Two authors of Learning by Doing (Fourth Edition), Mike Mattos and Anthony Muhammad, discuss the powerful impact of PLCs. They define a PLC as an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. The discussion explores shifts in the fundamental purpose of PLCs, the use of assessment, responses when students don’t learn, teachers’ work, focus, school culture, and professional development. It offers an insightful dialogue.
Contact Anthony: newfrontier21@comcast.net
Contact Mike: mikemattos@me.com
Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.610] – Steve
Professional Professional Learning Communities at Work. Those of you who follow this podcast and have practiced and learned with me over the years know how strongly I believe in the impact of teachers working on teams and high functioning PLCs. I started my teaching career in that climate of teacher collaboration and teamwork before the phrase PLC was in the education of language. Much of my career has been built around promoting the practices that build collective teacher efficacy. I’m delighted today to have two authors of “Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities – Fourth Edition,” join me on this podcast. They both have extensive backgrounds guiding stakeholders in building PLCs that maximize student success and have been recognized for their accomplishments and student success during their school-based careers and for their contributions to the development of educators globally.
[00:01:32.590] – Steve
Mike Mattos has been a distinguished elementary and middle school principal who has focused on team approaches with schools implementing RTI and PLC processes. Dr. Anthony Muhammad has a background of 20 years as a middle school teacher, administrator, and high school principal. He’s an Associate Professor of School Culture and Leadership at the Academia University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. Welcome, gentlemen.
[00:02:05.040] – Anthony
Good morning.
[00:02:06.910] – Steve
So early on in the book, you address the ongoing difficulty of having clarity in what is a PLC. Mike, I’m wondering if you might kick us off with, how do you go about answering that question?
[00:02:22.090] – Mike
I’ll start by giving a bit of clarification on what it isn’t that we hear a lot, and that is a lot of people, when they would term PLC, they reference it as a collaborative teacher team. But in the PLC at work process, the process first created by Dr. Rick DeForge, Dr. Bob Aker, they consider the larger organization being the professional learning community. If a school commit to the process, the school is the PLC. If a district commit to the process, the district is the PLC. We think that’s an important clarification because the ultimate goal of a professional learning community is to ensure high levels of learning for all students that that school or district serves, as well as the adults that serve within it. If you think about what it would take to ensure to make certain that every student learns at the highest levels needed to succeed next year and ultimately leave with the skills and knowledge and behaviors academically needed for success in their adult life, then a collaborative teacher a second-grade team in an elementary school, a math department in a middle school, a science department in a high school, they can’t alone meet the learning needs of all kids.
[00:03:40.360] – Mike
It would take the collective efforts. I like how you captured it so well in your intro there. And that is, it’s through our collective knowledge and skills, the diversity of expertise and experience that that larger organization has that would take to achieve that mission of high levels of learning for all. To officially think about how we define a PLC, we would talk about this way. It’s a never-ending process in which teachers work collaboratively to commit to collective increase building shared knowledge of best practice, both through research and through field study, and action experimentation, applying what they’ve learned on behalf of their students to achieve higher levels of learning. So it’s about job-embedded adult learning with an assumption that the better the adults in the building do their job, the more kids are going to learn. One last point here. I think sometimes as educators, we make ourselves into a victim mindset. We look at the factors outside of a child’s school life that we can’t directly control. Economics at home, parental involvement, sometimes educational regulations that come from above us that are not always aligned to best practice. And we use those as reasons why kids don’t learn.
[00:05:12.940] – Mike
Instead of looking internally, thinking about what we can control and what can we have a lot of influence on – pedagogy, instruction, curriculum, assessment, interventions. And those are the things that have the greatest impact upon student learning. So the better our adults get at what they do and not hoping PD happens at a conference now and then or a couple of PD days within the school year, but embedding that collective inquiry every single week as part of our professional responsibilities. That’s our best hope to improving student achievement.
[00:05:51.500] – Steve
Anthony, anything you’d plug in, add on there, another piece?
[00:05:56.570] – Anthony
The only thing I would add is I think Mike did a great job encapsulating what we mean by a PLC at work, is that the P in the PLC stands for professional. And a professional is not just one who goes through a rite of passage or some course of study to enter the field, but who is expected to continue to evolve with the evolving knowledge base in the field. It’s the assumption that a research-based profession continues to grow. And when teachers get a chance to learn, experiment, and grow, that their professionalism their effectiveness improves. And this is a huge culture shift from the tradition in American education that once I become licensed, my responsibility is to teach. Well, you become better at teaching when you become a learner. If teams in schools could make that shift alone, we’d see great dividends when it comes to improving student comprehension and student learning and outcomes.
