When defining PLC in a podcast with me, Mike Mattos, one of the authors of Learning By Doing, A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work, suggested that rather than just the group of teacher working together, the larger organization was in fact the professional learning community. If a school commits to the process, the school’s the PLC. If a district commits to the process, the district is the PLC.  The ultimate goal of a professional learning community is to ensure high levels of learning for all students that the school or district serves, as well as the adults that serve within it. If you think about what it would take to ensure that every student learned at the highest levels needed to succeed and ultimately leave with the skills, knowledge and behaviors needed for success in their adult life, then a collaborative teacher team, a second-grade team in an elementary school, a math department in a middle school or, a science department in a high school, can’t alone meet the learning needs of all kids. It would require collective effort.

(Amy  Edmondson)

Much of my work with PLCs includes setting learning goals for students and then collaborating to plan the paths to achieve those learning outcomes. First, the identification of perhaps different goals depending on a student’s starting point. Different learning outcome goals will thus require different student learning production behaviors. Even students with the same identified learning goal may require different learning production behaviors based on their previous learning, motivation, and style preferences. When looking at the start of a school year it is often helpful to engage the previous year’s teacher in setting the learning goals because of her knowledge of the students. As teachers are working on the last quarter push to the year’s end, it can be the perfect time to engage with the next grade level teachers to set goals for the upcoming year.

Consider fourth grade students in April completing a writing task on which fifth grade teachers provide some comments on strengths and recommendations for improvement. The students rework the piece and submit it again. Fifth grade teachers then score the work on the beginning of fifth grade rubric. The 4th and 5th grade teachers now meet and set next year’s writing goals for the new 5th graders. Such shared goals, especially set prior to teachers knowing which students will be in their individual classes, are a great start toward functioning as grade level and vertical teams. A similar process can provide a link for middle school and high school teachers. Writing samples of 8th grade students that receive feedback and are eventually scored by freshman teachers provide great communication between the teachers as to “what’s important”.  Freshman teachers with those students’ results in hand can set goals for incoming students and plan for initial instruction. I could envision freshman teachers at the beginning of the year engaging the students in goal setting as they compare their entering “best work” with required grade nine standards.

I believe this early goal setting is especially critical for students with advanced achievement. Without teachers having focused goals for these students, they can often be overlooked as the teachers’ immediate attention is on the grade level or course standards and then drawn to students who are missing prerequisite skills and knowledge. A teacher beginning the year with goals established for the advanced students will plan for the needed learning opportunities.

A primary school team developed a plan for the end of the year reading assessments, in this case running records, to be conducted by next year’s teachers. On an assigned day, Kindergarten teachers take charge of 5th grade classrooms and all the teachers move to the preceding grade level. So, 2nd grade teachers complete a running record on 1st grade students. Then with those results and input from the 1st grade teachers they set goals for students’ reading achievement next year in 2nd grade. This should prepare teachers to begin the year with instructional plans in place — hitting the ground running. Imagine the value when a new teacher joins the staff and is handed her class list along with goals for each learner. It takes a long time for a teacher new to the system to understand the curriculum and assess students to sufficiently set goals. The new teacher being handed goals that were set by colleagues is more likely to approach those colleagues for support when a student’s initial engagement seems to not align with the goal. Hopefully, teachers begin and persevere with higher expectations.

Bringing teachers together to look at student work and performance, reaching consensus on current achievement and creating target goals builds teams. It encourages a respect for each other and a commitment to ‘do what it takes’ to reach targeted student achievement outcomes — a more than one year process.

Last week’s blog covered some of my thoughts connected with Martin Seligman’s book, Flourish, and connections I made to coaching. I had an opportunity this week to explore another element from Seligman’s work with members of a middle school staff: Chapter 6 in Flourish… Self Control, Character and Grit presents a formula:

Achievement = Skill x Effort which aligns with my formula in Tapping Student Effort

Effort x Ability = Success.  

Seligman spells out how a character of self- disciple is a greater predictor of academic success than is IQ. The ultimate self-discipline character is GRIT… the never-yielding form of self- discipline, an extreme persistence that produces very high effort.

“The more GRIT you have, the more time you spend on the task, and all those hours don’t just add to whatever innate skill you have: they multiply your progress to the goal.” (page 121)

I asked the middle school staff to examine this quote from the work of Angela Lee Duckworth, a student and colleague of Seligman.

“Under achievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes. We suggest another reason for falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline. We believe that many of America’s children have trouble making choices that require them to sacrifice short term pleasure for long- term gain, and that programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement”(Psychological Science 16(2005):939-44)

You can listen to Duckworth’s TED presentation on Grit here.  When looking at the research of 90 /90/ 90 schools (90% poverty, 90% minority and 90% of the students scoring proficient) it strikes me that educator GRIT is a key. I wonder how that educator behavior might generate increased student GRIT.

How does a school look to increase student self -discipline? What kind of self –discipline would create the student achievement that we seek? The middle school group that I was working with is interested in exploring changes that move students from compliance, “What do I have to do to pass, or get an A, or finish?” to students setting goals and practicing identifying and committing to “what it takes to achieve it”.