. DuFour observed, “The pertinent question is not ‘Are teachers collaborating?’” but rather “‘What are teachers collaborating about?’” (DuFour et al., Learning By Doing, p. 91) We know effective teams focus on improving student learning, so why not simply utilize existing team structures and focus on what effective teams do to help all kids learn?

If the fundamental purpose of a team is learning, the research is clear: effective teacher teams (whether labeled as PLC teams or otherwise) focus on clarifying essential outcomes by class, course or grade level. They spend time developing common formative assessments and establishing targets and benchmarks for their students. They come together to analyze assessment results and use the data to plan appropriate interventions and instructional improvement strategies.

We know students benefit when teachers work collaboratively toward the common goal of high levels of learning for all. Specifically, students benefit when teams of teachers focus on clarifying what kids should know and be able to do, create common formative assessments, design systematic pyramids of intervention, and provide more time and support to those students who don’t learn in the course of initial instruction. Finding answers to these critical questions is the work of an effective teacher team.

Students and teachers benefit when principals devote their energies to designating protected time for teams to meet during the school day, supporting the creation of smart goals targeted at improving student learning, and designing strategies for monitoring the work of teams in order to articulate, protect, and promote what is important.

Creating new team structures with new names puts the focus on the wrong things. Principals should forget about what a team is called and focus instead on creating the conditions that maximize the effectiveness of the existing team. Likewise, principals should not allow the fact that PLC teams do not yet exist to delay the implementation of practices that improve student learning.

With his familiar words “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Shakespeare reminds us that what something is “not what it is called” is what matters. Instead of creating another team, labeling it the “PLC” team, and attempting to define what this new team is supposed to do, principals would do well to help existing teams focus on promoting those activities that help all children learn.

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During the course of a career spanning more than 30 years, Dr. Tom W. Many has served as a classroom teacher, principal and superintendent; all at the elementary level! With a passion for promoting the development of high performing schools, his district was recently recognized as one of the highest achieving – lowest spending elementary school districts in Illinois.

Teachers Key to Reversing High Failure Rate in Math

March 31, 2009

By Rick DuFour

We received a query from a high school principal about the failure rate in algebra in his school. At the end of the first quarter, 44 percent of students were receiving grades of D or F. At the end of the first semester, the rate had increased to 55 percent. When the administration met with the teachers to offer support, teachers took the following positions:

1. The problem was caused by the fact that middle school teachers were not giving students the necessary skills.
2. The teachers had no aggregate data on the achievement of their students because there was no point in the team creating common assessments or reviewing evidence of student learning together. The teachers were already working very hard individually and did not have the energy to work together on this task.
3. There was no need to arrange for reteaching skills because if students did not learn the skills in the first semester they could do so in the second semester.
4. There was no easy way to aggregate data on student achievement because Scantrons, which could readily provide the data, are not conducive to math assessment.
5. Although the teachers agreed it was beneficial to have students make corrections on problems they had missed, they did not require students to do so.

The principal asked for advice. Here is what we said:

There are several things that the math team can do if it wants to reduce the failure rate. The first is to acknowledge that 1) reducing the failure rate is important and 2) changes in the teachers own practice will contribute to reducing the rate.

Here are some of the things that are being done in schools around the country, all of which have teachers who work hard and are pressed for time:

1) The team should work with eighth-grade teachers to establish the prerequisite skills students must have in order to be successful in algebra and create an assessment to identify whether or not an individual student has those skills. Each middle school teacher should receive the results of the assessment showing how his or her students performed compared to the total group. Middle school teachers can then identify where their students struggle compared to other similar students and can begin to address those problems. If your teachers contend the problem is in the middle school, then you should establish a partnership with those teachers to address the problem rather than allowing it to continue.

2) It would appear from the notes that there is a pre-algebra course in the school. Students who are very deficient in essential skills should be assigned to that course to ensure they acquire the skills. It must be aligned with the algebra course so that exiting pre-algebra students are ready for algebra.

3) Students who are deficient in only a few skills should be placed in algebra, and the first few weeks of algebra should be a review of essential skills. Benjamin Bloom’s research on math classes showed that when teachers began with clarifying the most essential skills, assessing students on those skills, and then teaching the essential skills, they were ultimately able to cover more material and student achievement was dramatically higher.

4) The idea that if students don’t learn an essential skill in the first semester they can pick it up in the second (rather than arranging to give them another opportunity to learn in the first semester) is illogical and refuted by the team’s own evidence. The failure rate, which was horrible in the first semester, was worse in the second. Teams must begin to develop common assessments and review the data to identify immediately when students are having difficulty and who on the team seems to teach that skill better. Teachers must be willing to learn from one another, and there is abundant research on the benefits of common formative assessments in raising student achievement. The argument that Scantrons are not suitable for math is not valid. Adlai Stevenson High School math teachers, who have lowered the failure rate in their courses to 1 percent, use Scantrons constantly to get immediate feedback on where students are having difficulty. Teachers can use homework and individual teacher quizzes to review the students’ work leading to the answer, but students are constantly assessed in math (at the local, state, and national levels) in a format amenable to Scantrons.

5) The team’s argument that there is no benefit from looking collectively at evidence of student learning is only valid if they have no intentions of making any adjustments in their practice or creating plans for providing additional support for students who are struggling. The research on the benefits of this practice is abundant, and I would ask them to explain why that research does not apply to them.

6) I assume the greatest cause of failure is that students are not completing homework. Therefore, the school must create incentives for students who complete homework and require those who do not complete it to lose privileges until it is complete. For example, some schools make homework optional if a student is receiving an A or B. Students work to achieve those grades so they won’t have to do homework. All other students must complete homework as assigned, and if there grade dips below a C, they are assigned to a place where they must complete homework during the school day. In some schools, all freshmen are assigned to a study hall in recognition of the difficulty of the transition from eighth grade to high school. Those students are moved into an intensive guided study hall where someone monitors their homework each day. Others give up their lunch period and go to a working lunch study hall until they are passing. If your school gives students the option of not doing their work, many will choose not to do it. You must be more assertive as a school in taking away that option.

7) If the team agrees that correcting tests is an important tool for learning, it is inconsistent to then leave it up to students as to whether or not they will do the corrections. This should be a standard practice in all classrooms if it will help students learn, and students should have incentives for doing that work.

8) The school should have a process in place that requires students who fail a test to receive additional tutorial support on those skills. The team should have a process in place that allows students to take another assessment to demonstrate that they have achieved the skill. If a student fails a unit test after three weeks, he should remain in math class working on the next skill but be required to put in additional time on the skills he failed. If he can pass the test after continuing to work on the skills, then he should receive the higher grade. That is what formative testing is all about identifying students who don’t get it, requiring them to keep working on the skill, and giving them another opportunity to demonstrate proficiency. The team can’t make this happen alone. It will need the support of the school and structures put in place to ensure students keep working.

9) Instruction should engage students, and teachers must become more skilled at checking for understanding each day in their classroom. One observer said he did not see students doing many problems in class, but teachers said they are checking each student’s work multiple times during class. Which is it?

Here is the crux of the matter. Algebra has been called the single most important course in high school. It represents the window of opportunity through which students must pass to have access to higher education. The majority of students in your school are having that window slammed shut, and your teachers seem unwilling to accept any responsibility for doing anything about it. They call themselves a team, but they are not. They are not working interdependently to achieve a common goal for which they are mutually accountable. They are not developing common assessments to monitor each student’s learning and to inform and improve their practice. They are allowing students the option of failing and shrugging off their failure. They are rejecting suggestions for addressing the problem despite the evidence of the dire results of their current practice and the research in support of those recommended practices. My answer to the question about whether other departments were having secretaries call home would have been, “Other departments don’t have your dismal results, but you are right. This problem won’t be solved by a secretary; it must be solved by you.” I would consider the situation you describe as a genuine crisis, and any school that is committed to the students it serves must work together to address that crisis. I have no doubt that the math teachers in your school are working hard, but they have abundant evidence that continuing to do what they have done in the past will result in failure for students. Working hard individually is not enough; the team must begin to work collectively at the right work.

Read Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don’t Learn. Look at the math results from Stevenson described in Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work™: New Insights for Improving Schools. You will learn of a department that helps more students earn honor grades in calculus than any school in Illinois, a school where every BC calculus student earns an honor grade every year, a school where the mode grade is 5, and a school that has dropped the failure rate in all math classes to 1 percent. This did not happen because teachers were detached from the results. Read about Whittier Union High School District on the AllThingsPLC.info website. These schools have a student population that is much more challenging than yours, but they have been spectacularly successful in raising student achievement. Teachers in those schools believed their practices could help students learn to be successful in math, and they committed to searching for the practices that led to that success. A frank and honest assessment of the current reality in your school as depicted by the information you sent suggests your teachers have not made that commitment.

I’m the Only One Teaching This Course. How Do I Collaborate?

March 17, 2009

By Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

One of the most frequently asked questions we hear is, “I am the only one teaching this course. How can I be part of a collaborative team?” This question has been addressed numerous times in previous blogs, yet the uncertainty remains pervasive. We think the following story from the White River High School in Buckley, Washington, is a stellar example of how a singleton can be a contributing member of a collaborative team.

Mr. Mothershead and Advanced Placement Statistics

Since embarking on the journey to become a high-performing professional learning community, White River High School staff members have initiated a number of measures to stretch the aspirations and performance levels of their students. They have encouraged all students to undertake a more rigorous and challenging curriculum. The faculty has also made a commitment to provide additional time and support to assist students in being successful in their courses. This cultural shift is having a remarkable effect. In the 2008-2009 academic year, the number of students taking advanced placement (AP) courses has nearly tripled, and the number of AP courses offered has increased each year.

Statistics, one of the new AP courses, is taught by Cody Mothershead. Since Cody is the only person teaching this new course, one of the challenges facing him is obvious: “With whom do I collaborate? How can I be a contributing member of a collaborative team when I am the only person teaching this course?” Cody realized that although he would continue to be an active member of the math team, he would have to be creative in his approach to teaming with other AP statistics teachers.

Reaching Out

White River is the only comprehensive high school in the White River School District. However, Buckley, Washington, is only one of a number of small towns and communities located south of Seattle, near Mt. Rainier. Since he is the only AP statistics teacher in the White River School District, Cody decided to find out if there was an AP statistics teacher in a nearby district. Luckily, Cody located a teacher in Enumclaw, a district that borders White River. After initially interacting by Internet and then by telephone, Cody and his counterpart in Enumclaw met in person. They quickly realized that meeting face-to-face on a regular basis would be beneficial. They agreed to meet monthly to share ideas, learning activities, and materials. Cody said that it is amazing how much support he feels with these interactions. When they first met, Cody got information about pacing, what kids struggle with on the AP exam, and techniques to help get the information across to students.

The AP statistics teacher from Enumclaw mentioned that he knew of an AP statistics teacher in the Sequim School District. They agreed to invite him to collaborate as well. Cody also communicates with an AP statistics teacher that he met at the summer AP training. He is an experienced AP statistics teacher in Maine who, in addition to teaching the course for a number of years, serves as a reader of AP exams. Cody contacted this teacher and he proved to be most helpful, especially in terms of curricular emphasis and the development of a pacing guide. More important, the teacher in Maine agreed to stay in touch with the Washington group and help in any way he could. The teacher in Maine also uses the same textbook as Cody. This teacher is able to guide him on what needs to be emphasized for the exam, and what is perhaps overemphasized in the book.

Cody will tell you that he is amazed at how effective connecting electronically can be for a team.

Cody’s situation as the only teacher teaching a course or subject is not unusual. Obviously, there are many teachers who happen to be the only teacher of a particular course or subject. However, Cody’s response to his situation is instructive.

First, Cody took action.

Although Cody wasn’t exactly sure what to do or what the results might be, he decided to reach out and locate other AP statistics teachers. The point is this: Sometimes we try to have a perfect solution to the teaming issue before we go forward. Cody did not know where his inquiries would lead, but he got started and good things began to happen.

Second, Cody focused on the right things.

Cody’s primary motivation was not to become a member of a team, but to learn ways to become a more effective AP statistics teacher and to improve the learning levels of his students. Rick DuFour reminds us in his presentations on collaborative teaming that there is a huge difference between “co-blabbering” and “co-laboring.” Cody developed a team for all the right reasons. He found others with whom he could “co-labor.”

Third, Cody and his partners set a schedule in order to collaborate on a regular basis.

Cody did much more than “connect” with another teacher who happened to be teaching the same course. He desired regular communication, so he and his partners set a specific schedule for ongoing conversations. Occasionally, a teacher may seek out another teacher with whom to collaborate, but after an initial conversation or Internet exchange, the relationship declines. Let’s face it, teachers are very busy, and unless plans are developed for regular collaboration, the quality of the collaborative efforts will be iffy at best.

Fourth, Cody will continue to seek out others with whom to collaborate.

While it is admirable that Cody has developed a team with teachers from Enumclaw, Sequim, and Maine, he realizes that the status quo is never enough. He will continue to seek other teachers with whom he can learn and share. Cody is a perfect example of the idea, “Get started, and then get better!”

Fifth, Cody set the example for other singletons at White River.

As we mentioned earlier, how to be part of a collaborative team is a pervasive issue. Cody is not the only singleton in White River. He serves as an excellent example to others who feel that “I cannot be part of a collaborative team since I’m the only one teaching this course.” In short, Cody demonstrates that it can be done.

There is no right way to form collaborative teams. There are many creative teachers who collaborate in creative ways. The central point is that much is to be learned when the traditional barriers of teacher isolation are broken down. Perhaps the more important point is this: Not only do teachers benefit from meaningful collaboration, but ultimately the learning levels of students are impacted in a positive way.

Stop Blaming and Take Action: One Teacher’s Manifesto

March 3, 2009

A teacher who attended a two-day conference on PLCs was moved to write the following manifesto urging her colleagues to join her in a concerted effort to bring the PLC concept to life in their school. She clarified that she does not regard herself as a “great teacher,” but instead considers herself an “okay teacher with a big mouth” who believes “we all have the potential to be great together.”

It is rare that an individual in our profession would present an appeal to colleagues to re-examine traditional assumptions and practices. It is much easier to fly beneath the radar and remain in the comfort of our individual classrooms and schools. It seems to me, however, that if we are to meet the challenges confronting public education we need individuals to step forward as champions of effective change who enlist others in the effort until we reach the tipping point that signals new beliefs and practices have spread throughout the organization. As Margaret Meade once wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that has.”

From: Ballantine, Sara
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 10:49 PM
To: All Teachers and Staff
Subject: The Problem With Education in America: An Autobiography

Dear Esteemed Colleagues,

I would like to take this opportunity to say, well, to say that we suck. Don’t believe me? Ask Rob, he’ll show you the numbers. Now please take a minute to compose yourselves, grab a tissue, call your mom/spouse/brother/sister/accountant/etc. to wallow in self pity.

Done? Let’s move on.

The question still remains, who is to blame?

No, scratch that. That isn’t the question. The question remains, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

I do need to preface this by saying that I have no misgivings about my talent, as well as my shortcomings. I believe it would be safe to say that we, in fact, all have talent, as well as shortcomings. So again, just to be clear, I write this not to determine who is the “suckiest” out of all of us, but rather, as a call to action.

We are all aware that our first semester numbers were pretty dismal to say the least, and the budget situation is about as pretty as we could expect the offspring of Steven Tyler and Janet Reno to be. I don’t feel the need to outline all of the barriers in our way; we are all well aware of the current state of things in our country, our district, and our school.

Thus, I propose that we stop focusing on the things we can’t change, and concentrate on the things we can.

Let’s stop blaming the social demographics of our students, the apathy of parents, the lack of motivation in our students, the skills that they “didn’t come in with,” the middle school teachers, the elementary teachers, the birth control that the parents of our students didn’t take, the fact that we didn’t have any coffee this morning, the union, admin, each other, and start taking responsibility for the job that we were hired to do.

Let’s change our focus from the curriculum that is not available, the money that isn’t there, the challenges imposed by the “block” schedule, and start looking to each other as our greatest resources.

Let’s put the idle gossip, sidebar conversations, personal attacks, etc. aside, and start engaging in constructive criticism that serves only one purpose-us getting better for our students and for each other.

Let’s recognize that we can no longer wait for the system to work out its own flaws, our admin to lay the hammer down, our union to fight our battles and make a commitment to our students and one another to be accountable for our actions.

Let’s build, from within, a system in which we are accountable to each other, and most importantly, our students.

Let’s stop using data to point fingers, place blame, whine about what we are unable to do (whatever the reason), and start using it to inform our teaching practices.

Let’s identify the talents that lie within us, capitalize on them, and use them to compensate for the areas in which each of us is weak.

Let’s establish a culture in which students recognize that failure is not an option and so do our teachers.

Let’s put an end to the mockery of what’s become of our profession, and take the steps necessary to replace nobility in what it means to be a teacher.

So, how can we do this?

I propose that we start engaging dialogue that is candid, honest, respectful, and leads to solutions rather than creating even more problems.

I propose that we not spend one more precious minute of COLLABORATION time talking about budgets, the trash on campus, what we perceive to be the incompetence of those around us, our marital/family/pet/car/etc. problems, and start using the time to focus on what we are going to do to improve student achievement.

And then, let’s do it.

I propose that we recognize the fact that we all of have different ideas of what it means to have a collaborative culture, and stop spending our Monday afternoons hiding behind the closed doors of our rooms with only the colleagues we trust, and convene in the library, with all of resources (primarily each other), and start fixing what is, and has been for too long, broken.

The issue is critical, more so than some of us care to admit, and the time to take action is now. Actually, it was yesterday, and even before that, so it must be NOW.

I understand that I am saying things that many of us don’t want to hear, presenting issues that we would rather not confront, and making suggestions that we fear we will not be able to fulfill. I understand that this letter will make me unpopular among some of you, and expect some criticism. And to be frank, I really don’t care. I say that with conviction because this isn’t about me, it’s not about you, it’s about the 900 lives that we are charged with five days a week, 180 days a year, and the job we elected to do.

Some of us will be convening in the staff lounge (in the cafeteria) tomorrow at lunch to begin this dialogue and create and action plan; however, I hope to see ALL of us there. Let’s face it; we don’t have until next week, next month or next year.

So, Esteemed Colleagues, I propose that we do everything we can to make us not just “Better than Good,” but that we do whatever it takes to be more gooder.

No, scratch that. Let’s be great.

Sincerely,

Sara Ballantine

Tech Tools for Teams: Collaborate Using Twitter

February 17, 2009

By Bill Ferriter

Bill Ferriter, Solution Tree Associate and sixth grade classroom teacher, has been working to introduce learning teams and singletons to a range of free products and services that can make collaboration more efficient. This column will be the first in a series titled “Tech Tools for Teams” where Bill will spotlight individual tools that you might be interested in exploring.