[00:06:56.570] – Steve
I want to check. There’s a phrase I use in my work, and because of the expertise of both of you, I’d like to check my phrase with you. There’s a phrase I frequently use is that when teachers meet in a PLC, the driving question for them to work from is, “what do the students need us to learn?”
[00:07:23.210] – Anthony
Absolutely. And if learning is the focus, and they need to understand what students need to learn, then in turn, naturally, they would ask, what does it require from us as professional practitioners to get them there? Do we need to address more tactile and kinesthetic activities because the boys are struggling? Do we need to consult with a special Ed teacher because our students with IEPs need a little bit more support. That question will drive teachers into what learning they need to improve upon or that they need some support with to improve their practice. I would definitely say that that aligns with the PLC work process. I think that’s a great phrase or caveat for a team to operate from.
[00:08:08.040] – Steve
You have your book laid out by looking at seven cultural shifts that need to occur in professional learning communities. I thought we could take each of the seven shifts as a way of getting an overview here for folks. So the first one that’s identified is a shift in fundamental purpose. Anthony, you want to kick us off there?
[00:08:36.050] – Anthony
Absolutely. That intellectual analysis is really what initially attracted me to the process. I came into the field as an activist. I saw education as the outlet of my life service, particularly for those who are underserved. I knew that the old paradigm of you get what you receive. If the students come attentive, if they have home support, then congratulations. If not, then you’re out of luck because we really don’t make a difference. I just knew innately that schools were meant to be better than that. So this initial shift is what really attracted me to the process because I’ve been looking my whole career for a way to really boost the effectiveness of the institution on students. So the first shift, the fundamental shift, and I love the elegant simplicity that Dr. Robert Aker and Dr. Rick DeFore laid out this process. The first shift is a shift from focus on teaching to focus on learning. Now, that doesn’t mean we devalue the process of teaching. Teaching is absolutely essential, and we honor the work of people like Bob Marzano and others who have contributed so much to the art and science of the craft of teaching.
[00:09:52.450] – Anthony
But teaching is the means to an end. And what I heard Rick DeFore say the first time I heard him is that our job doesn’t stop when we teach. Teaching is a means to an end, it’s a process. But we know that our teaching is impactful when there’s evidence of student learning and that we collaborate not just on the correlation to what the research says about learning or teaching, we collaborate on, do we have evidence that our students have learned? So what makes good practice? Good practice is justified when students actually meet the expectation of learning. And the second shift is, if we realize that our focus is on the outcome and that the process is negotiable, and that’s a part of our collaboration. The second shift is we can’t do it alone. As Mike so eloquently said, even if you’re the greatest teacher that was ever created, no one teacher can be everything to every student by his or herself. So becoming collaborative is not just this cute little fad. Collaboration becomes essential in ensuring that students learn because, one, we blend together all of our capacity. We learn from each other. But as Mike will attest to in his expertise in RTI at work, is that even when it comes to giving students extra time and support or even extending them, no one teacher can do that by his or herself.
[00:11:24.310] – Anthony
So the things that actually lend themselves to improving student learning, we’re going to learn learn and grow together. But the key, we can’t do it alone. And that student learning drives what we do. And that is, Steve, a huge share for schools. The old adage of, I taught it and they didn’t get it, was always good enough for years. And I just want to share a resource I’ve been digging back into. It was written by one of my former Michigan State professors, Dr. Phil Cusick. It’s called, “The Education System, His Nature and Logic.” Where Dr. Cusick really gets into what was the purpose of developing a public school system and why was it so important? I think we need to go back to fundamental questions like that. And another book, I’m not trying to be Amazon today, but I’ve been into It’s called, “The Death of the Public School System.” And this book argues that mixing agendas, like social agendas and political agendas, have undermined the school’s fundamental purpose. And it’s become so politicized that schools have really forgotten and lost their way on their purpose, which is creating better citizens through addressing the needs of students, clarifying what those learning outcomes are, experimenting with practice, learning what’s worked, and having evidence that when kids leave us to go from grade 4 to grade 5 or grade 6 to grade 7, they have the skills, competencies, and dispositions to be successful.
[00:12:58.380] – Anthony
That’s a really complex I love how Rick DeFore and Bob Anker, our mentors, laid it out in an elegantly simplistic way. There’s a shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning, and a shift from individuality to a shift where we’re working collaborative.
[00:13:16.910] – Steve
Powerful.
[00:13:17.600] – Mike
If you extend this then, that means student learning becomes the litmus test of how we determine what’s working and what’s not in our school, in our district. When you commit then to our fundamental purpose is not just to teach, but to have students learn, then we’re willing to examine every practice, every policy, every procedure in our system with this question: is this practice helping more kids learn? Because if so, we should share it, double down on it, and ensure all kids get the benefit of it. But if not, that goes back to your excellent question, Steve, of what drives our collaboration. If we, let’s say, have some grading practices that are actually counterproductive to ensuring all students learning, maybe a traditional 100-point scale or policies like the assignment is due by Thursday, if not to zero, then I won’t accept it now. Then we would say, well, this is stopping some kids from succeeding. And then let’s seek out better grading practices. So what would research say would be grading practices that would increase student achievement, increase student motivation, engagement in their actual learning? And then let’s try those out and see if we see it having that positive impact upon student learning that we seek.
