Dear Department Heads and Administrators of Mid-Town
High School,
It was a pleasure to spend the day meeting with you
and hearing your visions for the future of your school and district. I think there are many ways in which
Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) could help make your visions for your
district a reality. Below I will
summarize some of the key points from our conversations and ways a partnership
could take Mid-Town High School into the future.
Culture Change
One of the most significant things that will happen
in a PLC school is a culture change.
Through the PLC model a community of collaboration is born. As we spoke about yesterday the climate at
Mid-Town is one of teacher isolation.
Teachers of same subjects all teach in isolation. They do not come together to share ideas,
discuss teaching content or process or analyze data. The research shows that when teacher
isolation is the norm, pedagogy is based on the “transmission of knowledge” and
“lower teacher expectations of student achievement”. The greatest gains in student achievement are
seen in districts with strong PLC’s.
Districts that center on teacher learning connected to student learning
have a “common vision that all students are capable of increased
achievement”. As I shared yesterday my
own experiences are ones of profound culture change. When I was teaching science and we began our
PLC journey all the science teachers very much taught in isolation. We began first by developing norms and
protocols for team meetings. We also
decided that we would focus our meetings on the 4 essential questions for a PLC.
1) What is it we want all kids to know?
2) How will we know if they learned it?
3) What will we do if they don’t know it
4) What will we do if they already know it?
As a Science Department if we kept the focus of our
team meetings on these 4 essential questions we were centered on student
learning and achievement. Once the norms,
protocols and goals of a community are established the community will then need
to build the capacity to be able to trust and share.
Capacity
Building trust is essential, as this builds the
capacity for honest conversations. When
we discussed the book Teachers in
Professional Communities one of the key points was the idea between congenial
and collegial cultures. When a district
first begins adapting a PLC culture the climate will be congenial. The relationships will be “amiable and
compatible” and free from risk taking and conflict. On the surface this will look good. Everyone is getting along, everyone agrees
and there will be sense that PLC work is easy.
But in the congenial culture teachers are comfortable “sharing stories,
making reassurances, and placing blame on outside forces” but at this point no
real work is being done. The deep issues
of content, process and pedagogy are not being addressed. Everyone is walking a fine line because no
one wants to cross that line and create conflict or controversy. Once a trust is established within the
community the group can become collegial.
This will look vastly different than any other school culture. Collegial culture will “provide a forum for
reflection and honest feedback, for challenge and disagreement, and for
accepting responsibility without assigning blame”. As a community of Biology teachers we began
as a congenial group. Placed blame on
the middle school for not preparing students properly, everyone always got
along, everyone always agreed on content and life was good. So for a while things were wonderful but
student achievement was stagnant. As we
spent more time together talking about our students and classrooms a trust was
established and with achievement still stagnant things within our community were
going to have to change. As a community
we believed that all students were capable of achieving at high levels but to
analyze why some weren’t on a deeper level was going to require conflict. In our situation there was one teacher with consistently
lower student scores and we were going to need to analyze why that was and what
she could be doing different. We began a
process of each teacher bringing one piece of student work to our meetings so
that we could compare how we were grading this work, expectations that we were
presenting and how we were teaching that concept. We also began by each bringing one idea for
each unit to our meetings and selecting the ones that we thought would be most
effective. We also began writing all
assessments during our PLC time as a team.
Prior to this one teacher would write the assessment for the unit and we
would all use it. One teacher would
establish the assignments and projects for a unit and we would all tweak them
to our classrooms or styles. We were now
“working together to develop practices that served all students well” and
students achievement was increased. When
we first began our PLC journey many teachers viewed it as a way to “lighten the
load”. We could share work, divide up
tasks and this would result in less work for everyone, which it did – but this
was not the point of PLC. We were not
connecting teaching to learning and student achievement did not increase. It took time for our PLC to evolve and raise
achievement. Eventually we became a
community that gathered data, pursued new knowledge and ideas and saw classroom
challenges as fuel for community discussion and team problem solving.