Let me start by making an observation based on the past six years that I’ve spent working as a member of a highly motivated professional learning team: Collaboration may be incredibly rewarding and professionally satisfying, but it ain’t easy!

The biggest barrier to collaboration in any professional learning community (PLC)-whether it be a traditional team of teachers working in the same building or a collection of singletons from across several schools who’ve banded together to learn from one another-is simply finding the time to sit down and talk. Teachers working in a PLC really are engaged in powerful conversations with one another and thinking about learning in deep and meaningful ways, but deep thinking can be just plain time-consuming.

This inevitably puts collaborative teachers into the uncomfortable position of wondering whether the benefits of collaboration outweigh the time that it takes to work together. Transaction costs, or the effort necessary just to coordinate the work of groups, must be addressed before collaboration is completely embraced. If we don’t find ways to make collective action more efficient, our organizations are unlikely to ever reach their full potential.

The good news is that we live in an age when new digital tools can be used to “grease the wheels” of collaboration.

One of my favorite tools for increasing the efficiency of teachers and teams is called Twitter. Twitter is essentially a public instant messaging system that allows users to attract “followers” and to “follow” others. As Sheryl Nussbaum Beach so aptly explains, Twitter is a way for people to build a “personal learning network” of colleagues and friends who can provide just-in-time help, resources, and advice about almost anything.

The central element in a Twitter conversation is called a Tweet, which is a short 140-character message that users send through an online forum that looks just like any other instant messaging application. That message immediately appears in the Twitter windows of anyone who is “following” you, and they can respond with help, advice, suggestions, ideas, and/or compassion if they feel so inclined.

To see a recent string of Tweets from my Twitter window, click here.

Each of the icons represents a different person whose messages I am following. All are brilliant educators I’ve come to know in the course of the professional work I’ve done in the past few years. All are also people whose opinions I trust and who I know that I can learn something from.

As a result, I want to know what these guys are talking about! If they’re posting links, the chances are good that the articles they’ve read or written are going to help me in my own work. If they’re asking or answering questions, chances are good that those questions will challenge my thinking, too.

Let me show you how Twitter works. A few weeks ago, I bought my first Blackberry. In the course of getting it up and running, I wanted to know if there was any way that I could use a program called Skype, which allows users to make Internet phone calls, on my Blackberry. Not wanting to spend hours and hours searching for answers online, I sent a message out on Twitter:

7 MINUTES LATER one of the people who follow my Twitter messages sent me a link to an article about a program that would do exactly what I wanted it to do:

Amazing, huh? Instead of spending what would have probably been hours sifting through thousands of Google search results looking for a solution to my problem, I turned to my Twitter friends and had a high-quality answer with almost no effort. The time that I saved because I turned to my network of digital friends for help could then be spent doing other things-like planning my next lessons, grading the papers that have been on the corner of my desk for a week, or going to the gym!

Here’s another interesting example: A friend and I are planning to start a new project in our social studies classes using the microloan company Kiva. Basically, our students are going to research a part of the developing world and then, with the help of Kiva, select a businessman or woman in that part of the world to offer a small loan. Knowing that some of the teachers who follow me would be interested in this project, I sent out a Tweet announcing our plans. Later that day, one of my followers (a middle school teacher from St. Louis) posted this reply:

Again, with almost no effort I’ve found a partner to work with on our upcoming project. We’ll be able to share resources with each other and brainstorm plans together. If we’re really motivated, we can pair up our students and get them working collectively. All that I needed to do was make a 140-character post in Twitter (which took me something like 10 seconds to write) and I was off and running. Imagine how long it would have taken me to find a partner for this project the old-fashioned way. Honestly, I’m not even sure I would know where to begin, and because there is no guarantee that I could have found someone to work with, I probably wouldn’t have even tried. I would have looked at the costs of trying to coordinate my work with others, determined that the costs didn’t outweigh the potential rewards, and ended up working alone.

My favorite example: While writing this article, I needed a bit of help. I knew that there was a list of teachers using Twitter somewhere online. I’d seen it a few times but never bookmarked it. Knowing that someone in my network of followers would have the link at the tip of their fingers, I sent out a Tweet:

TWO MINUTES later I got a reply connecting me directly to the resource that I needed but couldn’t find on my own:

So how can you make Twitter work for you?

Try these tips:

Sign up and jump in. Strangely enough, one of the hardest parts of getting teachers to Twitter is convincing them that it is worth giving a try! The idea of public instant messaging and “followers” is a 21st-century stretch that many of us are unwilling to make. So my first suggestion is a simple one: Go and get a Twitter account! They’re free. What have you got to lose?

Follow your colleagues. The reason that Twitter works so well for me is that I’m following the messages of (and being followed by) other educators who share similar interests. Some are middle school teachers, so when I’m looking for resources on the developmental needs of tweens, they’ve got my back. Others are into educational technology, so when I’m looking for examples of good blogs for my students to read, they know just the right place.

Consider joining Twitter with the members of your grade level or department if you’re working in a traditional learning community. If you’re a singleton, reach out to teachers in the same content area at other schools. Call your state’s Department of Public Instruction and ask for the contact information of other teachers like you, and then invite them to test the Twitter waters. If you’re a principal, talk with the other principals in your district or professional associations about starting Twitter groups with the isolated teachers in your building so they can collaborate, too.

By starting with a handful of colleagues you know are working in the same content area or grade level, you’ll be setting yourself up for some early Twitter successes. The more early success you have with a new digital tool, the more likely you are to keep using it. When you post a great resource that you’ve found, you’ll be helping someone else. When you ask a question, you’ll be asking people who are bound to have the best answers. When your followers need a hand, you’ll have ready expertise to lend.

Find some new digital friends. Even if you struggle to find colleagues in your school or district to take the Twitter plunge, there are literally hundreds of teachers Tweeting with each other from every corner of the globe that you can start learning from today! Don’t believe me? Visit the Twitter for Teachers website, where you can find the Twitter usernames for teachers working in almost every grade level and content area.

There are entire pages of Twitter teachers working in subjects ranging from art and business to music and middle school. There are lists of principals and preservice people who are Twittering alongside lists for people interested in 21st-century learning and Foreign Languages. Counselors, librarians, and Family and Consumer Science teachers all have their own pages at Twitter for Teachers.

With a bit of browsing, you’ll find a collection of digital friends to learn from in no time!

Feel no pressure. Whenever I introduce Twitter to my friends, they almost always recoil in absolute horror. “I don’t have time to read a thousand silly instant messages a day!” they’ll say. “You’re nuts, Bill. Nuts.” The mistake they make is believing that every Twitter user absolutely MUST read and reply to every message that is posted by every person they are following!

Remember, I’m looking to save time with digital tools, not create something else to do. In reality, most users spend very little time swimming through the digital soup of their Twitter windows. They make a committed effort to stopping by at least once or twice a week to see if they can help anyone they are following and try to remember to post the best resources they come across in their work, knowing that others are likely to be interested in what they’ve found.

But none of us live online! In fact, I probably spend about five minutes a day in Twitter either helping someone out or looking for help. Some days, I might send out four messages and other days, none. There’s no rule that a Twitter user has to read and respond to every message, and because Tweets never come to your email inbox, you’re never buried under piles of unwanted communication.

Twitter is just a place to turn for quick help in a pinch.

Remember it’s public. While there’s no pressure to reply to every message that is posted in your Twitter timeline, it is important to remember that everything you do post is public and can be seen by anyone who follows you! That means you’ve got to remember to keep your conversations professional. Twitter’s not a place for your deepest reflections on life or your complaints about your boss. Not only does that kind of conversation turn off followers, it can put you in some uncomfortable positions when people you know read what you have written!

In the end, Twitter is a tool that has changed the way I collaborate. I get trusted answers instantly from a collection of colleagues, most of whom live and work in other states and countries. Twitter has become the place I turn to when looking for new resources or for new challenges to my own thinking.
I’m more efficient than ever because I can count on almost 300 Twitter friends to help me find what I’m looking for.

Are There Universities That Teach PLC Principles?

January 6, 2009

By: Rick DuFour

We recently answered an email regarding PLCs in higher education.

I’m a board member for a small district in Wyoming. I’m curious if some colleges teach PLC principles more than others. It would seem to make sense that we should recruit new teachers from those schools as one way to help institutionalize PLC in our district.

We aren’t familiar enough with the programs of the many colleges around the country to recommend particular schools. The best option for a school district is to examine the course requirements of the undergraduate and graduate education programs to see if they offer courses on PLCs, working in collaborative teams, and using common formative assessments.

Your proposal that colleges would prepare students to work in PLCs makes tremendous sense. Unfortunately, most of the PLC premise is contrary to the typical culture in higher education.

• In a PLC, staff must be committed to helping all students learn.
• In universities, there is an assumption that the student is responsible for his own learning and that the college should raise standards for admission and do a better job of screening to keep incapable students out of the program.
• In a PLC, there is an assumption that staff should work collaboratively to ensure all students have access to a guaranteed curriculum.
• In the university culture, personal academic freedom takes precedent, and there is no expectation that courses taught by different professors offer similar content or comparable ways of assessing students.
• In a PLC, assessment is used to inform our professional practice and respond to individual students who experience difficulty.
• In the university culture, assessments are used to assign grades.

Given the tremendous misalignment between the university culture and the PLC concept, I believe most districts will have to create their own programs for orientation to a PLC.

Working in Vertical Teams

December 23, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

We received an inquiry regarding how vertical teams would work together in a professional learning community. Here are some ideas:

Each team should work with teachers at the grade levels above and below it to explore the following questions:

1. What knowledge, skills, and dispositions do we want our students to acquire as a result of this course or grade level? This question is answered in part by clarifying with teachers in the grade level above what they consider the skills and knowledge students must have as they enter their grade level.
2. How do we know our students have acquired the intended knowledge and skills? What assessments can the two teams create together to monitor student learning as they make the transition from one course or grade level to the next? For example, if the sixth grade team has identified certain math skills as essential for students to master prior to entering sixth grade, then the fifth and sixth grade teams should work together to create assessments that provide evidence of student proficiency. Both teams should examine that evidence and discuss ways to strengthen the results.
3. What evidence can the receiving team gather about student learning that could be helpful to the sending team? Precise and specific feedback is far more effective than generalities. The statement “These kids don’t know how to write” is not helpful. “Forty percent of the students struggle with making transitions between paragraphs” could be very helpful to a team focusing its efforts on ways to benefit students.

Clarifying Collective Inquiry

December 9, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

We received a question about collective inquiry as it relates to professional learning communities. The writer indicated he was confused and wondered if it simply meant the comparison of test scores of the students of a collaborative team. He asked for clarification and examples. Here is my response:

Collective inquiry is the process in which educators engage as they make significant decisions. Rather than making decisions on the basis of mindless precedent (”This is how we have always done it.”) or personal preference (”This is how I like to do it. “), they begin by building shared knowledge or learning together, thus it is a collective endeavor. Inquiry simply means we are asking and answering questions together. The key to effective inquiry is making sure the question is significant, that resolving it will help us be more effective in achieving our fundamental purpose and goals. In a PLC, collective inquiry will address not one, but many of these questions:

• What is the fundamental purpose of our school?
• What do we know about the characteristics of the most effective schools?
• To what extent are these characteristics evident in our own school?
• What commitments do we need to make to one another in order to create a more effective school?
• What indicators will help us monitor our progress?
• What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions we want all students to acquire as a result of every course, grade level, and unit of instruction?
• How should we pace our instruction to ensure all students have access to a guaranteed curriculum?
• What evidence will we gather to monitor each student’s learning?
• Do we agree on the criteria we will use in assessing the quality of student work?
• Do we apply the criteria consistently?
• How will we respond as a school when it becomes evident some students are not learning?
• How can we enrich and extend the learning for those who are already proficient?
• Who among us seems most effective in teaching each skill? How can we learn from each other?
• Which of our policies, programs, and practices support learning for all students? Which interfere with student learning?

It is important to understand two things: first, collective inquiry is a process, the way an organization approaches decision making by gathering evidence; second, the effectiveness of the process will depend on the extent to which the collective inquiry is focused on the correct issues.

Motivating Teachers to Collaborate

November 25, 2008

By Rick DuFour

I recently responded to the following question regarding how to motivate those teachers who do not fully engage in the collaborative process:

Our district has adopted a PLC vision, which is fantastic. Two years ago, we were required to read your book Professional Learning Communities at Work™: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement. It was a great read for me. I’m not sure that others gathered as much as I did from it. Since then our school has picked up about 15 new teachers unfamiliar with PLCs. Many of these teachers have never worked in such a collaborative environment, so our collaboration has been less than effective.

We have a set time on Monday afternoons to meet and set goals. During our initial meetings, I discovered that our 45 minutes of allocated collaborative time was simply not sufficient for the size team we had (eight members). We accomplished very little, and there was no way that each teacher made their voice heard. So, I opened up a Google Group to allow for the sharing of ideas. I thought this would be a great way for us to discuss back and forth throughout the week when we were at home or in our classrooms. We would be able to continue our conversations beyond those 45 minutes. All the teachers are logged into the group and have access to it, but there are only three teachers who consistently look on Google Groups. The three of us have found it rather useful, but the other teachers don’t seem to find it useful.

Which leads me to my next thought. Many of these teachers are teachers who do “what is easy.” They design their day with what works for them (not the students). They have created teacher-centered classrooms, not learner-centered classrooms. They don’t seem to care about research or best practices, just whatever is easy. My questions for you are how do you motivate other teachers to “buy into” this idea of becoming a learner and a reflective teacher? How do you establish a PLC where there is trust and where there is willingness to hear all ideas? Do you have any suggestions on what I can try to do to help make our collaboration more effective?

I have a few suggestions. First, if the size of your team is interfering with full participation of its members, you could organize the team into two groups of four that meet on the weekly basis. Then, every third week or so, you meet as the full team. For example, one team can be the math team and the other the language arts team. Each team focuses on clarifying the outcomes, establishing pacing, developing common assessments, and brainstorming strategies for teaching specific skills and concepts to the students for that team’s subject area (math or language arts). Then each team presents its recommendations to the full team for review, discussion, and revision until all members commit to moving forward with the agreed-upon plan. These two sub-group teams should be structured to complete certain tasks–developing a list of essential outcomes for each unit, gathering instructional materials, developing common assessments, creating strategies for instruction, and integrating technology, etc.–and each member should be assigned to make specific contributions to the team. It should be impossible to avoid contributing.

Second, until you have common assessments, veteran teachers who are used to doing things a certain way will have little incentive to change their practice. You probably won’t be able to talk them into changing; however, if the results of the common assessments consistently demonstrate that their students are not achieving as much as other students, most teachers will be motivated to explore why. In the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, Kerry Patterson describes the most effective strategies to influence the thinking and behavior of others. Among the most powerful strategies he recommends are positive peer pressure, irrefutable data, and creating new experiences for people that cause them to act in new ways. The PLC process is designed to take advantage of all three. A collaborative team that has agreed on essential learnings and created SMART goals related to student learning creates positive peer pressure. Most teachers don’t want to be the person who prevents the team from achieving its goals. Common assessments make results transparent and reveal which students are or are not learning. Most teachers don’t want to be the person whose kids are not learning. And the team process of clarifying outcomes, establishing common pacing, developing common assessments, and analyzing results in a collaborative way creates new experiences for teachers who have worked in isolation.

The Role of Support Staff in a Professional Learning Community

November 11, 2008

By Robert Eaker, Janel Keating, and Meagan Rhoades

Recently, an assistant superintendent for operations inquired about the role the support staff plays in a district that is committed to functioning as a professional learning community (PLC). While the answer to this query may seem obvious, the role of the support staff in a PLC may be overlooked by some. Let’s be clear; the support staff plays an important role in any school district, but this is especially true in a district that seeks to function as a PLC. For example, secretaries are often the first people parents contact when they call or enter a school. Bus drivers can undo in one afternoon what a teacher has worked on for weeks with a student. A smile and a kind comment from a cafeteria worker can light up a child’s day. Think about how it makes you feel when you get an unexpected smile or compliment. Think about the effect it has on the rest of your day! Kids who have positive interactions with the adults they come in contact with will walk into their classroom knowing that they are valued and ready to do the work.

A number of cultural shifts occur when a school or school district begins to function as a PLC. The first and perhaps most important big idea of a PLC is a shift from a focus on teaching to an intense focus on learning. It is important to recognize that this intense focus on learning is not limited to students. There is also an intense focus on the learning of adults–including the support staff!

The second big idea of a PLC involves a shift from a culture of isolation to a culture of collaboration exemplified by high-performing collaborative teams. Numerous studies have demonstrated the power of collaborative teams, both inside and outside the educational community. The benefit of teams is not limited to teachers. The real impact of a collaborative culture occurs when an entire school district, including the support staff, is organized into highly effective collaborative teams.

The third big idea of a PLC is a shift from a focus on intentions to a passionate focus on results. A PLC is a culture of continuous improvement. Therefore, school districts that function as PLCs ensure that every component of the district sets measurable goals and then focuses intently on achieving them. This is also true of the support staff whether it is transportation, food service, or office personnel support.

The Support Staff: Modeling Professional Learning Community Concepts

A PLC is a way of thinking about schooling. In a district that functions as a true PLC, the support staff models the concepts and practices that form the PLC framework. Here’s how:

Gaining Shared Knowledge: Seeking Out Best Practice

Basic to all professions is the idea that what professionals do is based on the latest and best information available at any particular time. The support staff in a district that functions as a PLC develops, plans, and implements the latest and best practices available. For example, secretaries will learn the very latest in technology or bus drivers will be up to date on safety issues. Para-educators study research-based intervention practices. The support staff in a school district that functions as a PLC is constantly learning best practices and seeking to improve.

Working in a Collaborative Culture

A PLC is also characterized by a culture of collaboration, collaborative teams planning together, analyzing results, and seeking ways to improve. Ideally, improvement doesn’t just happen in the classroom; it should happen throughout the school and district. Streamlining processes, making sure that everyone is reading out of the same book and working off the same page, is something that should happen in every area of a school district. A cultural shift should include every department within the district, otherwise it becomes more of a “some people” shift rather than a cultural shift.

A Culture of Experimentation

Members of a PLC do more than learn; they act–they experiment in ongoing attempts to get better. They are not satisfied with the status quo. They realize that to create a culture of continuous improvement, they must try new things and that becoming a PLC is a journey, not a destination.

An Intense Focus on Results

How well are we doing? What are the results of our efforts? These questions drive the support staff in a PLC. They set goals and monitor them frequently. They develop specific plans to celebrate and publicly recognize both individuals and groups when improvement occurs. In short, the support staff is driven by the question, “How well are we doing and how do we know?”

The White River Example

The White River School District located in Buckley, Washington, implemented a one-hour late start on Mondays to allow grade level department teams time to collaborate. At first there was an assumption that only teachers “had to” do this. Of course, if the goal is to change the culture of a school district to function as a PLC, where the culture of learning for all is valued, half of the employees cannot be separated and told indirectly that they will not be a integral part of this learning culture. The White River School District decided to act as if they really meant it and emphasized shared learning with everyone–especially the support staff.

What Did They Do?

In White River, the secretarial/office personnel staff was frequently excused from participating in events. We know the secretarial staff must be on duty to answer the phones, greet parents, and help staff, so it is difficult to require the approximately 60 staff members to be away from their desks. They couldn’t be pulled from their buildings for one hour every Monday during the late starts designed for collaborative team time. To solve this problem, the secretarial staff was split into two groups with each group meeting every other Monday. The groups focused on customer service training, and time management and technology skills. The same training was repeated for each group to ensure consistency with what they were learning.

What Happened?

It was wonderful to observe these very busy professionals continue to show up every other Monday, despite the fact that they knew a great deal of work would be waiting for them when they returned to their desks. One school secretary commented, “I always look forward to these Mondays because I know that not only will I learn something, but I always leave with a smile on my face.” Another secretary commented that what she loved about the technology training was that she could actually start using the new information as soon as she returned to her desk. An additional benefit of this shared learning was that the staff was able to get together as a group and get to know each other, something that doesn’t typically happen for the support staff in more traditional districts. As the White River support staff learned more about what others did and the issues they faced (and because they developed some personal connections), they felt more comfortable reaching out to one another to ask questions and, more importantly, help each other. Additional sharing began to occur outside these meetings. And over time, the training and interactions became increasingly site specific, focusing on training in programs that helped expedite the daily tasks of support personnel throughout the district.

What Did We Learn?

One of the resources that was used in White River’s customer service training was Give ‘em the Pickle by Robert Farrell (1998). A consistent theme in every customer service resource that was used in White River was how people are most successful in their jobs when they are also having fun. Mr. Farrell observes that for people to have fun in their jobs, they need to first be competent. He writes, “You show employees that you care about them and you value the work that they do by making training a priority.” As best practices in any field are refined and improved, training is required to keep staff up to date. Offering all staff members continual training and access to the best and most current practices for their positions enables them to perform their jobs more effectively.

We also learned about the importance of planned celebrations. We know that in the absence of ceremonies and celebrations, things we say we value lose credibility. Everyone wants to be recognized for doing difficult and complex jobs well. We learned that these celebrations cannot be left to chance. They must be planned and become an integral part of school and district culture.

Summary

What happens in classrooms never happens in isolation. Every interaction children have, from waking in the morning to walking into the classroom, has an effect on the attitude they bring to learning, their focus, and how they feel about the school environment. Establishing a true PLC is another way of saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It could also be put this way–there is never a time when interactions just “don’t matter.” Ensuring high levels of learning for all students requires high levels of learning for the adults who serve them. Helping more students learn more is truly a worthwhile goal. Anything less than the full participation of each and every staff member in this effort is unacceptable if we really mean it!

Does This Seem Like a PLC Format?

October 28, 2008

By Becky and Rick DuFour

We recently received the following question:

At my school we have two mandatory PLC meetings scheduled per month in the mornings before our contract hours begin. We are in the process of preparing to establish schoolwide intervention blocks four days a week. Groups of two grade levels are working together along with our ESL staff to implement these blocks. I am excited about implementing these interventions in this coordinated manner, but in trying to plan for these intervention blocks, we have been working on compiling data from multiple assessments without being given time to meet. Our administrator just sent out a schedule of planned training sessions for one of our two PLC meetings each month beginning this month and continuing every month throughout the rest of the school year.

This does not seem like a PLC format nor does it seem to value our judgment and professionalism, but the administrator is not very approachable on the subject. Any suggestions?

Here is our reply:

We hope you and your colleagues will work with your principal to make this a great year of professional learning linked hand-in-hand with the student learning needs in your school. We advocate the following:

• Time for team collaboration is part of, not in addition to, the contractual workweek. We understand that many schools do adjust the start and end of the teacher contractual day once a week (or twice a month) to provide collaborative time, but those adjustments are then offset by allowing teachers to leave early that day or arrive late on other days so the total hours that they work are within the contractual workweek. We offer brief explanations of this option and a variety of other no-cost strategies for making time at the following link:
  http://www.allthingsplc.info/pdf/articles/MakingTimeforCollaboration.pdf

• Teachers and collaborative teams should be provided user-friendly data that quickly allows them to see how their students are doing in learning agreed-upon standards, on valid assessments, and in comparison to other students in the same course or grade level. We do not advocate that teachers should be expected to spend lots of time gathering, compiling, and disaggregating data. We recommend this work be completed by either a designated person(s) in the school and/or through the use of data software programs. In either case, it is imperative that teachers receive the information in a timely and user-friendly way.

• The work of collaborative teams of teachers clarifying essential learning outcomes (power standards); developing and administering common, formative assessments; analyzing students’ performance on those assessments; and developing systems of intervention/enrichment to meet the learning needs of each student is the best professional development possible! It represents job-embedded professional development. When teams of teachers engage in this ongoing collective inquiry and action research focused on their content, their students, and their own professional strengths and learning needs, learning for ALL increases. The best training to become a PLC is actually engaging in the work of collaborative teams (described above), being reflective, sharing and learning best practices with and from each other, testing out those new best practices in the classrooms with students, gathering new learning data, etc. In other words, learning by doing. We would strongly support the idea that PLC time be reserved for teachers to work on the PLC process.

• It appears that your school would benefit from a crucial conversation between teacher representatives and the principal. We recommend that a small group of representative teachers ask to meet with the principal to discuss your concerns. Set the tone by finding common ground; that is, discuss your assumptions about the shared hopes and dreams for your school. Acknowledge the good intentions of the principal and that you share his/her desire to create a great school for your students. Suggest some specific steps that TEACHERS are willing to take to help achieve that objective. Then indicate that you feel the success of your efforts will depend on the principal’s willingness to make certain commitments. Be very specific about those commitments. For example: (1) We ask that our collaborative meetings be reserved for teams to work on the PLC process; (2) We ask that you be willing to confront a teacher who is not contributing to our PLC process; and (3) We ask that we be provided with time to collaborate in mutually agreeable ways.

Should We Adhere to Our District’s Prescribed Curriculum or Engage in the Team Learning Process of a PLC?

October 8, 2008

By Becky and Rick DuFour

We recently received the following message from a principal:

I’m trying to understand the relationship between essential outcomes and a math program. My interpretation is that the math program would support the students’ learning of the essential outcomes that our staff derived from our state’s standards.

My elementary school is the only elementary school of our eight in the district that has worked at implementing the tenets of a PLC. Someone at our central office is pushing the use of a program and its pacing guide as the district’s curriculum. I’m concerned because my staff worked hard last year at clarifying 5 essential outcomes and developing common formative assessments. Either I misled my staff or I’m going to have to inform and influence my central office person to see the issue differently.

This principal’s dilemma is not unique. In this age of accountability and high-stakes testing, we have noticed an increasing number of teachers and principals experience a growing tension as they work together to build professional learning communities within districts and states which have adopted prescribed curriculum programs and textbooks that must be “implemented with fidelity.”

We contend any program or textbook should be 1) aligned with state and national standards and 2) considered a resource to support teacher dialogue and decisions rather than a mandate that eliminates the need for collaborative professional dialogue regarding the learning most essential to students.

Schools and districts benefit when each teacher (not just a committee or textbook publisher) participates in a collaborative process to clarify the essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions students must acquire. Ultimately, it is not the intended curriculum (the curriculum designated in a math program, textbook, or district curriculum guide) that will have the most powerful impact on student learning. For too long, districts have pretended that if they just purchase the right program and merely distribute it to individual teachers, each teacher will interpret it in a uniform way, assign equal priority to each standard, pace the curriculum consistently, assess student learning in a common way, etc. We have a century of evidence that this is not true. We cannot “teacher-proof” a curriculum.

Ultimately, it is the implemented curriculum, or what actually gets taught when the door gets closed, that has the far greater impact on achievement. Teachers who have worked with colleagues to become students of district resources and state standards, discussed with teachers at the next grade level what skills are most critical to students entering that grade, clarified the essential learnings, established common pacing, developed common formative assessments, and most important, committed to one another that they will honor the decisions made by the team are far more likely to provide students with the guaranteed and viable curriculum Dr. Robert Marzano has found impacts student learning so powerfully.

We would hope all teachers–through their collaborative study–will find value in and honor the district’s programs and textbooks as terrific resources. We also hope district central office staffs will honor the hard work and professionalism of teachers in every school and allow the programs and textbooks to be utilized as resources, not as lockstep curricula that remove teachers from curricular and instructional decisions.

Finally, results should drive the process for making this decision. If teams can demonstrate that their approach leads to higher levels of student achievement, the district should learn from those teams. If the results indicate student achievement is not improving, then teams should be willing to take a hard look at their curriculum, instruction, assessments, and adult learning needs.

Wishing You and Your Students a Great Year of Learning!

A Delicate Dialogue On Data

September 22, 2008

By: Charlie Coleman

Charlie Coleman is principal at Quamichan Middle School in Duncan, BC, Canada. Charlie has 18 years of experience in education and has been a Professional Learning Communities at Work^TM Associate since 2006.

Teachers and principals in a number of schools and districts have asked, “How do you have the tough conversation about data without offending teachers?” and  “What do you do in response to discouraging data?”

Here is an illustration I have shared in several workshops:

It was the end of the first report card term at Quamichan Middle School and a week before our faculty meeting where we would discuss data and analyze results for the first time. We had spent the fall taking the initial steps to becoming a PLC. Because of these conversations, staff knew this was coming and were both excited and anxious about this new focus on “results, not intentions.” As I consolidated the data into a manageable document, one particular class was a major cause for concern. The math class in question had an 85% failure rate! This stood out in stark contrast to the rest of the subjects and grades across the school. While we would not be sharing the data with teacher names attached, it would be quite easy for staff members to assume which class and teacher these results came from. I did not want this first delving into data to derail our PLC journey, so I took some proactive steps.

First, the teacher and I had a private conversation. I told her that while reviewing the Term 1 results, one of her classes really stood out as a cause for concern. Before she could feel attacked or defensive, I suggested that this must be a very tough class with a number of students who had obvious learning challenges. This set her at ease, and she was able to share with me a number of her concerns and challenges with this particular class. I apologized for not noticing the challenges sooner and asked her how I could help support her and these students. Together we brainstormed some possible solutions, and I promised to work toward some of them. She remembered that we would be sharing all our data at the next faculty meeting and was relieved to know that we would use the dialogue on data as a solution-seeking opportunity, not a finger-pointing exercise.

Following that conversation, we spoke to our learning assistance teacher about ways we might support this teacher and these students. The two teachers were encouraged to meet before the next faculty meeting to see if they could put an intervention plan in place. They worked on this in collaboration with our Student Support Team. By the time the entire faculty met to review the Term 1 results, there was a plan in place and the teacher felt comfortable sharing both the troubling results and the resulting support plan.

The intervention plan we put in place made a dramatic difference. That one class went from 85% failing at the end of Term 1 to 85% passing by the end of Term 2. This was cause for celebration! The process we followed also enhanced trust and collaboration. Staff now know that a focus on results does not mean punishing teachers. They also saw that from the results flows responsive intervention and improved student achievement.

Questions New Teams Should Consider Early On

September 4, 2008

By Rick DuFour

Twice this week we received emails from teachers who were just beginning to work in collaborative teams. One of the first issues they tackled was grading and homework policies, and they immediately began to disagree. They asked for advice.

My first reaction is to suggest that while the issues these teams have tackled are important, they are not the most critical for a new team to consider. Assuming the primary purpose of their school is to help all students learn, their team should begin its work with questions such as:

1. What is it we want our students to learn? What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions we expect each student to acquire as a result of each unit we teach in eighth-grade language arts?
2. How will we know if our students are learning? What evidence will we gather and consider collectively to monitor the learning of each of our students?
3. How will our team and our school respond when students don’t learn? Do we have a process in place that ensures students are provided with additional time and support for learning in a timely, directive, and systematic way that does not deprive students of access to new, direct instruction?
4. How will we enrich and extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?

Two other important questions the team should consider early on are:

1. What are the collective commitments we are prepared to make to each other regarding how we will operate as a team?
2. What are the specific, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound goals we are working interdependently to achieve, and for which we hold ourselves mutually accountable?

The questions about grading and homework practices should only be addressed after the team has tackled these critical questions. In fact, we have witnessed teams spend months debating homework policy as a way of avoiding the more substantive issues essential to a team working in a PLC.

When a team does turn its attention to grading and homework, I suggest it considers the excellent blog posting by Bob Eaker and Janel Keating entitled “Drilling Deeper in a PLC” at http://www.allthingsplc.info/wordpress which offers advice for considering these topics as schoolwide issues. We also address the issues in chapter ten of Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work^TM: New Insights for Improving Schools.

I recommend teams consider these general parameters when discussing establishing team policies:

1. Articulate the assumptions behind a proposed policy and cite evidence (rather than feelings or perceptions) to support your assumptions.
2. Consider whether the proposed policy is aligned with the purpose of ensuring all students learn at high levels.
3. Consider whether the policy will encourage or discourage learning and the effort necessary to learn.

For example, imagine the following dialogue:
Q. Should we assign homework?
A. Yes!
Q. Why should we assign homework?
A. Because homework helps students learn at higher levels.
Q. Is there evidence to support the assumption that homework helps students learn at higher levels?
A. Yes. Giving students the opportunity to practice skills and to receive precise feedback about the practice will help students learn. Robert Marzano’s synthesis of research confirms this.
Q. Is it likely that some students will not complete their homework on time or choose not to complete their homework at all even if we threaten them with zeros?
A. It is not only likely, it is a virtual certainty!
Q. If we are committed to helping all students learn, and we believe that homework is a critical element in their learning, should students be able to opt out of homework? Shouldn’t we adopt a policy that requires students to act in ways that are essential to their learning?
A. But we can’t “make” students do their work?
Q. There are schools that have established the expectation that students will complete their homework, and they have put structures in place to require students to do so. Why adopt a policy that in effect says, “homework is essential to your learning, but you don’t need to complete homework if you would prefer not to as long as you are willing to fail” when we know some students will choose that option? Do we teach students to be responsible when we allow them to choose to be irresponsible?

Here are a couple of other questions teams might consider:

• Should a student be required to do homework in order to practice skills in which he or she has already clearly demonstrated advanced proficiency?
• Should a student who fails to demonstrate proficiency be required to devote additional time and effort to his or her learning?
• Should a student who has completed that requirement be given another opportunity to demonstrate his or her learning?
• Does providing a student with the opportunity for extra credit contribute to his or her proficiency in essential skills?

When teams begin with the premise of an unrelenting commitment to help all students learn, it will help lead them to the right answers to these questions.

Drilling Deeper in a Professional Learning Community

August 13, 2008

By Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

The term professional learning community has become enormously popular, but the actual practices that form the framework of the professional learning community concept are much less evident in most schools. There are schools and school districts that adopt the term but never deeply embed the practices into the day-to-day culture of teaching and learning. Classrooms and students are the very heart of a school. Unless we are willing to affect what happens to students, the professional learning community concept will swirl around–but not within–classrooms.

This is more difficult than it might seem at first, given the aspects of teaching and learning that educators have been reluctant to address. Classroom practices such as homework and grading have traditionally been left to the discretion of individual teachers. Such practices often vary greatly from classroom to classroom, and can in fact have a negative effect on student learning.

How can a professional learning community approach emotionally charged issues that have been generally ignored? One important point to remember is: Above all, a professional learning community is a way of thinking. Regardless of the complexity of the issue, using the professional learning community way of thinking can increase the likelihood of success.

A Way of Thinking in a Professional Learning Community: Four Principles

Begin with Building a Guiding Coalition

Issues such as homework and grading are complex, with few simple answers. A professional learning community is characterized, in part, by a culture of continuous improvement. We are constantly asking the question, “Is there a better way?” On most issues, especially those that are emotionally laden such as homework and grading, it is virtually impossible for the entire faculty to initially engage in an effective dialogue. There are simply too many people involved, each with their own background, experiences and strong opinions. Typically, they end up talking at each other. On most issues a large group is ill-suited for building consensus.

It is usually preferable to start with a few staff members who can address the issue in a more professional and rational way. Creation of a guiding coalition is the first step that characterizes a way of thinking in a professional learning community. By beginning with a smaller group, the likelihood of building consensus later with the larger group is enhanced.

Build Shared-Knowledge

The first step in addressing a problem or issue is to gain shared knowledge; nowhere is the phrase “a way of thinking” more applicable. The very term “professional” in a professional learning community implies that what we do will be based on the latest and best information available. Therefore, when a school, team, or group functions as a professional learning community, the approach should not be to average opinions. It should be to first build shared knowledge about best practice–with “best practice” being defined as those practices that have a positive impact on student success. A major cultural shift occurs when members of a professional learning community seek to learn together.

This doesn’t necessarily mean simply seeking out research findings, although research studies are obviously an important source of information. Best practices may be found right within a team, within our own school, or in another school or neighboring district. Best practices may also be found in articles or books. In professional learning communities, groups seek to learn, and they don’t limit their sources.

Engage in Experimentation

Gaining knowledge about effective practices does little to improve a school unless we are willing to try them out. A willingness to experiment with new approaches is a significant aspect of a way of thinking in a professional learning community. Through experimentation we develop a culture of continuous improvement. Through experimentation we try to close the knowing-doing gap by recognizing that we won’t know unless we try.

Experimentation involves a willingness to move beyond the status quo. However, be cautious. We must avoid the “Yeah, but” syndrome obsessing on the flaws of an idea. There are obvious downsides to any new initiative. If we refuse to try things simply because they are not perfect, we will never try anything. This goal is not a perfect approach, but rather, a more effective approach than our current practice.

A Focus on Results

How is “more effective” defined in a professional learning community? There is a tendency in more traditional schools to judge our efforts based on acceptability or how well staff like them, rather than on how a particular approach is affecting student learning. In a professional learning community there is a commitment to assess our practices based on their effect on student learning. We must recognize that every attempt at improvement will not be successful. The willingness to examine a failed attempt is a good thing if handled correctly. By thoroughly analyzing what happened and why it happened, we can learn many things. After all, this is the essence of a learning community.

An Example: Grading

There are few issues that elicit stronger emotions than grading and report cards. Yet, in most traditional schools, grading is left to the discretion of individual teachers. Grading practices range widely even within the same school, grade level, or course. Grading is an important component that affects student learning, and an area in most schools where there is potential for improved practice. How can we use the professional learning community way of thinking to improve grading practices?

Having the entire faculty address the topic of grading will prove problematic at best. It will be more effective to have a smaller task force tackle the issue first. Their charge should be clearly defined and the core of this charge is that they must first gain shared knowledge about effective grading practices. (Of course, these will vary depending on grade level, areas of study, etc. We must also recognize that there is no one best grading practice.)