Challenges – Fault Lines
Once you have begun to establish a more collegial
culture within your communities and school you can begin to navigate the “fault
lines”. Many teachers want their
classrooms to remain private. Remaining
private “protects against exposure and censure in cultures that have not
developed forums for honest talk”. That
is why it is key to develop a collegial culture. Many teachers will shy away from the PLC
process because they want to hold onto control.
Teachers will feel like sharing their ideas, assessments, data and
pedagogy will cause them to lose control of what is theirs. When a teacher open ups their classroom to
the public for “critique and collaboration” they are demonstrating great bravery. Communities will need to also develop a
balance between the process of and subject specific content and process. It is easy to get caught up in either the process
or content and most often it is content without really discussing the process
that wins out. There has to be a balance
between the content and the process used to teach it. Sharing content can be very easy and
communities will gravitate toward that but actual process sharing is more
difficult. When communities share
process they are opening those classroom doors and looking at how each individual
teacher is teaching, this can be scary and will require that strong capacity
building. One example form my Biology
team was when we gave students a sample test essay question and had students
respond. Our community of Biology
teachers then brought those answers together, mixed them up and began
evaluating them. Through this process we could see students’ misconceptions but
also how different teachers were using different terminology. We also graded them as a group. This opened up discussion about how we were
interpreting the grading rubric. I
recently worked with a group of general science teachers on a chemistry unit
about balancing equations. Each teacher
brought samples of student work to class, some correct and some incorrect. The teacher community reviewed the examples
and why students were making those mistakes.
Each teacher also reviewed how they were teaching balancing
equations. There was one teacher who was
using a different process that led the community to discuss what was best
practice for teaching the content. There
is a feeling sometimes among administrators that professional development has
to be done from an outside source because “the best practices are out there, in
professional learning communities this belief is replaced by the conviction
that the best practices are in here”.
Schools just need to build communities so those best practices can be
shared. PLC’s offer real professional
development directly related to the teaching and learning take place in your
school and can completely replace the lifeless professional development that
had little impact on teaching and learning.
Administration
As we discussed true teacher learning communities
have to be “horizontal and not vertical” so that administrator involvement is
minimal. Teachers need to develop into
leaders in their communities and with administrator involvement this will not be
possible. As hard as administrators
might try when they attend community meetings they are perceived as being
evaluators, bosses, in charge and intimidating.
For teachers to take charge of their own learning and PLC they need to
be the leaders of their community without interference from
administration. Teachers will emerge as
instructional leaders and take ownership of their community which will make it
more successful.
As we discussed yesterday I believe that subject alike
PLC teams with meeting time built into the school day will be most
effective. This will take some creative
and outside the box thinking about scheduling but it can be done. This may involve a lot of hand
scheduling. Most computer scheduling
programs being used today don’t account for teacher communities so administration
and guidance will have to be prepared to roll up their sleeves and get dirty
creating a schedule that allows for teacher communities.
Your PLC Future
Mid-Town schools are good but you want them to be
great! As we discussed yesterday you are
concerned about static student achievement scores and teachers who teach the
same subjects but seem to not be aligned with content, process and
assessment. I believe your first step is
to develop subject-alike PLC teams that weekly.
After the teacher community process takes hold you may be able to
develop students into smaller learning communities and teacher cross-curricular
learning communities. Developing teaching
communities will be a major step in changing the culture or your district and
holds a “promise of transforming teaching and learning for both educators and
students”. It was a pleasure meeting
with all of you and I look forward to working with the Mid-Town High School in
the future.
Warmest Regards,
Melissa Hocking
PLC Education Consultant
Resources:
Ann Lieberman & Lynne Miller. (2008). Teachers in Professional Communities:
Improving Teaching and Learning. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker & Rebecca DuFour. (2008). Revisiting Professional Learning Communities
at Work: New Insights for Improving Schools. Solution Tree.