After learning together, analyzing, and discussing, the task force should periodically update the entire faculty on their work, sharing what they are learning, engaging in a deep, professional dialogue and, most importantly, listening deeply to faculty concerns, points of view, and questions.

As a result of thoughtful analysis, discussion, and reflection, the group can recommend a different approach to grading that might be tried, perhaps by one or two teams at first. (Notice that we used the word “tried” here rather than “adopted.” Initially, we are simply experimenting with a different approach.) After experimenting with various grading practices, the group or groups will analyze the effects of the new approaches, and may adapt them and try again. It is important to constantly share with the larger group so we are moving the whole faculty towards a willingness to try a new and proven approach. However, we are also making the commitment to monitor new approaches and make adjustments as needed.

Summary

If schools are to function as true professional learning communities, they cannot avoid difficult and complex issues. Recognizing that a professional learning community involves a way of thinking will increase the likelihood of success when addressing such topics–topics that impact student learning. This way of thinking will prove effective on most issues, especially emotional ones such as homework practices or grading. Keep in mind that the quality of what we do will be determined, to a great extent, by the quality of how we think!

Student Grouping in a PLC

July 8, 2008

By: Rick and Becky DuFour

We received a message from a school that had concluded assigning students to academic classes based on their ability was the best way to promote differentiated instruction for students. While we enthusiastically endorse the idea of differentiated instruction, we do not endorse the idea of tracking students as the best strategy for promoting differentiation for 4 reasons:

1. Research advises against it.

The question of the effects of ability grouping have been examined throughout the past 25 years, beginning when Jeannie Oakes and John Goodlad concluded:

a. Students in the lower tracks receive an education that is qualitatively and quantitatively inferior to that provided to children in the upper tracks. Whatever schools distribute that matters educationally, lower-track students get less of it.

b. Students in the lower tracks learn less than those in the upper tracks and what they learn is of less value.

c. Students in the lower tracks are held captive in them. There is very little opportunity to move to more advanced tracks.

d. Minority and low SES students are disproportionately assigned to lower tracks, whereas teachers perceived as the”best”teachers in a school are rarely assigned to the lowest track.

In short, there is almost nothing in research to say students in lower tracks benefit, and a great deal that says they are harmed by this structure.

2. It is misaligned with the goal of closing the achievement gap.

It is illogical to argue that the way to close the achievement gap is to assign some students into curriculum that is less rigorous and moves at a slower pace than the standard curriculum. Evidence and common sense says this strategy exacerbates rather than closes the gap each year.

3. Tracking sends the wrong message to students.

One of the most consistent findings in research of high performing teachers and schools is that they have high expectations for student success. Tracking sends the message to students in the lower tracks that their schools and teachers have diminished expectations for them. Furthermore, students internalize that message. Oakes found that students blame themselves for their lack of success in school. They embrace the implicit message their school is sending: “the rich curriculum is reserved for the ’smart’ kids.” Students conclude, “I can’t be successful here because I am not smart.” We support Jonathan Saphier’s premise that schools should espouse “effort-based achievement” rather than “ability-based achievement.” The most successful school will send the message, “you can be successful here if you work hard. All of you will learn, but some of you will need some extra help and more time, but you all will be successful.”

4. When schools create multiple ability groups, they typically respond when students experience difficulty by dropping them into a lower group.

This option becomes the path of least resistance for both educators and students. Instead of intervening with more time and support to help students achieve standards, schools simply lower the standards. Students come to recognize that “the less I do here, the less I have to do.”

Therefore, we advised this principal to create heterogeneous groupings for homeroom placement and for most of the students’ day. We also recommended that teachers in the school work in collaborative teams to gather information from frequent common, formative assessments to determine which students need more time and more support to acquire the intended essential skills & concepts and which students are ready for a deeper application of those skills/concepts. Students could then be assigned to flexible, fluid, homogenous groups for intervention and enrichment – student-by-student, skill-by-skill – for a brief, designated portion of each day. Each member of the team, as well as other human resources the school might employ, could then be responsible for providing extra time and support for intervention and enrichment during that designated period each day.

There is a significant difference between differentiated instruction and differentiated curriculum. Tracking is dedicated to the later. Differentiated instruction is not just clustering all students with similar learning needs into one group and providing them with different curriculum, but rather it requires giving students who are struggling to learn the essentials more time, more support, and new learning experiences with different strategies and different structures such as small-group instruction and individual tutoring.

We are not opposed to providing middle school students with access to an accelerated program in mathematics or high school students with access to advanced placement programs, but we would advocate that the programs be open to any student willing to pursue the challenge. Schools could then serve as a bridge to the advanced curriculum rather than a barrier. PLCs at all levels attempt to meet the needs of students by building strong systems of intervention and enrichment rather than relying on remedial programs.

What is the role of the library media specialist in a professional learning community?

June 3, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

Recently we received a letter from library media specialists who objected to one of the proposals we offered to give teachers time to collaborate in our book, Learning by Doing. We suggested that an elementary school schedule could be constructed to ensure all of the students at a particular grade level were assigned concurrently to specialists-an art teacher, music teacher, physical education teacher, and library media specialist. Our belief was that this strategy would not only enable students to receive instruction in these critical areas from the people with the greatest expertise, but also provide grade-level teachers time to collaborate. This is one of several options we suggested, but it raised the ire of these library media specialists who contended we had an “antiquated notion” of the role of the library media specialist. To reinforce their point, they sent the 2008 edition of School Libraries Work!, a document designed to make the case for the importance of school libraries and the need for qualified library media specialists to staff them.

We reviewed the document carefully, and found ourselves agreeing with its major findings, including:

1. Schools should be provided with the resources to provide up-to-date print and nonprint materials in all school library/media centers.

2. Schools should be staffed with highly qualified library media specialists.

3. School libraries can play an important role in student achievement and school improvement.

4. Library media specialists can have a positive impact on student learning when they collaborate with classroom teachers to teach and integrate literature and information skills into the curriculum.

5. Library media specialists enrich the teaching and learning process when they teach skills and strategies students need to learn and achieve, are partners in educating children, teach students how to become effective users of ideas and information, and instruct students on how to seek, select, evaluate, and utilize electronic resources and tools.

7. Certified school library media specialists should collaborate with teachers regularly to provide resources and activities for course, unit, and lesson integration and to meet the intellectual needs of students.

Repeatedly throughout the document, there are references to the importance of library media specialists teaching students. We strongly and enthusiastically endorse that position. In fact, the schedule we described in Learning by Doing was specifically designed to ensure that these specialists were able to teach the critical skills students need throughout their elementary school years.

We also strongly and enthusiastically support library media specialists collaborating with grade-level teams. In fact, we advocate time being built into the school calendar and schedule to allow the specialist to work with teams to identify how the specialist could contribute to each team’s curriculum, priorities, and goals.

In short, we fully endorsed the positions of this organization, and we have presented recommendations that are consistent with those positions. We can find no reference in this document that the library media specialist must attend every meeting of every team, and in fact, in middle and high schools it would be virtually impossible for them to do so. We do not interpret collaborating with teachers “regularly” to mean weekly, and we doubt there are many schools in America in which the media specialist spends time each week with every collaborative team, particularly when most schools don’t even organize teachers into collaborative teams. We can think of no logical reason a library media specialist should be the only person in the building to attend every team meeting, nor do we argue that teachers in a K-5 building should spend one hour per week working with colleagues but the library media specialist should spend six. Clearly this would not be the best use of time for professionals who have unique skills and insights that all students should have access to on a regular basis. In fact, if we argued library media specialists must attend every meeting of every team every week, we have no doubt that we would be criticized for placing an unfair burden upon them. Finally, we can find no reference in this resource that library media specialists should not spend time each week teaching students. In fact, that point was repeatedly stressed throughout the report.

School Library Works! has confirmed our belief about the important role of the library media specialist in schools. We will continue to recommend that these professionals teach children and that they can be scheduled to do so in ways that contribute to making time for their colleagues to collaborate. We will also continue to stress that the school schedule and calendar should provide time for the library media specialist to work directly and regularly with the teams of teachers as important contributors to the collaborative process.

Does Preparing Students for Success on High-Stakes Assessments Interfere With Their Learning and Rob Teachers of the Opportunity to be Creative and Innovative?

May 13, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

Current Reality: Teachers across the United States often express their concern that too much emphasis is being placed on state tests. In light of the sanctions being applied under NCLB on the basis of those tests, they raise a very valid point. I am not an apologist for state tests. As W. James Popham has pointed out, most state tests attempt to assess too many skills in too little time, with an assessment tool that is too limited. The result is that these tests do not provide teachers with the timely and specific information they need to adjust their instructional strategies and improve student learning.

On the other hand, we must acknowledge as a profession, that one of the reasons states have created assessments as an accountability tool is that schools were typically providing no evidence that all students were learning beyond teacher grades. Furthermore, we must acknowledge that in most schools, there is virtually no attempt made to guarantee the grades teachers assign to their students are based on consistent criteria and clear standards. Furthermore, these tests are here to stay, and teachers who are inattentive to them do their students a disservice.

The Question: Recently I received an e-mail from a teacher who objected to the fact that he was being asked to work in a collaborative team whose members were expected to work together to improve student achievement on the end-of-course state test in his subject. He objected to this collaboration because the state test was a 100-item, multiple choice assessment. The test had a significant impact on the students of his state who were required to pass it to receive a diploma.

He objected to working on a collaborative team to help prepare students for what he felt was a bad test. He was convinced working on a team to help prepare students for success on a standardized test: 1) would not improve the quality of teaching and learning in the school; and 2) would make it impossible for teachers to be creative and innovative. As he wrote, “Please tell me I am all wrong.”

My Response: OK, you are all wrong. You are creating not one, but two false dichotomies:

1. Either I must prepare kids for success on a high stakes test or I can improve the quality of my teaching and learning for my students, but I could not possibly do both.

2. Either I can prepare students for success on standardized tests, or I can be a creative and innovative teacher, but I could not possibly do both.

I taught U.S. history and never limited my assessment of student mastery of essential knowledge and skills to multiple choice tests. In fact, research from a variety of sources indicates that students who are called upon to compare and contrast, analyze, draw analogies, synthesize, and explain their thinking in short answers, essays, reports, and oral presentations not only learn at higher levels but outperform students without these experiences­-even when the assessment is a high-stakes multiple choice test. So I agree that a single test, or any single assessment strategy for that matter, should not be used to assess student learning. I am also very opposed to teacher effectiveness being judged on the basis of state assessments. But I urge you to reconsider the false dichotomies you have presented. They are not supported by fact.

The history teachers at Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, are the best, most creative, most innovative history teachers I have ever seen. They use their team process to support their innovation and their effectiveness. They have a passion for their subject and believe it serves a moral purpose. They want students to embrace their role as citizens and they engage them in a multitude of community service projects. Their students represent the largest block of election judges in their county and are very active in voter registration drives. These teachers also prepare more students for success on the Advanced Placements exams in social studies than any school in Illinois. They have an active history club and have won more state and national history fairs than any school in the Midwest. They conduct follow-up studies of their students one and five years after graduation to assess the extent to which students are involved as citizens of their communities. And, although they began to work collaboratively to strengthen their program, their teaching, and their collective capacity to help students learn long before there was a state test in Illinois, once the test was created they committed to helping their students achieve success on the state test. Incidentally, their aggregate achievement of their students on that test has always been among the top 1% of the schools in the state even though that state test relies heavily on multiple choice items.

The test in your state clearly has significant consequences for your students, and I would consider it negligent if you were unconcerned with their performance on that test. I would consider it equally negligent and short-sighted if you and your colleagues defined your sole purpose and priority as preparing students for success on that test. What are the essential outcomes you and your colleagues seek for all of your students? What is your process to ensure that your students have access to a guaranteed curriculum regardless of the teacher to whom they are assigned? What evidence is your team gathering to determine whether or not your students are acquiring the intended knowledge and skills? What process does the team and/or school have in place to intervene for students who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria does your team use when assessing the quality of student work? What evidence do you have that members apply the criteria consistently? What has the team done to ensure that when a student completes an essay, a research project, or a report his or her work will be scored consistently? How are using the evidence of learning gathered by your team to inform and improve your own teaching? These are the kinds of issues collaborative teams in a PLC address, and I believe they are exactly the issues teachers should resolve collaboratively and collectively. I hope that these are the very activities that your sense of professionalism and sense of equity would draw you and your colleagues to even if there were no state test. I certainly would support a district that asked you to engage in these activities during your regular contractual day and year, even at the risk of being charged with top-down mandates, because these are things teachers in every school should be doing.

I encourage you to present your administration, your community, and me with all the other evidence you are gathering as a team to monitor each student’s learning of the knowledge, skills, concepts, and dispositions you believe are most essential to their success. I submit, however, if your students have a deep and profound understanding of history they should be able to do just fine on a multiple choice test. And I hope you would include the success of your students on all high-stakes assessments (state tests, ACT exams, AP exams, etc.) as one of several areas of continuous improvement for you and your teammates.

Are Smaller Learning Communities (SLCs) Synonymous with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)?

April 24, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

Education thrives on acronyms – IEP, UBD, RTI, ESL, SES, LD, NCLB, AYP, API. Sometimes this abbreviated attempt to communicate can create confusion. Recently, we received a query from a high school principal who felt his efforts to help his school become a professional learning community (PLC) would be enhanced by converting the school into a Smaller Learning Community (SLC). Teachers in his school had been working collaboratively in content-specific teams as they attempted to implement the PLC concept. The principal proposed the school should be re-organized into separate houses with teachers working in interdisciplinary teams. He felt certain the SLC structure would promote the PLC concept, and he asked if we felt he should press forward despite the resistance of the staff. We did not, for the following reasons.

1. Moving teachers from working in isolation to working in collaborative teams is a difficult and challenging task. The school should stay the course it is upon rather than heading off in a new direction.
2. The principal should focus on building the capacity of staff to work within a collaborative culture rather than shifting his focus to structural issues.
3. There is little in either the history of American education or recent developments in the field that suggests converting schools into smaller learning communities will improve student achievement.

The current push for smaller high schools stands in direct contrast to the recommendations presented by James Conant after he conducted a study of high schools for the Carnegie Foundation in 1959. Conant, the former president of Harvard University and Ambassador to Germany, called for the consolidation of small high schools, arguing any school with fewer than 400 students should be abolished as ineffective and inefficient (our emphasis). His book on the subject, The American High School Today, became a national best seller.

At the time of Conant’s recommendation, 12,000 of the nations 21,000 high schools served fewer than 400 students. If “small” was the answer to the problems of high schools, the 1950s offered secondary students the perfect environment for a fabulous education. There is little evidence to suggest, however, the students of the 1950s were particularly well served by their small schools. In fact, almost one of every three high school-aged students had left school prior to graduation throughout the decade.

More recently (2005 and 2006), two independent research organizations conducted independent evaluations of the progress of the schools that had been organized into smaller learning communities between 2001 and 2004 with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their reports to the Gates Foundations concluded:

1. Students reported improved relationships with their teachers

2. The attendance rate of students in the restructured schools was worse than attendance in other schools in the district.

3. When taking previous achievement into account, students showed slightly better performance in language arts but worse performance in math than other high school students in the same district

4. The quality of student work was low in the restructured schools

5. Demanding and unwieldy teacher work loads “may be endemic to the staffing structures of many small high schools” (p.6) and the resulting teacher burnout threatened the viability of the initiative. Staff turnover at the schools was high.

6. Staff cited lack of tutoring services and appropriate opportunities to do homework as a barrier to the success of many students.

7. Lack of staff capacity made the restructured schools vulnerable

8. Changes in teaching and learning lagged behind the structural changes that characterized the schools (American Institute for Research and SRI International, 2005).

A year later the same two research agencies issued their final evaluation of the Gates initiative. They reported Gates schools confronted significant difficulty in bringing the attributes of high-performing schools into their restructured schools because “entrenched cultures and sets of expectations about student achievement and behavior often became obstacles” (American Institute for Research and SRI International, 2006, p.6, our emphasis). They urged the foundation to: “Rethink the school redesign strategy. Although there have been some isolated examples of apparently successful small schools emerging from the restructuring of a large high school, these have been the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, the data that we have for school redesign efforts are not encouraging” (p. 82, our emphasis).  The better hope for changing schools, according to the report, was to emphasize continuous monitoring of student learning, a “tight” school culture, and “greater attention to issues of curriculum and instruction”(p.4-5).

In other words, even with the support and backing of one of the world’s greatest private philanthropic organizations, structural change alone will not reform schools. Those who pin their hopes on high school reform based on the size of the school are destined to be disappointed. Ultimately the culture must change to impact classroom practice and student and staff expectations, and the best strategy for improving schools at any level will focus less on the structure of the organization and more on building the capacity of people within the schools to create a new culture.

How will we respond when students don’t learn?

April 4, 2008

By: Austin Buffum and Mike Mattos

It is essential to implement both Professional Learning Communities (PLC) and Response to Intervention (RTI) because these complementary processes are considered
research-based best practices to improve student learning.

Response to Intervention (RTI) is based upon the assumption that schools cannot wait for struggling students to fall far enough below grade level to “qualify” for help. Instead, schools should develop a systematic, schoolwide process in which struggling students receive targeted, research-based interventions at the first sign of difficulties. These interventions can be provided by special education and/or regular education resources. Yet for a school implementing PLC practices, this approach to helping students at risk should not be a new concept, as this process is identical to a PLC’s “Pyramid of Interventions.”

While RTI and a Pyramid of Interventions (POI) have essentially the same outcome, we would contend that effectively implementing RTI practices is not possible and should not be pursued until a school effectively begins implementing the three “Big Ideas” of a PLC-a focus on learning, a collaborative culture, and a focus on results. These first steps create the foundation needed to more effectively respond when students don’t learn. To skip these vital steps and move directly into creating a RTI/POI program would be disastrous. How can a school be expected to create powerful interventions if the staff has not built a culture that believes all students can learn, has not identified what they want their students to learn, and has not created a timely assessment system that can accurately identify which students need additional help? A school or district would be putting the proverbial “cart before the horse” by requiring teacher teams to use their meeting time to discuss individual student needs, while delaying or neglecting other important, prerequisite team tasks.

Remember that the fundamental mission of collaborative time in a PLC is to focus on student learning. As a school embraces the idea that RTI and PLC are not two distinct “programs,” but instead ongoing processes that strive toward this same outcome, the more a school will view their collaborative time as not “PLC time” or “RTI time,” but “learning time.” In other words, we hope that the lines between RTI and POI continue to “blur” to the point where they are indistinguishable.

Who should decide the agenda for collaborative team meetings?

March 11, 2008

By: Rick DuFour

Our school district is using the book Whatever It Takes as our guide to establishing PLCs. Should administrators tell PLC groupings what to discuss at their weekly meetings, or should the needs of the campus and students drive the constructive conversations?

The way you have posed the question makes it apparent what you believe the answer should be. I suggest, however, that you are falling victim to the “Tyranny of OR.” You ask who should determine the agenda for team meetings-administrators who have their own agenda OR teachers who are motivated by the interests of their campus and their students? First, I would suggest that the interest of administrators and teachers need not be different. Both groups should be driven by the interest of the campus and its students.

Furthermore, it would be unreasonable in my mind for a district to provide staff with a resource as precious as time, and then be indifferent as to how that resource was used. That does not mean, however, that the administration needs to dictate the agenda or topics of every team meeting. The best schools will reject the Tyranny of OR and embrace the “Genius of AND” with both groups playing a role in determining how the time is to be used. For example, the administration, with the help of teacher leaders, could establish a timeline for when it expects teams to complete certain tasks (please submit your team norms by X date, your team SMART goal by Y date, your first common assessment by Z date, and your analysis of the results and your strategies to improve by ZZ date). In doing so, the administration should provide teachers with time, resources, examples, and support to complete those tasks. Teams, however, should be free to establish the agendas for their meetings provided they honor this timeline. If a team needs to spend some time on a topic that does not appear on the timeline (for example, the behavior of an individual student), it should be able to do so, but it should still be expected to do address the topics on the timeline.

Finally, remember that the question “Are we collaborating?” is not nearly as important as “What are we collaborating about?” Giving teachers time to collaborate is a necessary step on the PLC journey, but it is not sufficient. Teams must demonstrate the discipline to focus on the issues that actually lead to gains in student achievement if their schools are to function as PLCs.

Moving from a tradition of isolation to a culture of collaboration

February 14, 2008

By: Becky DuFour

Some faculty and staff may undoubtedly have a difficult time moving from a culture of isolation into learning communities. How may other faculty and staff help these professionals make that transition and understand their role as a collaborator and its importance?

Let’s begin with the following assumptions: 1) All staff members have been organized into a series of collaborative teams, focused on student learning, and 2) Time and support for collaboration are being provided to each team by the administration. Some teams, however, are discovering some of their members are reluctant to collaborate for any number of reasons (i.e., not wanting to share their hard work, ideas, and/or materials; being fearful their ideas will be criticized by their colleagues; not convinced collaboration will actually enhance their teaching and ultimately student achievement; or simply not getting along well with their teammates).

Here are several steps these teams can take to help colleagues who are experiencing difficulty:

1.  Establish team norms. In PLCs norms represent the protocols and commitments developed by each team to guide members in working together. Norms help team members clarify expectations regarding how they will work together to achieve their shared goals. Daniel Goleman states norms are ground rules or habits that govern a group (Goleman, 2002, p. 173) and that establishing explicitly stated norms is an essential first step in getting off to a good start and in transforming a group into a team (i.e., we will begin and end our meetings on time, we will each contribute to team dialogue, we will share equally in the workload, we will listen respectfully, etc.).

2.  Identify and pursue a common SMART (Strategic and Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, Time-bound) goal. The very definition of a team in a PLC is a group of people working interdependently to achieve a common goal, for which members are held mutually accountable. Katzenbach and Smith’s research found that establishing the right goals are the most powerful tools to help people begin to come together as a team.

3.  Become skillful in having crucial conversations. Kerry Patterson, et al. (2002) offer some very helpful tips in Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High. This book could provide some strategies for members of the teams to use when they experience difficulty with the team process.

4.  Become skillful in Howard Gardner’s seven strategies for changing someone’s mind (including your own)

a. Reason-Appealing to rational thinking and decision making

b. Research-Building shared knowledge of the research base  supporting a position

c. Resonance-Connecting to the person’s intuition so that the proposal “feels right”

d. Representational Re-descriptions-Changing the way the information is presented (for example, using stories or analogies instead of data)

e. Resources and Reward-Providing people with incentives to embrace an idea

f. Real World Events-Presenting real-world examples where the idea has been applied successfully

g. Confrontation*

*In the early stages of working in teams in a PLC, there will likely be times when a staff member(s) remains reluctant to contribute to the team process regardless of how skillful the members are in the art of persuasion. At those critical junctures, the principal must be willing to direct the team process. The hope is that the reluctant team members will ultimately experience the benefits of collaboration and will no longer need to be convinced.

We have learned one of the best ways to help people believe in the power of collaboration is to put them into the team setting and then provide all members with time, support, resources, and just-in-time training when they experience difficulty. Therefore, we have devoted multiple chapters to building and supporting strong collaborative teams in our book Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work^TM (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2006).

Reference List

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., and Many, T. (2006). Learning ByDoing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Bloomington, IN: Solution-Tree.

Goleman, D. (2002). Primal leadership:Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, MA:Harvard Business School Publishing.

Gardner, H.  (2004). Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing our Own and Other People’s Minds. Boston, MA:  Harvard Business School Press.

Katzenbach, J. & Smith, D. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. New York, NY: McKinsey & Company.

Patterson, K., Cover, S., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A.. (2002). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

What Trumps Learning

January 25, 2008

By: Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

Virtually no one disagrees with the proposition that having all students learn at high levels is a worthy mission. It is rare to hear someone say, “Well, I’m just not sure about that ‘learning’ mission.” One of the easiest aspects of reculturing a school to function as professional learning community is achieving a general consensus regarding a “high level of learning for all” mission. It’s only afterward that problems arise. All too often schools adopt a mission of ensuring high levels of learning for all students, yet engage in practices that are counterproductive to improving learning.

This disconnect between what we say we believe and what we are often willing to do is analogous to card games in which a particular card or suit of cards will “trump” other cards. This is an interesting idea to put into the form of an activity for small groups of faculty. Ask this question: “We have adopted the mission of ensuring high levels of learning for all students as our fundamental purpose. So, here is an important question-what would ‘trump’ learning in our school or school district?”

What Trumps Learning: A Few Examples

Obviously, every school and school district is different, each with its own distinct culture. However, there are common themes regarding those things that “trump” the “learning card” in schools. For example, if schools are going to embed common planning time for collaborative teams to meet during the school day and if a school is going to develop a plan to ensure that students receive additional time and support within the school day regardless of the teacher they are assigned, the school schedule will more than likely need to be changed. Changing a school schedule is difficult because it brings directly to the forefront the issue, “What is the purpose of the schedule in the first place?” Is it to assist the staff in attaining our learning goals or is to ensure the happiness of the adults? It seems that in some schools the fundamental mission is, in fact, to ensure the happiness of the adults who work there. Often, ensuring the  happiness of a few “trumps” learning.

Another example is the issue of individual autonomy versus collaborative decision-making and collective responsibility. This conflict frequently rears its head with issues such as whether or not teachers serve as contributing members of a collaborative team- assisting with clarifying standards, developing common formative assessments and participating in collaborative analysis of student work- all of which have been shown to be highly effective strategies for improving student learning, or will they be left alone to work in isolation?  All too often individual autonomy “trumps” learning, in spite of the fact there is not a shred of evidence that students learn more when teachers work in isolation.

Frequently, policies or practices will “trump” learning. Perhaps, there is a policy that doesn’t allow students to do make-up work if they miss school with an unexcused absence or a policy that limits those who can take Advanced Placement classes to a certain percent of their class. In a professional learning community, all decisions and practices should be reviewed through the lens of the learning mission and address the question, “What is the probable impact of this decision or practice on our goal to improve the learning levels of all students?”

Two Questions

In the White River School District in Buckley, Washington, the issue of making sure the learning mission is, in fact, embedded into the district culture is addressed by frequently asking two critical questions:“Regarding our mission to ensure high levels of learning for all students, what would  this particular policy, activity, initiative, or decision look like if we really meant it?” What if we really meant that ensuring high levels of learning was our fundamental mission-the core of what this school or district is about?  The second question is equally powerful: “Is what we are doing good enough for my own child?” When we filter questions through the context of our own children, very few things “trump” learning. So, think about-or better yet, engage in collaborative discussions about this question: “What trumps learning in your classroom, school or school district?”

Team SMART Goals vs. Smart Students

January 10, 2008

By Rick and Becky DuFour

A teacher raised this issue about SMART goals by offering this example:

Current Reality: Last year, 70% of the students in Algebra classes earned a final grade of C or better and 68% of the students met or exceeded the proficiency standard on the State/Provincial Algebra Assessment.

SMART Goal Example: This year, at least 75% of the students in Algebra will earn a final grade of C or better and at least 75% of our students will meet or exceed the proficiency standard on the State/Provincial Algebra Assessment.

His Question: “If we meet this SMART goal, how do we know if the change is the result of the actions we took or just that this group of students was more proficient in Algebra to start with?  Aren’t we comparing apples and oranges?  Maybe this year’s students are far better at Math than last year’s group and our actions actually hindered them from scoring at 80% or better. ”

Our Response: There are two assumptions we can make about teaching and learning. One is that students will learn according to their effort and ability and that their teachers and their school have no impact on their learning. The other is that teachers and schools can have a significant impact on student learning, and as  teachers work more effectively and become more aware of more powerful strategies for teaching, assessing, and responding to students, they can help more students learn at higher levels.

Your question indicates that you subscribe to the first assumption – if Group B achieves at a higher level than Group A. it means the students in Group B are smarter. But, thirty-five years of research on effective schools and effective teaching indicate the second assumption is valid – some teachers are  able to help more students achieve at higher levels than other teachers in the same school teaching the same kind of students. I have no doubt that if you were to look at the achievement of all the students in your school over an extended period of time, the students of some teachers consistently outperform the others.

We advocate that teams set their SMART goal based on the assumption that the previous year of working and learning together will enable them to improve student learning for all incoming students. This kind of goal reflects the assumption that teachers make a difference.

If you would also like to establish a goal based on growth, and you had a valid way of assessing student proficiency at the start of the year, you could establish a growth goal as well. For example, a team might say, 83% of our entering students demonstrated proficiency on the state/provincial test in math last year. Our goal is to ensure at least 90% of these students are proficient on the state/provincial test at the end of this year. But I would advise that if you use a goal based on the growth of your students that you also use a goal based on your team’s growth as professionals. For example, of the students we taught last year,  85% scored proficient on the state/provincial test, and this year we want to get 90% to be proficient. Thus, you are setting one goal -90% proficiency – that has taken both student growth and teacher effectiveness into account. What I would not support is your establishing a goal based on incoming student proficiency that would result in lower student achievement than your team accomplished in the prior year.

Finally, here is a question we ask teachers. “Next year you have a choice of teaching either of two classes, both of which are grouped heterogeneously.  In Class A we have grouped all the students who believe they will be successful in your class if they are smart, and that they will not be successful if they are not smart. In Class B we have grouped all the students who believe they will be successful if they apply themselves and work hard. Which class would you rather teach – those who believe they will be successful based on their innate intelligence or those who believe they will be successful based on their effort.”

Every time we ask that question, teachers pick class B. If we want students to believe that their success will be determined by the willingness to continue to work and learn, we should model that assumption and recognize that our effort and willingness to continue to grow as educators impacts the achievement of our students. If, as you suggest, the only factor impacting their achievement is the ability they enter the class with, we could administer a pre-test and assign grades for the year since what we as educators do does not matter.

What’s the Difference Between a PLC, a Collaborative Team, and a Task Force?

November 27, 2007

By: Rick and Becky DuFour

We recently received an E-mail from a high school math teacher who attended a three hour PLC overview session we provided for all of the staff members of his K-12 school district. Prior to hearing about PLCs for the first time that morning, his high school had already convened three task forces to meet on a regular basis this school year to resolve the three pressing issues the faculty had identified:

Physical Environment: “This group is mostly concerned with the physical appearance of our school. They have already successfully lobbied for more garbage cans around the school but they looking for a “Five Year Plan” for our building from the School Board….”

Professional Practices: “This group is mostly concerned with the “nuts and bolts” of what teachers do. They are working on a “Teacher Policy Booklet” that would include items such as lates, attendance, forms to fill out, etc.; union items (dealing with other teachers, student boundaries, ethics issues, benefits, etc. and possibly school policy issues (steps for dealing with students who are not learning?)…”

Community Profile: “Our school has become the “third choice” for students in the district as there are two newer schools on the other side of the freeway. We are not doing a good job “selling” the school to the community…”

His question to us was: “In your opinion, do these three Task Forces fit the PLC model?”

We recognize clarity in terms is an important step in creating the shared foundation (mission, vision, collective commitments, and goals) of a successful learning organization. Here is an attempt to establish such clarity among educators attempting to apply PLC practices:

We refer to the school or district – the larger organization – as a PLC. Our definition of a PLC is: educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research in order to achieve better results for the students they serve. PLC’s operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators. (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many. 2006. Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree)

Each PLC is organized into a series of high-performing collaborative teams which meet on a regular (weekly) basis to focus on student learning. A team is a group of people working interdependently to achieve a common goal, for which members are held mutually accountable. (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many. 2006. Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree) Collaborative teams are the fundamental building blocks of PLCs.

In addition to structuring and supporting collaborative teams focused on learning, a school or district may also utilize a task force or committee structure to further disperse leadership while addressing current schoolwide/districtwide issues. A Task Force is a temporary group convened to addresses a specific issue/charge. Once the group has fulfilled its charge, the group no longer needs to meet.

The work of task forces could greatly improve school-wide programs, practices, and procedures if  the task forces focuses on the right issues and recommends action steps members of the school community should take in order to improve upon the current reality of their school.

Each of the three above-mentioned issues could be effectively addressed by the task forces and the high school could realize a more appealing physical environment; more clearly defined practices & procedures for the adults to follow; more positive media coverage and yet realize no gains in student learning as a result of the task force work. These topics focus on issues that are outside, rather than within the classrooms.

Therefore, we want to stress two points. First, a school-wide task force in a PLC does not substitute for the work of teachers organized into collaborative teams based upon a shared course, grade level, or interdisciplinary program —-teams focused on the critical questions of student learning:

1. What do we want our students to learn? (essential, guaranteed & viable curriculum)

2. How will we know they are learning? (administer frequent, team-developed common, formative assessments)

3. How will we respond when they don’t learn? (Timely, Directive, Systematic Intervention)

4. How will we respond when they do learn? (Timely Enrichment/Extension)

In a PLC, the work of task forces is temporary, but the work of collaborative teams of teachers is always focused on learning and is on-going and never ending…it becomes “they way we do things” forever.

Second, task forces will not improve either student or adult learning if they focus on issues unrelated to learning. A task force can be a powerful tool, but only if it is focused on the right task.

Collecting and Analyzing Common Assessment Data

November 7, 2007

By: Sam Ritchie

While most teachers recognize the value of analyzing assessment data they often struggle with collecting the data. It is not sufficient to know how many questions each student answered correctly or how many students passed and failed. While collecting assessment data is possible without technology its use allows the collection and reporting of assessment data in a timely and user-friendly way. Software programs that use a browser and the Internet (web-based) to collect and report assessment data tend to more user-friendly and are designed with the teacher in mind. These programs allow students to take an assessment on a scan form or online,  score the assessment, and report the results (data) almost instantly in a predefined format. Characteristics of such programs include:

1.  Assessments that are aligned, by teachers, to state and/or local learning outcomes and graded automatically.

2.  Automatic multiple choice and performance based assessment grading.

3.  Access to immediate, actionable achievement information that teachers and administrators can use to adjust curriculum variables and improve student outcomes.

4.  Access to immediate and actionable student performance data so teachers can design and deliver appropriate student intervention and enrichment programs.

5.  Access to disaggregated and aggregated data by any level (student, teacher, course, section, grade, school and district)

6.  Reporting achievement by any student demographic group (including ethnic, IEP, ESL, Free and Reduced Lunch, etc.)

7.  Access to trend, comparative and progress reports by student subgroups, teachers, courses and learning standards.

8.  Complete visibility of learning objective mastery, through simplified reports that make it easy to know what students have or have not learned.

Representative of this group of programs is Mastery Manager by GoldStar Learning (www.masterymanager.com). The under lying premise of Mastery Manager is that assessments should be created by those closest to the learning, the team, and that the resulting data should be directly accessible to the team.

Common Formative Assessments and the Question of Pacing

October 10, 2007

By: Rick DuFour

We received a blog query from someone who expressed concern that the way common formative assessments were being implemented in his district required teachers to have identical pacing – same page same day – and uniform instructional practice. Common formative assessments DO NOT and should not require teachers to use lockstep pacing or instruction. Instead, a team of teachers should plan a unit, agree on the skills and concepts to be taught, and the date they will administer the common assessment. Pacing on a day-to-day basis should be left to the discretion of each teacher. Furthermore, we believe schools should encourage varied instructional strategies as part of action research to determine which seems to be more effective in promoting learning. So while teachers in a PLC have agreed on what students should learn and how and when that learning will be assessed, they have great autonomy in determining instruction on a day-to-day basis.

Another question raised by this teacher was “does common mean exact.” We think the assessments should be as similar as possible to reduce the variables that could be used to explain results. If, however, individual teachers wanted to include additional items or assess in additional ways, they should be encouraged to do. For example, one teacher on a US History team may want to add some questions on a topic he covered that was in addition to the guaranteed curriculum or another might want to add an essay question that was not part of the common assessment.

The writer asked if common assessments must replace unit tests. First, once again we have seen teams enjoy great discretion as to how frequently they use common assessments. In District 96 many teams are using common assessments every two weeks. Teams in other districts are using common assessments as infrequently as once a quarter. Furthermore, not every assessment needs to be a common assessment. Good teachers are checking for student understanding constantly. They never let a day go by without using some strategy to assess student understanding. Individual teachers may want to continue giving some of their own tests and should be allowed to do so. There are many advantages to using common assessments, but no single assessment strategy can provide teachers with all the information they need.

Finally, and very importantly, the more important questions about common formative assessments are these:

1.  Do they help our team to identify students who are experiencing difficulty in their learning?

2.  Do we have a plan in place to provide those students with additional time and support for learning?

3.  Do we provide students with another opportunity to demonstrate their learning once they have been required to devote additional time to learning the skill or concept?

4.  Do the results provide me with useful information as a teacher, helping me to identify areas where my students are not doing well compared with similar students pursuing the same curriculum?

5.  Does student success on our common assessments translate into success on other high-stakes assessments such as state and national exams?

I strongly encourage this school to clarify the logistical questions this teacher has raised, and begin to examine the far more important questions I have presented above.

Good luck.

The Role of an Elective Teacher in a PLC

September 26, 2007

By: Rick DuFour

A frequent question that surfaces when schools attempt to implement the PLC concept is, “What about the electives. Where do they fit?”  If an elective teacher is the only person in the school who teaches a particular subject, we have suggested vertical teams (for example, the middle school band teacher teaming with the elementary school band teachers to create a strong band program).  Another possibility is all the teachers of a particular elective area being released for district-teaming on a regular basis (for example, all the elementary school art teachers convening monthly to clarify what skills students should acquire, ways of assessing the skills, and practicing assessing actual student work to ensure consistency of standards).

Elective teachers can also look for connections with core curriculum teachers. The following letter comes from Susan Williams an elective teacher from Freeport Intermediate School in Brazosport, Texas who responded to an inquiry about how she “fits” in the PLC model at her school. Freeport is nationally recognized middle school featured in Whatever it Takes. Its principal, Clara Sale-Davis is an extraordinary leader, and Ms. Williams articulates the PLC concepts with exceptional eloquence. She has given us permission to share the correspondence with blog readers.

Rick DuFour Septermber 25, 2007

My name is Susan Williams and I am the Spanish teacher at Freeport Intermediate School.  My principal, Mrs. Davis forwarded me the message that you sent her concerning the role of elective teachers in our continual journey for academic excellence.  First of all let me thank you for taking the time to contact us with you questions.  We are proud of our school, community and students and are always thrilled to hear from other educators who share our vision and interests.

We, the teachers at F.I.S. share a common goal.  That goal is to do whatever it takes to push our students to the highest levels of academic, emotional and social well being.  We learned many years ago, thanks to the outstanding leadership of our principal, Mrs. Davis that a common goal is met only through collaborative efforts.  Teachers cannot work in isolation and expect school wide success in core subjects, electives, student behavior or extracurricular activities.  Students must expect uniformity throughout their curriculum and their school day.

As to how I, as an elective teacher am able to impact the goal of our school in a positive way, it is simple.  Through our weekly agendas that are placed in our boxes on a weekly basis, I stay informed as to the material that the core teachers are presenting and then find ways to incorporate it into my lessons.  For example, at the beginning of the school year, I cover geography of the Spanish speaking world.  In doing so, we label continents, major bodies of water and basic geographical features.  It so happens that they are doing the same thing in 7 th grade Social Studies only I do it with them in Spanish.  By doing so, students receive constant reinforcement from two different teachers with different personalities and teaching styles.  Additionally, they are meeting a part of the scope and sequence for high school Spanish 1.  This same practice continues throughout the school year allowing me to not only teach in my content area, but to collaborate with other teachers on projects and interdisciplinary units.

I feel that it is my moral responsibility to help mold and create good citizens who are educated and understand how the world is interconnected.  Collaboration is a perfect opportunity to do so.  For example, two years ago, our school participated in a school wide interdisciplinary lesson on great inventions throughout history.  In History, students researched inventors and inventions.  In Science, students created their own inventions.  In Language, they helped put together the research that was done in history class in narrative form.  In Math, students researched the measurements and mathematical principles behind great inventions.  In my class we researched great inventions such as the railroad that helped connect the Spanish speaking world to other industrialized nations.  We then helped the Art department make etchings and prints of the inventions.  Our awesome band learned about music that came about as a result of inventions or that had inventions as a part of their title or musicality.

On the day of the school wide presentation, our artwork was put on display; the history students acted out and or read the narratives written by the language students.  Our band presented information about what they had learned about inventions and inventors and performed fabulous music.  Then, as icing on the cake, our science students entered their original inventions into a school wide competition in which various winners were chosen in an after school science fair.  Parents, district administrators and community members attended the presentation which was the culmination of a couple of weeks of lessons.  We have done similar school wide units on immigration and jazz music.

Thus, through collaboration, communication and creativity, I am able to stay abreast of the academic climate of our campus and am able to help reinforce the core subjects and enrich what they are learning through the added material in my class.  Lastly, I do not think of myself as an elective teacher.  I am simply a teacher who happens to have a specialty area that others do not posses. As a result, I can do additional things that other teachers may not be equipped to do. For example, I tutor ESL students in writing and in any other way that helps the core teachers and other electives effectively teach students who are not proficient in English.  As a result of this collaboration, ALL of our students excel.

I hope that I have been able to shed some light on the question that you proposed and I would love for you to be able to come and visit us here and Freeport and share in some of our Rowdy Redskin hospitality.

Sincerely,

Susan Williams

Spanish teacher F.I.S.

The Case for Common Formative Assessments

September 13, 2007

By Rick DuFour, Becky DuFour, and Bob Eaker September 2007

We received a question from a principal of a high-performing middle school who wrote: “Although we have made significant growth in many of the core components of a professional learning community we continue to struggle with the perception of teacher autonomy as a result of attempting to create common assessments. A number of teachers continue to believe that common assessments restricts their ability to differentiate instruction from their colleagues…. our staff still remains hesitant to fully engage in meaningful collaboration which would result in creating common assessements and sharing instructional practices

We have offered our own arguments as to why assessments created by a team of teachers are superior to the formal assessments developed by a teacher working in isolation.

1. Team-developed common assessments are more efficient.

If five teachers teaching the same course or grade level are responsible for ensuring all students acquire the same knowledge and skills, it make sense those teachers would work together to determine the best methods to assess student learning. A team of teachers could divide responsibilities for creating a unit and developing assessments. Teachers working in isolation replicate and duplicate effort. They work hard, but they do not work smart.

2. Team-developed common assessments are more equitable.

The use of common assessments increases the likelihood that students will have access to the same curriculum, acquire the same essential knowledge and skills, take assessments of the same rigor, and have their work judged according to the same criteria. We have witnessed repeated examples of teachers who were emphatic about the need for consistency, equity, and fairness in terms of how they were dealt with as adults, being completely unconcerned about the inconsistency, inequity, and lack of fairness that characterized the assessment of student learning in their school. If every teacher has license to assess whatever and however he or she determines, according to criteria unique to and often known only by that teacher, schools will never be institutions that truly model a commitment to equity.

3. Team-developed common formative assessments are more effective in monitoring and improving student learning.

We have cited several researchers who have concluded that team-developed common formative assessments are one of the most powerful strategies available to educators for improving student achievement. We know of no research concluding the formal assessments created by individual teachers working in isolation advance student learning.

4. Team-developed common formative assessments can inform and improve the practice of both individual teachers and teams of teachers.

Teachers do not suffer from a lack of data. Virtually every time a teacher gives an assessment of any kind, the teacher is able to generate data – mean, mode, median, standard deviation, percentage failing, percentage passing, and so on. As Robert Waterman (1987) advised, however, data alone do not inform practice. Data cannot help educators identify the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies. Data inform only when they are presented in context, which almost always requires a basis of comparison.

Most educators can teach an entire career and not know if they teach a particular concept more or less effectively than the teacher next door because the assessments they generate for their isolated classrooms never provide them with a basis of comparison. Most educators can assess their students year after year, get consistently low results in a particular area, and not be certain if those results reflect his or her teaching strategies, a weakness in the curriculum, a failure on the part of teachers in earlier grades to ensure students develop a prerequisite skill, or any other cause. In short, most educators operate within the confines of data, which means they operate in the dark. But in a PLC, collaborative teams create a series of common assessments, and therefore every teacher receives ongoing feedback regarding the proficiency of his or her students, in achieving a standard the team has agreed is essential, on an assessment the team has agreed represents a valid way to assesses what members intend for all students to learn, in comparison to other students attempting to achieve the same standard. That basis of comparison transforms data into information.

Furthermore, as Richard Elmore (2006) wrote, “teachers have to feel that there is some compelling reason for them to practice differently, with the best direct evidence being that students learn better” (p. 38). When teachers are presented with clear evidence their students are not becoming proficient in skills they agreed were essential, as measured on an assessment they helped to create, and that similar students taught by their colleagues have demonstrated proficiency on the same assessment, they are open to exploring new practices. When the performance of their students consistently prevents their team from achieving its goals, they are typically willing to address the problem. In fact, we consider team-developed common formative assessments one of the most powerful motivators for stimulating teachers to consider changes in their practice.

5. Team-developed common formative assessments can build the capacity of the team to achieve at higher levels.

As Wiliam and Thompson (2007) found, the conversations surrounding the creation of common formative assessments are a powerful tool for professional development. When schools ensure every teacher has been engaged in a process to clarify what students are to learn and how their learning will be assessed, they promote the clarity essential to effective teaching. When teachers have access to each other’s ideas, methods, and materials they can expand their repertoire of skills. When a team discovers the current curriculum and their existing instructional strategies are ineffective in helping students acquire essential skills, its members are able to pursue the most powerful professional development because it is specific, job-embedded and relevant to the context of their content, their strategies, their team, and their students.

6. Team-developed common formative assessments are essential to systematic interventions when students do not learn.

We argue that if educators were truly committed to high levels of learning for all students, they would not leave the question, “what happens when some students do learn” to chance. They would instead, work together to create systems of intervention to ensure any student who struggles receives additional time and support for learning in a timely and directive way. Team-developed common formative assessments are a critical element of that system of intervention.

Not every assessment should be a common assessment. There is still a place for individual teachers to create their own formal assessments. Team-developed common assessments will never eliminate the need for individual teachers to monitor student learning each day through a wide variety of strategies that check for understanding. But if schools are ever to take full advantage of the power of assessment to impact student learning in a positive way, they must include common formative assessments in their arsenal. Professional learning communities will make team-developed common formative assessments a cornerstone of their work.

Rick DuFour, Becky DuFour, Bob Eaker

We’re already a “good” school, why do we need to improve?

August 30, 2007

By Rick DuFour

I recently engaged in a spirited discussion with a high school faculty that was balking at the idea of the implementing PLC concepts. Two of their concerns were: 1) “it is an affront to our honor to suggest that we should consider ways to improve when we are already a ‘good’ school and 2) this proposal is coming from the central office and we resent ‘top-down’ intrusion into our school.

I found the reaction puzzling. Jim Collins’ observation that “Good is the Enemy of Great” has become something of a clich’. Certainly any organization that is to sustain its effectiveness over time must engage in ongoing processes of continuous improvement. Even more certainly, a school that claims its fundamental purpose is to ensure high levels of learning for all students should search for more effective practices if even some of its students were being unsuccessful.

I’m reminded of the Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hatches the Egg in which Horton asserts the refrain, “an elephant’s faithful – 100 percent.” Regardless of how “good” a faculty may consider its school, for the parent whose child does not learn, the school has failed the child – 100 percent. When the staff in this school acknowledged that not all their students were being successful, I asked them to clarify at what point the failure of its students would warrant considering more effective strategies. Put another way, what would the level of failure have to reach in order to cause them discomfort.

Those who work in a high-performing PLC, where continuous improvement is deeply embedded into the culture of their school, where every team establishes and purses SMART goals to raise student achievement every year, would be puzzled by the adverse reaction to the suggestion that a staff might explore ways to be more effective.

I’m also puzzled by the visceral opposition to explore PLCs because the proposal came from the central office. I suggest that an institution committed to collective inquiry into best practice would be more attentive to the quality of ideas rather than the direction from which they came. I am certain of the quality of the PLC concepts because I have seen the impact that they have upon students and faculty alike. I contend educators should examine those ideas for their potential merits and worry less about the messenger.

There is nothing theoretical about PLC’s for me. I worked in Adlai Stevenson High School – a school that put PLC concepts into place and has continued to improve upon them for over two decades. I would contend that the teachers at that school feel more fulfilled, more rewarded, and more effective than teachers in traditional schools. A number of books have been written about the school (see Joan Richardson, Mike Schmoker, Tom Sergiovanni, Terry Deal, Thomas Lickona) and they invariably report on the enthusiasm, professionalism, and high morale of the faculty. If PLC concepts inevitably carry the dire consequences some educators predict, I question why the teachers who have actually implemented the concepts have failed to discover those consequences over twenty years.

Team Structure in PLC

August 15, 2007

By: Rick & Becky DuFour

We have heard the concern expressed that the PLC concept only allows for course-specific teams at the middle and high school level or grade level teams at the elementary level.  This is not the case. Adlai Stevenson High School, a national model of a PLC, had a variety of interdisciplinary, vertical, and even electronic teams included in its structure. The critical issue is not the structure of a group. The critical issues are:

a.) are the people in the group truly functioning as a team and

b.) do they do what teams do in a PLC.

A team is a group of people working interdependently to achieve common, specific, results-oriented goals for which members are mutually accountable.

In a PLC this means that people work together to focus on those questions that have the greatest impact on student learning:

1) what knowledge, skills, and dispositions do we want our students to acquire in this course/subject this semester and this unit,

2) how will we know our students are acquiring these essential learnings;

3) how will we respond individually and collectively for those experiencing difficulty in learning,

4) how will we enrich and extend the learning for students who are capable of moving further, and

5) how can we use the evidence of student learning to inform and improve our practice.

If people do not have a common goal, if they do not work interdependently, if they are not mutually accountable, they are not a collaborative team. If they do not focus on the issues presented above, they are not “co-laboring” in the right areas.  Getting together to discuss student behavior or creating book clubs to discuss common reading is not creating a collaborative team.

From time-to-time, a group of interested people come together at Stevenson High School to examine a school-wide issue (i.e. grading practices or meeting the needs of students assigned to the lowest tracks in the curriculum).  They build shared knowledge regarding 1) the current reality of the issue and 2) best practices for addressing the issue found in research and exemplary models.  They make recommendations to the rest of the staff, build consensus for their recommendations, and ultimately call for a decision to be made regarding the issue. These groups represent task forces rather than teams.

Once the members of a task force help the staff build shared knowledge about the issue, make their recommendations, build consensus for their recommendations, and assist in overseeing the implementation of the decision, their task is complete and they disband. Task forces make significant contributions to the school, and we advocate their use, but they serve a very different purpose than do the collaborative teams.

Collaborative teams are the fundamental building blocks of a PLC – the engine that drives continuous improvement – and therefore they meet continuously (weekly at minimum) and stay focused on the critical questions of learning.  When organizing teams, ask:  “do the people on this team have a shared responsibility for responding to the critical questions in ways that enhance the learning of their students.”

Possible team structures, focused on student learning include:

• Grade Level teams – all teachers teaching the same grade level

• Course/Content Teams – all teachers teaching the same course

• Vertical teams (K-2/3-5 or French I – IV)

• Electronic teams – job-alike teachers in different schools us technology to engage in meaningful collaboration.  The following websites have been created to assist educators in finding electronic teammates:

1. www.isightEd.com
2. www.firstclass.com
3. www.nsdc.org  (Microsoft partnership)

• Interdisciplinary teams – members from multiple courses are mutually accountable for an over-arching academic common goal (i.e. improve student proficiency in non-fiction writing across the curriculum)

• District or regional job-alike teams (i.e. all elementary music teachers from across the district collaborate about student learning in music)

• Similar Responsibility Teams (i.e. general education and special education teachers meet regularly because they share responsibility for the learning of a group of students)

Common Formative Assessments

July 30, 2007

By Rick DuFour

I had a conversation recently with a high school faculty that expressed several concerns regarding the idea that teachers teaching the same course or grade level should have common formative assessments periodically to identify students who were experiencing difficulty, to identify strengths and weaknesses in their program, and to give each teacher feedback on the how well his or her students had learned in comparison to all the students attempting to become proficient. Here is a summary of their concerns and my responses.

1. Common assessments will require lockstep pacing and uniform instruction.

Advocates of professional learning communities do not support either lock-step pacing or uniform instruction. Teachers remain free on a day-to-day basis to make instructional decisions and PLCs benefit from diversity in instructional techniques so members can begin to observe which of those techniques are most effective in helping students achieve the intended outcomes of the unit and/or course. PLCs do insist that teachers agree to 1) ensure students have access to the same knowledge, skills, and dispositions regardless of the teacher to whom they are assigned and 2) to specify certain benchmark dates when the team will administer assessments to identify students who may be experiencing difficulty or areas of the curriculum needing attention. When teachers first begin this practice, we recommend they start with a minimum of four common assessments per course/subject, per year. Once they begin to see the benefits, they typically add more frequent assessments. So once again, there is no expectation that all teachers must be teaching the same content on the same day or using identical strategies. The expectation is that we will agree to teach certain concepts within the same window of time (perhaps six weeks) so that all students will be prepared for the common assessment.

2. The common assessments will limit us to a narrow focus or lower-level skills.

Teams are free to use a variety of assessment strategies, and many use performance-based assessments. The assessments can be as rigorous, varied, and authentic as the team decides and should provide the team with the information it will find most helpful in assessing its effectiveness. As an individual teacher, you can use whatever assessments you like all throughout the year, but at least four times a year we agree to use the same common assessment.

3. We are already assessing too much. This adds to the burden.

Common assessments need not be additional assessments. They should replace some of the individual assessments that teachers have traditionally given. Doug Reeves contends that American students are over-tested and under-assessed. Teachers in PLCs do not test more often, but they do use assessments that are far more powerful.

4.If we focus on student achievement on assessments we diminish our efforts to develop the whole student.

This is a false dichotomy. There is no need to choose between academic achievement and developing the character of students, fostering a love or learning, or generating good citizens for a democracy. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois is cited repeatedly as a model professional learning community. It was also cited as a national model for its attention to teaching character (see The Good and Smart High School by Thomas Lickona) and was the only high school in the nation cited by NASSP for two consecutive years for the exceptional service its students provide to the community.

What Might Be: Open the Door to a Better Future

July 17, 2007

By Rick and Becky DuFour

Those called upon to forecast future trends in professional development are well advised to remember the biblical observation, “there is nothing new under the sun.” In fact, a case could be made that the greatest advances in professional development will come not from identifying new strategies or processes, but rather from applying what we already know to be best practice. The most pressing issue confronting educators is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of implementation, and a key to improving schools is taking purposeful steps to close this knowing-doing gap.

It has also been argued, however, that a group must be able to envision a better future before it can take steps to create that future. The following observations are presented to help others imagine a better future, “what might be,” in the domain of professional development for educators.

We will know a new era has dawned when educators engaged in the deepest and most meaningful learning won’t even recognize they are participating in professional development. Purposeful collaboration, collective inquiry, action research, and seeking evidence of results to inform individual, team, and school practices will be so deeply embedded in the routine work of educators that they will consider these powerful learning experiences as simply “the way we do things around here.” The artificial distinction that has so long existed between teacher “work time” (that is, time spent in the classroom) and teacher “learn time” (that is, the four days set aside annually for “institutes”) will be replaced by a culture in which working and learning are so interwoven it will be impossible to identify where one begins and the other ends.

The collaborative team will become the primary engine for this professional learning, and time for collaboration will be embedded in the daily and weekly schedule. Teams will be expected to develop and pursue results-oriented goals that are specifically linked to school and district goals. They will be required to analyze data, to identify concerns regarding the learning of their students, to build shared knowledge regarding how to best address those concerns, to develop and implement short-term action plans to improve upon the current reality, to analyze data to see what worked and what did not, to assist each other as they work interdependently to achieve the goals for which they are mutually accountable, and to continue to repeat this process in a perpetual cycle of improvement. Within this tight process, however, teams will enjoy tremendous autonomy in the problems they choose to address, their selection of improvement strategies, and, very importantly, in seeking the kind of professional learning they deem essential to their success.

The ongoing learning essential to this process has profound implications for schools and districts. Professional development as an event or workshop will give way to a process of continuous learning. The generic professional development presented to an entire faculty a few designated days each year will give way to “just-in-time” learning specific to the issues confronting a team. Professional learning will become both more timely in delivery and more precise in identifying the specific knowledge and skills educators need to address an issue and achieve their goals.

And if adult learning in schools is truly to become professional development, educators must commit to the collective pursuit of best practice and extend that pursuit beyond their classroom, their team, their school, or even their district. In too many schools and districts, decisions are based upon preferences and perceptions rather than evidence of effectiveness. The question that has driven initiatives has been “do we like it,” rather than “does it help more students learn at higher levels.” Discussion of complex problems devolves into a “pooling of opinions,” and the contrived congeniality of many faculties makes it difficult to critique diverse opinions in a culture that seems to suggest all perceptions are of equal value. A “professional,” however, is someone with expertise in a specialized field, a person who has not only pursued advanced training to enter the field but who is also expected to remain current in its evolving knowledge base. It follows, then, that professional development must be specifically linked to compelling evidence of best practice.

Imagine a group of second-grade teachers who have worked together as a collaborative team to clarify the knowledge, skills, and dispositions their students are to acquire as a result of the upcoming unit they are about to teach. One of those skills is re-grouping numbers in two-digit addition and subtraction. Members have discussed different instructional strategies, have agreed on common pacing, and have developed a common formative assessment that they administer to all students. They share the results of the assessment, seek ideas from a colleague who is achieving outstanding results, and offer support and specific strategies for a team member whose students are experiencing difficulty in learning the skill.

But perhaps no one on the team has been successful in helping students become proficient with re-grouping. So, that district identifies teachers and principals who represent what Jerry Sternin has described as “positive deviants” – individuals who consistently achieve results that are dramatically superior to the norm in that district. The district has studied those positive deviants, has asked them to reflect upon and articulate their practices, has created training programs based upon some of their specific skills, and makes them available as a resource to other educators in the district. The team can access the ideas, insights, and information from the district’s most successful teacher in teaching 2nd-grade math skills and solicit his or her assistance as team members implement new strategies in their classrooms.

Or imagine a national network of best practices in education for every course, every discipline, and every grade level. Now the second-grade team accesses a national website that provides the lesson plans, handouts, worksheets, teaching tips, and sample assessments for that specific skill from some of the most effective teachers in the nation. They watch a video of some of those teachers working on that skill with students similar to their own. They discuss the best way to implement some of the ideas they have learned, and they develop strategies for gathering evidence on their effectiveness.

This proposed openness and accessibility may seem foreign to educators who have been reluctant to open their file cabinets to, or share “their stuff” with, a colleague. But there is reason for hope. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently announced that it is making the content of all its courses available on-line to anyone in the world at no charge. MIT described this initiative as an act of “intellectual philanthropy.” Perhaps others will follow suit. Perhaps the next “Education Governor” or “Education President” will conclude that helping all students learn will require more than assessments and sanctions, and he or she will champion the creation of the systematic intellectual philanthropy that provides educators with free and open access to the knowledge base that can serve as a vital catalyst to their ongoing professional development.

To quote John Lennon, “Imagine.”

From Journal of Staff Development, pp. Vol. 28, NO. 3 Summer 2007.

Copyright Rick and Becky DuFour, 2007.

Helpful link: http://www.nsdc.org/standards/index.cfm

Podcast: 2006 Summit

June 12, 2007

“On Common Ground: The Power of Professional Learning Communities” featuring Rick Stiggins, Michael Fullan, Richard DuFour, and Lawrence Lezotte.

Download the entire podcast, or click on a topic below:

• Changes in Education
• Future of Education
• Initial Steps
• Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Teacher Learning
• Inclusion
• Greatest Paradox
• Best Book

Time and Support for Adults in a Professional Learning Community

May 29, 2007

By: Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

We were recently asked if the concept of providing students additional time and support when they experience difficulty also applies to the adults in a school district.  Virtually everyone agrees that students learn at different rates and in different ways. So, the idea that some students will need additional time and support strikes a cord with most educators. As one teacher put it, “It just makes sense.” But, what about adults?  Do the same principles apply?

We think the answer is an emphatic “yes”.  In fact, the same principle applies not only to individuals, but to groups of adults as well.  Think of it like this – the school is really just a bigger classroom – a classroom of adults.  The principal and the district office support staff are the “teachers” in this “bigger classroom”, providing additional time and support for those who need it.  (Additionally, these “teachers” are enhancing the learning of those who do “get it” and are publicly celebrating their accomplishments.)

If a school district is passionately and sincerely committed to the notion of improving the learning of all students, it is highly unlikely that each school within the district will progress at the same rate or in the same way.  Each school will experience difficulty at one time or another and when they do the district office staff should work with the school personnel to develop a plan for “additional time and support”. And, just like for students, the plan should be timely, systematic and directional.

The same is true for collaborative teams within a school.  When a school is organized into collaborative teams it is unrealistic to think that each team is going to develop, mature and perform at the same rate and in the same way.  Certainly, some teams are going to need more attention, time and support than others.

For some schools and districts the notion of ensuring high levels of learning for all is a lofty goal but one that is difficult to achieve.  Here’s a suggestion; think about breaking it down and focusing on “one team at a time.” It becomes doable when, for example – the science department – a department that has already aligned curriculum, and written their common assessments, is asked to assist the English department as they begin the process of writing common assessments.  Another example is this; perhaps there is a third grade team in one building that has improved student learning by collaboratively analyzing student work.  Wouldn’t it be helpful to have this team share their work with other teams within the district?  Best practices come alive when they are modeled and shared by respected teachers.  This is only one way of providing teams additional time and support.  And, it’s also one way to improve student learning.

Successful schooling is a difficult and complex endeavor and everyone needs additional time and support from time to time.  But, time and support must be tailored to fit each circumstance, since adults, like students, learn in different ways.  Think of it as intentionally creating a roadmap – first making sure everyone knows where we are going and why.  Second, identifying specific steps needed to reach the destination (i.e. benchmarks along the way).  And, providing additional time and support to ensure everyone arrives.  Perhaps everyone will not take the same route to the destination or even arrive at the same time, but with frequent monitoring, feedback and effective time and support everyone can get to where they should be.

We think this is an important aspect of successfully reculturing districts and schools into professional learning communities.  What have been your experiences?  We invite you to share your thoughts, ideas and experiences about this important and timely topic.

Small School PLC Implementation

May 7, 2007

QUESTION:

I am principal of a small school, with 1 or 2 teachers at each grade level.  The collegiality/cooperation in the school is nearly nonexistent. I buy into the whole idea behind PLC’s. My question–how can we accomplish this with such a small school, and with the disrespect and distance in some of the staff members?

RESPONSE:

1. Create a “Guiding Coalition” – convene a group of teachers from your school to help you lead this journey…no matter how good a leader is, no leader can “go it alone” when attempting to make significant structural & deep cultural changes.

2. Build Shared Knowledge about PLCs – that is, you and your guiding coalition should engage your staff in collective inquiry into both your school’s current reality (what does our hard & perceptual data tell us about ourselves) AND into “best-practice” (what are “improving schools doing that we’re not) This is addressed at length in the chapter on “building consensus” in our book latest book, Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, Solution Tree, 2006)

You can also help your staff learn about PLCs by sharing and discussing articles (from http://www.allthingsplc.info/); making site visits to PLC schools (see schools listed under “Evidence of Effectiveness” on the site); video conferencing with teachers in PLC schools (call Solution Tree at 800.733.6786 for more information); attend PLC institutes, summits, etc. (visit http://www.solution-tree.com/ for a listing institutes and events)

3. Explore/Utilize PLC Resources:

Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work provides answers many of the questions you’re facing.  (i.e. how do I make this happen in a small school – what’s the best way to structure teams; how do I build consensus for these ideas; how do I deal with the people who still don’t want to change/implement new ideas & strategies; how do I sustain the change process…etc.)  We’ve also created a teacher Plan Book that helps to “guide” the team process (you can explore these & other resources at: http://www.solution-tree.com/)

4. Network with other principals in small school settings:

Several of our PLC associates and schools included under Evidence of Effectiveness have implemented PLC practices in small school settings. Please explore the listings and feel free to contact the principals of those schools.  We also invite them and other blog readers to write in and offer insights, advice and support and you implement PLC practices in your small school setting.

As always, we look forward to learning with you,

Becky, Rick and Bob

Podcast: 2007 Summit

April 27, 2007

“Learning by Doing: Bringing PLC to Life in Our Schools and Districts” featuring Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Rick Stiggins, and Jonathan Saphier.

Download the entire podcast, or click on a topic below:

1. Clarifying outcomes on the PLC journey
2. Implementing a common assessment across the system
3. Setting parameters for structuring teams
4. Hiring productive PLC teachers
5. Preparing teachers to contribute to PLC practices’ the role of universities
6. Leading upward when PLC practices are not supported
7. Who is your educational hero?

The Professional Teacher

April 18, 2007

I received an interesting response from a teacher to a blog entry I made in support of giving teachers time to collaborate. In that entry (posted January 29, 2007) I attempted to make the point that in other professions, collaboration is an accepted part of professional practice and that teachers should be treated as professionals and given time to collaborate.

One of the respondents, a teacher, objected, saying I was making false analogies as justification for bullying teachers into things they didn’t want to do. Professionals, in his view, are free to make all their decisions based on their “own professional experience and intellectual discretion.” As he writes, “real professionals do not submit to anyone’s view but their own.” If we follow this logic, every teacher should be free to teach what he/she wants, when he/she wants, how he/she wants, assess student learning however and whenever he/she wants, and respond to students who experience difficult in whatever way he/she sees fit. Every teacher should be able to ignore the consistent research findings over 35 years on the benefits of students having access to a guaranteed and viable curriculum regardless of who the teacher is, of the link between collaborative school cultures and high student achievement, of the importance of effective formative assessments in the teaching and learning process, of systematic interventions that provide students with additional time and support for learning, etc.

The respondent defines being a professional as being able to disregard all research, all evidence, and all other points of view than his own. I could not disagree more. A “professional” is someone with expertise in a specialized field, an individual who has not only pursued advanced training to enter the field, but who is also expected to remain current in its evolving knowledge base.

My son took several AP courses in high school. These courses had prescribed curricula and high stakes comprehensive examinations. I was grateful that his teachers worked together collaboratively to become student of their AP curriculum, to discuss how to pace it, to study released sets of AP exams, to create a series of formative assessments based on the AP assessments to monitor student learning and to help students become familiar with the AP format, to explore different ways to teach key concepts, and to help students review and prepare for the exam. A teacher who consistently helped students achieve at the highest levels on the challenging AP exams was willing to share strategies, methods, and ideas with colleagues because each teacher was interested in and supportive of the learning of all the students in the course, not merely those assigned to their classrooms. I believe they personified professionals. If each had said, “I see no need to submit to the tyranny of the College Board, I will teach what I want, how I want, assess whatever and however I choose,” they would have been exercising their “discretion” and refusing to”submit to anyone’s view but their own;” however, they would be the anti-thesis of professionalism because they would not be acting in the best interests of those they are expected to serve.

Recently, a comprehensive study established that performing an angioplasty, a painful and potentially fatal operation, was no more effective in preventing heart attacks than medication and exercise. That finding will have an enormous impact on the medical field, and the number of angioplasties performed in this country will plummet. Professionals do not disregard evidence or assume the knowledge they have when they enter the field will be sufficient for an entire career. They are willing to adjust their practice on the basis of evidence.

That is what we advocate for educators. That they come together to develop strategies for gathering evidence that their students are learning the things that the teachers have agreed are most essential, they discuss the evidence, and use it to inform and shape their practice. Of course, this is a feckless activity to one who believes every teacher is king of his kingdom, free to follow his personal discretion and unique vision.

This respondent continues to harp on the idea that the PLC concept is an attempt to “bully” teachers into a prescribed way of teaching. I have written 8 books and 50 articles. Not once I have ever suggested that all teachers be required to teach the same way. I have seen some brilliant teachers get wonderful results with direct instruction. I have seen others get equally terrific results with cooperative learning. Teachers at my former school were not asked to obey, or conform, but they were asked to honor and apply practices that have been well established as having a positive impact on student achievement and school culture, “ a guaranteed curriculum, a collaborative culture, formative assessments to monitor student learning, systematic interventions when they don’t learn. Those teachers have unique styles, personalities, and philosophies, but they were also open to the possibility that someone, somewhere might teach a concept better than they did, and they were willing, even eager, to learn from one another. They welcomed the process that enabled them to do so. They valued the time they were given to collaborate and sought more rather than less time to work with colleagues.

Perhaps the most tiresome of this respondent’s entry is that non-teacher education leadership is infantilizing teachers by suggesting it knows better than they what teachers should do. Why is it then that groups that have specifically been established to support and enhance the teaching profession have insisted that teachers, as a matter of right, should be working in professional learning communities? Why have both the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future made shaping schools into professional learning communities one of their core strategies for making the profession more rewarding? Why is it that the National Education Association’s plan for improving schools calls for teachers to work together collaboratively to promote continuous improvement of teaching and learning to achieve shared goals? Why is it that the American Federation of Teachers has called for schools to engage teachers in a continuous process of individual and collective examination and improvement of practice as the best method of improving schools?

There is simply no evidence that encouraging each teacher to work in isolation in autonomous classrooms to teach his or her own curriculum according to his or her own idiosyncratic philosophy, vision, and discretion creates a school culture that is beneficial to either students or teachers. Those who advocate such a position should do more than attack the integrity of proponents of PLCs. They should present compelling evidence that their ideas lead to better teaching and learning.

Rick DuFour

HOW DO LEADERS COMMUNICATE PRIORITIES? ATTENTION IS ALL THERE IS!

March 27, 2007

Superintendents often ask how they can promote PLC concepts in their schools. An article from the April 2003 Harvard Business Review entitled “Tipping Point Leadership” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne offers some great ideas on that topic. The article focused on William Bratton, a guy who is credited with being the more successful chief of police in the U.S. (he cleaned up Boston, then moved to NYC under Rudy Giuliani to transform its crime rates).

Bratton’s primary strategy was to motivate and inform his precinct captains through a semi-weekly strategy review meeting that required mandatory attendance. A selected precinct captain (think principal) would be called before a panel of senior staff (think superintendent and key central office staff) and all his/her colleagues to present data on crime rate performance (think student achievement). The captain was then called upon to interpret the data, clarify his/her strategies for attacking problem areas, and offer recommendations regarding successful practices. The entire group was expected to ask clarifying questions and offer suggestions. By the way, the precinct captain was given only two days notice prior to the presentation to establish the expectation that leaders should have the data at the finger tips and should be able to produce and explain it at a moments notice.

Here is how the authors described the benefit of the practice:

“By making results and responsibilities clear to everyone, the meetings helped to introduce a culture of performance (think, a results orientation). An incompetent commander could no longer cover up his failings by blaming his results on the shortcomings of neighboring precinct’s because his neighbor’s were in the room (think middle school principals blaming elementary principals). The meetings gave high achievers a chance to be recognized (think celebration) both for making improvements in their own precincts and for helping other commanders. The meetings allowed police leaders to compare notes on their experiences……..The great challenges in applying this kind of motivational device, of course, are ensuring that people feel it is based on fair processes and seeing to it that they can draw lessons from both good and bad results. Doing so increases the organization’s collective strength and everyone’s chances of winning.”

One way used to promote this sense of fairness was to focus on both crime rates and improvement in crime rates. The crime rates for Park Avenue were bound to be better than Brooklyn’s, but Brooklyn was in a position to show significant improvements. Conversely, Park Avenues’ rates may be great, but getting worse. Everyone had a chance to be a winner. Every captain was required to have “specific goals that were doable” (think SMART goal) all linked to a very specific purpose -making their precincts safer (think raising student achievement and closing the gap).

Here is another important point from the author’s of the study: “Over time, this management style filtered down through the ranks as the precinct captains tried out their own version of the Bratton meeting” (think principals transforming faculty meetings into team-led data analysis and dialogue).

Administrators encourage teachers to make data easily accessible and openly shared among members of a team, and this format would model that openness among administrators. Fullan argues that for PLC concepts to spread across a district, a principal must be almost as concerned about the success of other schools as he/she is about his/her own school. This format could foster that interdependence.

I encourage you to consider adapting something like this to your own settings and would be very interested in hearing your impression of results.

Rick DuFour

Gap-Thinking In a Professional Learning Community

March 16, 2007

From Robert Eaker and Janel Keating

In recent years a number of writers and researchers have utilized the phrase “habits of mind” The idea that we develop “habits” in the way we think raises an interesting question. How do we”think” about improving our schools within the professional learning community framework? Reculturing schools to function as professional learning communities involves more than a checklist. It requires a conceptual understanding that goes far deeper any mere recipe. While there is no “correct” way to think about changing schools, one way that we have found to be helpful is to think in terms of closing various “gaps” that exists in schools. If we are constantly and consistently engaging in collaborative processes to close various gaps that are related to school improvement, we are going a long way towards creating a culture of continuous improvement based on best practices, which is an important characteristic of a professional learning community. Here are a few examples:

The Current Reality-Shared Vision Gap

Schools that function as professional learning communities engage in processes to develop a shared vision of the school they seek to become. They quite literally “describe their school of the future” in fairly specific detail. But, an important aspect of this process is that it begins by first gaining “shared knowledge”– a deep, rich understanding of best practice. This is an important difference between professional learning communities and their more traditional counterparts. Traditional schools tend to “average opinions” while professional learning communities engage in collective inquiry designed to learn about best practices. In this case, the effective schools research forms the basis for understanding what a school should “look like”. We once heard someone remark, “But, we really don’t know what a good school looks like, do we?” Well, the answer is an unequivocal, “Yes, we do!”. Over 35 years of research provides a clear and consistent picture of effective schooling practices. (For example, see Robert Marzano’s What Works in Schools (2003). A deep understanding of how effective schools work and what they look like creates a natural gap between the current reality of a school as it exists and a school based on the effective schools research. Leaders in professional learning communities engage faculty in, first, understanding current reality,”the good and the not so good, and second, comparing current reality to a description of the desired school of the future that is based on a deep understanding of the research on effective schools, and third, collaboratively developing a plan to close the gap that exist between the two.

The Knowing-Doing Gap

However, intentions are never enough. In The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000) Pfeffer and Sutton observe that one of the great mysteries of organizational life is the disconnect between what we know and what we do. As we think about reculturing schools to function as professional learning communities at some point we must “do the work”. However, we would like to offer a word of caution here. There is a tremendous difference between doing the “right work” and being “busy”. The issue in many schools is often not an issue of the lack of work, but rather the lack of focused work. What is the work of a professional learning community? The answer is this; collaboratively pursuing answers to the critical questions associated with ensuring high levels of learning for all students and adults. One of the questions leaders in professional learning communities ask is this; what plans have been collaboratively developed to close the gaps between what we “know” about schools that function as professional learning communities and what we are “doing” day in and day out in our school?

The Expectation-Acceptance Gap

Even doing isn’t enough. Many schools are attempting to do the work of a professional learning community but find they are having only marginal results. We have learned that the problem may be one of quality, that is, the culture of the school may be one in which the expectations are clear and explicit, but what we are willing to accept is far less. This phenomenon gets played out in virtually all aspects of school culture from student work, to teaching practices as well as leadership and management behavior. To echo Pfeffer and Sutton and their thinking about the knowing-doing gap, how can we close the gap between what we say we value and expect and what we are willing to accept? Here are a few ideas to think about: First, we must be clear in what we expect, what it should look like. Teams of teachers should work collaboratively to develop rubrics for student performances and products. Administrators should meet regularly to develop clear product and performance standards. But, most important rubrics and standards must be built into the assessment systems for both students and adults.

Also, we would suggest a deep discussion about the role shared values and commitments can play in raising the quality of what we are willing to accept. This involves a willingness to promote, protect and defend the things we say we value and are committed to, as well as a willingness, to confront behavior that is incongruent or not up to the level of quality with what we say we value, expect and care about. It also involves public recognition and celebration of the best examples of what we say we value when it occurs. And, importantly, we must be willing to give both students and adults additional time and support when the quality of their work does not meet our expectations.

We hope these ideas will encourage you to think about these and other “gaps” that exists in schools. But more important, we hope these comments will cause you to reflect on how your school is attempting to close these gaps and how you are monitoring results. We look forward to your comments and the ensuing dialogue.

Should a district-wide PLC initiative impact the recruitment and selection of future teachers to a district? If so, in what way?

March 12, 2007

Our bias on the recruitment & selection of new teachers follows:
The district should recruit & screen applicants on the basis of whether or not this candidate “appears” to have the qualities/knowledge to be a part of and help our district advance the mission & vision of our district. However, the selection process should happen at the individual school site where the candidate is a potential member of “our” school’s culture.  Adlai Stevenson High School (Rick’s former school/district in Lincolnshire, IL) offers an excellent example of PLC selection & retention process:
The administrative team (principal, assistant and department chair(s) interview candidates and narrow the pool to three finalists.  They then give each finalist a copy of the team’s list of norms, essential outcomes, pacing guides, common formative assessment instruments, etc. to study prior to being interviewed by “the team” they would potentially become a member of.  The team engages each candidate in dialogue about the products: could you live up to the norms our team has agreed to – are there any norms you question;any you’d like to add; could you teach to the list of essential outcomes and follow the packing guide; are there any outcomes on the list that you’re not comfortable with/question; are there outcomes you’d like to see on the list that aren’t; could you prepare student in this course for the common assessments we’ve created; what ideas do you have for strengthening our assessment instruments; ETC.
THEN, before a decision is made, the candidate must either spend a day at the school teaching a lesson(s) in the course(s) for which they are interviewing.  The department chair and members of the teaching team observe the lessons – what strategies/methods and material did the candidate choose to use for the lesson; how is the candidate engaging the students/relating to the students (If the candidate is not able to take a day off from teaching in a current school, a delegation from Stevenson’s team will go to their school and observe them teach).
Finally, the team makes a recommendation to the administration – which of the three finalists are they most excited about.  In most departments the teams report their perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. The administration then typically offers the job based on the team’s feedback.
Once the new teacher is hired, they are assigned a mentor from the team to meet with during the summer and throughout the first year.  And of course, the new hire has the support of the entire team each week when they come together to meet about student learning in their course.
For more information about the mentor program, read the scenario in Chapter 2, beginning on page 29 of Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement (DuFour & Eaker, Solution Tree, 1998)

Becky, Rick & Bob

Assessing Principal Performance In a Professional Learning Community

February 19, 2007

Robert Eaker, Richard Dufour, and Rebecca Dufour

We are frequently asked questions regarding the best ways to assess the performance of principals in a PLC. While recognizing that each district is unique, here are a few principal evaluation practices that could be applied in any district:

First, – and everything else hinges on this – we do not think traditional rating scales provide the crucial information that either the superintendent or the principal will need if they are committed to building and sustaining professional learning communities. The question, “should we have a five-point rating scale or a four-point scale is the wrong question. Rather, we are proponents of deep, meaningful conversations, portfolios, and high-quality summative narratives,” all built around specific practices evident in schools that embrace learning as their fundamental purpose.

A FOCUS ON LEARNING, THE PRINCIPAL AS A “LEARNING LEADER”

Mission: The Fundamental Purpose

The most important area of focus should be centered around the concept of “The Learning Leader”. What is the quality of the principal’s performance as it relates to the central mission of the school, ensuring high levels of learning for ALL?

• What evidence can the principal provide to demonstrate a focus on learning has been embedded into the culture of the school?
• Are policies, practices and procedures congruent with the learning mission?
• Is the learning mission the centerpiece of discussions as new initiatives are considered and decisions are made?

Evidence of a focus on learning could include:

• Student Learning Growth -data from local, district, state/provincial and national indicators demonstrating increasing levels of student achievement, specifically addressing areas of learning targeted in the last evaluation and in the school’s Learning Improvement Plan.
• Adult Learning Growth – documentation that the principal has successfully stretched the learning of adults in the school, individuals and teams. This documentation, demonstrating the quality of professional learning and the degree to which the adult learning is aligned with team SMART Goals, might include:
  • products from collaborative teams indicating their focus on the critical issues of learning, such as:
    1. lists of common essential outcomes in every subject, grade and course;
    2. examples of common formative assessments designed by the teams to monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis, and
    3. action plans designed to provide students, teachers, and teams with additional support and/or enrichment, during the school day.
  • attendance records and descriptions of staff development activities
  • book studies,
  • site visits to other schools/districts

The principal’s personal growth plan would also be a key element of this section as he/she models a commitment to being a learning leader.

BUILDING A COLLABORTIVE CULTURE

Vision: Describing the School We Seek to Become

Has the principal engaged the faculty in a review of the effective schools research as well as data that reflects the current reality of student performance in their own school? Has the principal engaged the faculty in developing a detailed description of the school they would like to become? Has the document been widely shared, but most important, what evidence is provided that the vision statement is being used to guide decision-making in the school?

This section would focus on evidence of the principal’s leadership in regards to embedding a commitment to collaboration into the day-to-day life of the school, such as:

1. How are the adults organized into high-performing teams?
2. How is time provided for teams to collaborate?
3. What products have the teams generated as a result of their collective inquiry into best practice? (i.e. norms/protocols; SMART Goals; lists of essential outcomes; common pacing guides/curriculum maps; common formative assessments; analysis of formative assessment data; strategies for improved results; etc.)
4. How are teams demonstrating a commitment to continuous improvement – working to improve their own professional practice in order to improve the learning of their students?

Shared Values and Collective Commitments

How does the principal promote, protect and defend the shared values and commitments? How does the principal communicate the collaboratively developed shared commitments to guide the day-to day culture of the school?

• What systems are in place to ensure priorities are addressed in a productive way?
• What is monitored?
• What is modeled?
• What questions are asked?
• How are resources allocated: time, money, people?
• Does the principal confront behavior that is incongruent with the school’s values and commitments?
• How are the values and commitments celebrated?

Recognition and Celebration

What are the artifacts of public recognition for student improvement and achievement. Are the awards varied and celebrations frequent enough so that all students feel have a chance to be recognized? Are both individuals and groups celebrated? Are adults (both individuals and groups) recognized and celebrated, and, what are they recognized for? And, importantly, are the recognitions and celebrations genuine?

A FOCUS ON RESULTS

Results-Oriented Goals
This section would be a presentation and analysis of the school-wide goals, the teams’ SMART goals, as well as the principal’s personal goals.

• Are the goals in line with the district goals and are there both short-term and long-term goals?
• What evidence is there that the principal uses goal setting to drive the work of teams and create a focus on results?
• How are goals developed, monitored and celebrated to drive improvement throughout the school?

Frequent, Formative Common Assessments

Are teams developing & administering frequent, formative common assessments designed to monitor student learning of the essential outcomes? Are teams provided with frequent information on student learning (i.e. how did each teacher’s students perform on each assessment compared to the total group of students who took the same assessment.) Are students who need it given extra time and support to learn the essential outcomes and then given additional opportunities to demonstrate that learning?

QUALITY OF ADMINISTRATIVE WORK
This section reviews how well the principal goes about the day-to-day managerial work.

• Is work done on time?
• Is it of high-quality?
• Is it correct?
• Are phone, e-mail messages and other correspondence addressed promptly?
• What is the quality of the principal’s interpersonal skills in dealing with staff and students?
• What is the quality of school/community relations.

And, of course, this section would focus on other administrative issues that are unique to the district.

As the principal presents evidence in each of these areas through portfolios, power-point presentations and/or other means, there must also be dialogue about the quality of the work of the principal – the issue is not just whether or not the work was done, but what was the quality of the work?

The summative product of this process would be a high-quality narrative written by, in most cases, the district or area superintendent. The summary narrative would also include two additional key elements:

1.) mutually agreed upon goals for next year and
2.) how the district will support the principal in achieving the school-wide goals.

We hope these ideas will prove helpful as you think about aligning assessment of a principal’s performance with the concepts of professional learning communities. We look forward to the dialogue.

Why Educators Should be Given Time to Collaborate

January 29, 2007

A Board of Education had asked the educators in its district to justify why they should be provided with time during their contractual day to collaborate rather than simply expecting them to do so on their own time. The Board felt that the key to improving student achievement was to maximize teacher time in the classroom.

Here is how I would respond to that question.

1. Time spent in collaboration with colleagues is considered essential to success in most professions. The law firm that represented our school district when I was superintendent required all of its attorneys to meet on a weekly basis to review the issues and strategies of the various cases that had been assigned to individual members. Each attorney presented the facts of the case and his or her thoughts on how to proceed. The others offered advice and challenges and shared their experience and insights. Our Board of Education never considered this collaboration as inappropriate. In fact, our members would have been very upset if the advice they received had been limited to the perspective of a single member rather than the collective expertise of the entire firm.

When our school district underwent construction projects, our Board expected the architectural firm to work as a team to design our new buildings. Furthermore, they expected those architects to collaborate on a regular basis with the managers of the construction company that did the work. Had the firm not engaged in such collaborative efforts, we would have questioned both their judgment and their effectiveness.

When I went for a comprehensive physical examination, a doctor who looked at one of the test results initially recommended that I undergo an immediate angioplasty. Prior to moving forward, however, he consulted with two other doctors and concluded the procedure was not necessary as long as I engaged in alternative treatments. I did not question his taking the time to consult with others.

Educators are professionals, and they too benefit from the insights, expertise, and collective efforts of a team of colleagues. Collaboration is not a frill: it is an essential element of professional practice.

2. The research base in support of collaboration is extensive both inside and outside of education. The collaborative team has been called the fundamental building block of a learning organization and the link between a collaborative culture and improving schools is well established. No district should disregard the compelling evidence that collaboration represents best practice as long as people demonstrate the discipline to collaborate about the right things.

3. American educators are often criticized because their students do not score as well as Asian students on international tests. The work-week of Japanese teachers is similar to American teachers in terms of the number of hours at work, but the time spent in front of students in the classroom is considerably less. In Japan, it is understood and accepted that a teacher who is working with colleagues to perfect a lesson or review examples of student work is engaged in highly productive activities that have a positive impact upon student achievement.

4. Lew Gerstner, the former chairman of IBM, was asked if he felt the key to improving American schools was simply extending the time teachers spent in the classroom – more time on task, longer school days, longer school years. Gerstner pointed out that the United States has created a system that impacts students for 13 years (K12), yet approximately one of every four students who enters the system fails to complete it (that is, they drop out). Furthermore, many of those who do complete the system are incapable of doing what the system was designed to ensure they could do. Gerstner insisted that if IBM found that one of every four of its computers failed to reach the end of the assembly line, and many of those who did could not do what the computer was designed to do, IBM would not solve the problem by running the assembly line more hours in the day or more days in the year. They would have people sit down together and determine more effective ways to achieve the intended objective.

5. Finally, organizations demonstrate their priorities by the way in which they utilize their resources. Time is one of the most precious resources in a school. In light of the strong correlation between meaningful collaboration and improved student achievement, it would be disingenuous for any Board to argue that it wants better results but it is unwilling to provide this important cost-neutral resource to achieve them.

Rick DuFour

Learn about PLCs by Doing what PLCs Do!

January 12, 2007

Here is a great story from an elementary school in Schaumburg, Illinois that moved quickly to implement PLC concepts.The staff is seeing improved results almost immediately, and the success they are experiencing has fueled momentum for continuing efforts. Their experiences reinforces the idea that the schools that make the most progress on the PLC journey are those who roll up their sleves and do the work. Celebrating small successes is critical to sustaining the PLC effort.
Rick DuFour

I am principal of Anne Fox School in Schaumburg D54 and I really wanted to share with you some of our data results from our winter MAP administration. We spent last year, my first year at Fox, developing our mission, vision, commitments and getting teams to function interdependently using some common assessments. Over the summer, we really made whole scale changes to our master schedule and built in our intervention and enrichment block based off of Becky’s model from Boone’s Mill. Our students now receive 45 minutes of targeted literacy intervention in small groups each day while proficient students are receiving extension and enrichment instruction. We also put into place an accelerated math section in each grade level in 3rd-6th basing our student class lists off of our common assessment results.

The attached tables demonstrate that we are making great progress. Our staff utilizes spring MAP proficiency targets, which correlated almost perfectly with ISAT last year, for determining students meeting or exceeding state standards. These targets are where we want all of our students to be in May (of course it is wonderful when they get there quicker J).

What we are seeing right now is incredible growth in math and great gains in reading. As I shared with my staff last night at our staff development meeting – we are achieving in January where we were achieving in May a year ago in terms of the percentage of our students that are proficienct. I am particularly excited about this result because it is not just one or two grade levels observing this trend – it is ALL of our grade levels in ALL of our subject areas. Teachers are now seeing the results of their efforts and are hungry for more success!!!

Thanks for all of the support you have given us at Fox and in D54 the past two years. While we aren’t where we want to be yet, the future sure looks bright and I can sense great optimism in a school that was not providing students with what they needed to be successful in the past. I know that my teachers are now seeing that even the most troubled kids can and have made considerable gains. I can’t even tell you how many “individual” student success stories we have this year – kids that were well below the national norm in reading and have now surpassed it in a three month window. We didn’t do it with gimmicks or canned programs, we did it by working together in proactively intervening with every child not achieving impressive results.

MAP Reading Performance Over Time
(% of Students Meeting or Exceeding SPRING Grade Level Proficiency Targets.)

Current Grade Level Fall 2005 Spring 2006 Fall 2006 Winter 2007
2nd Grade 35% 59% (+25%)
3rd Grade 56% 66% (+10%)
4th Grade 59% 75% (+16%) 64% 74% (+10%)
5th Grade 54% 63% (+9%) 50% 61% (+11%)
6th Grade 56% 64% (+8%) 59% 63% (+4)**
** Nine students are 1(5) or 2(4) RIT points from meeting the spring proficiency target

MAP Math Performance Over Time
(% of Students Meeting or Exceeding SPRING Grade Level Proficiency Targets.)

Current Grade Level Fall 2005 Spring 2006 Fall 2006 Winter 2007
2nd Grade 44% 54% (+10%)
3rd Grade 55% 69% (+14%)
4th Grade 63% 87% (+24%) 73% 86% (+13%)
5th Grade 68% 72% (+4%) 57% 71% (+14%)
6th Grade 62% 71% (+9%) 61% 77% (+16%)

We will keep building off of this!!!
Nick Myers, Principal

Welcome to AllThingsPLC, What’s a PLC?

January 9, 2007

We extend our sincere appreciation to Solution Tree for creating and maintaining allthingsplc. We believe the site offers a rich resource to those looking for ways to deepen their understanding of this model of school improvement. We also believe it is consistent with the collaborative and collective effort to acquire and share knowledge that is so much a part of the PLC process. We look forward to learning with and from you as we respond to your questions and comments, post entries to support your work, recognize your successes, and engage in on-going dialogue related to building and sustaining PLCs. Our hope is that educators at all levels will frequently visit this blog to get questions answered, give and receive support, network with colleagues from around the world, and celebrate PLC progress in their own settings. Thank you for being a part in this new venture!

Rick DuFour, Bob Eaker, & Becky DuFour

What’s a PLC?

It has been interesting to observe the growing popularity of the term professional learning community. In fact, the term has become so commonplace and has been used so ambiguously to describe virtually any loose coupling of individuals who share a common interest in education, it is in danger of losing all meaning. As our friend Michael Fullan concludes, “terms travel easily but the concepts underlying those terms often do not.” This lack of precision represents a very real obstacle to implementing PLC concepts. If you hope to become proficient in building PLCs, you must first develop clarity regarding what the term represents. Therefore, we have opted to devote this first entry to clarifying the term, “professional learning community (PLC).”

Professional Learning Communities are educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research in order to achieve better results for the students they serve. PLC’s operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators.

PLCs Maintain A Relentless Focus on Learning

The very essence of a learning community is a focus on and a commitment to the learning of each student. When a school or district functions as a PLC, educators within the organization embrace high levels of learning for all students as both the reason the organization exists and the fundamental responsibility of those who work within it. In order to achieve this purpose, the members of a PLC create and are guided by a clear and compelling vision of what the organization must become in order to help all students learn. They make collective commitments clarifying what each member will do to create such an organization, and they use results-oriented goals to mark their progress.

Members work together to clarify exactly what each student must learn, to monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis, to provide systematic interventions that ensure students receive additional time and support for learning when they struggle, and to extend and enrich learning when students have already mastered the intended outcomes.

A corollary assumption is that if the organization is to become more effective in helping all students learn, the adults in the organization must also be continually learning. Therefore, structures are created to ensure staff members engage in job-embedded learning as part of their routine work practices.

There is no ambiguity or hedging regarding this commitment to learning. Whereas many schools operate as if their primary purpose is to see to it that children are taught, Professional Learning Communities are dedicated to the idea that their organization exists to ensure that all students learn essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions. All the other characteristics of a PLC flow directly from this seismic shift in assumptions about the purpose of the school.

Andy Hargreaves once wrote: “A professional learning community is an ethos that infuses every single aspect of a school’s operation. When a school becomes a professional learning community, everything in the school looks different than it did before.” We concur, and we also contend that once a staff truly embraces the premise that the very reason the school exists is to ensure high levels of learning for all students, decisions about what must be done (and equally important, what must no longer be done) become more clear.

For more information on “What is a PLC,” go to Rick’s seminal article on the topic published by Educational Leadership at: “What is a PLC?”