[00:14:53.400] – Mike
So I’ll go back to, sometimes I’ll hear educators say, well, yeah, we are a PLC. We PLC Every Wednesday morning from 7:30 to 8:30, that’s when we PLC. Well, we know that school doesn’t get it. So we try to improve student learning an hour a week, and then the rest of the whole time all week, we’re running our schools like we’re preparing half of our kids to go work on a farm or a factory? I mean, no, no. It’s going to impact us all day, every day, this mindset, this shift from teaching to learning.
[00:15:30.720] – Steve
Well, Mike, I think you set us up for the next shift. Actually, I think the next two go together. I’ll ask you to jump in there. There’s this shift on the use of assessments, and then connected to that, the shift in what’s our response when students don’t learn. You want to walk us through those two?
[00:15:50.310] – Mike
Yeah, let me jump in. I love the way you link those two. If our fundamental purpose is student learning in the PLC work process, there four critical questions that drive our collaboration. These aren’t the only topics that we would ever study together in our collaborative time. But these are four non-negotiable topics because they directly link to student learning. First question is, what do we expect kids to learn? What are those outcomes we want every kid to gain, grade by grade, course by course? Because how can we collaborate to ensure kids learn if we don’t have clarity amongst teachers who teach that course or grade on what those learning outcomes are? But the second question then is the assessment question. How do we know kids have learned it? Because we can’t hope kids learn. And if we let high stakes tests at the end of the year be our determining factor of kids learn, those assessments aren’t perfect. They aren’t always aligned to what we deem essential. And even if they were, the school year is done. So there’s no real time for us to help the kids who haven’t learned it yet. So we would like to have a timely process built around formative assessment.
[00:17:00.900] – Mike
So we’re not just judging kids, ranking them, moving on, but catching kids early, catching kids often to be able to, one, determine which kids will need extra time and support. That’s the intervention part. But equally important, in a professional learning community, we use assessments to validate our practices, both individually and collectively. How do we know the impact? Or as Hattie says, “know thy impact.” How do we know if our practices are getting the results that we are looking for? Well, if we set our mission as learning and we’ll judge things by actual student learning, then shouldn’t we be collecting evidence of student learning frequently on the things we deem most important? Because that’s giving us, individually as teachers and collectively as teacher teams and as a system, which of our practices are increasing student achievement, which of them might not, that we might want to then reconsider study and seek out better practices. That would then prepare a school, a district, for the intervention question. We know all kids don’t learn the same way, same speed, enter a school year with the same prior skills and knowledge, have mastered all the behaviors it might take to succeed in our system.
[00:18:22.420] – Mike
And some kids, sadly, come from home lives that actually might be counterproductive to student achievement, let alone helping their child succeed. So if we’re committed as educators to ensuring that kids learn, we better embed extra time and support into our master schedule. We actually plan ahead to dedicate time within the school week when teachers are already paid to teach, so we won’t be asking more of teachers to be working smarter, not harder. It’s when kids by law must be with us so we can ensure they get that help. And again, it will be a collective effort. So we’re not asking an individual teacher just to get the students in their class to grade level or higher on what we deem essential. It wouldn’t be just a teacher team, the third grade team, the ELA team to get every child there. We would leverage our collective knowledge and skills to support kids, both academically and if they lack key mindsets, dispositions, behaviors, we can address that element elements within the school week also to ensure every child reaches that goal of high levels of learning.
[00:19:38.160] – Steve
It’s a lot there. It sounds like there’s a lot there that administrators have to keep in mind, the schedule, if nothing else. I recall working with a group of administrators. I was talking about teacher collaboration, and someone said out loud, “there’s just no time in the schedule for teachers to collaborate” and I said, man, we got to talk to the people who make up the schedule. They were all the people who were sitting there in the room at the time.
[00:20:11.300] – Anthony
I would say, Steve, that when a person says that they haven’t made that first shift, as you asked me about, from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning, they built their schedule around giving students opportunity to be taught as opposed to creating a structure that ensures that students learn. And leadership is a tremendous part of whether this happens systemically. You can have good teams who transcend unresponsive leadership. But we’ve said for years that it’s nearly impossible systemically to ascend to greatness without the cooperation, the impact, and the vision of a strong leader. When a leader says that, there hasn’t been a paradigm shift.
[00:21:00.210] – Steve
Yeah. Powerful. Powerful. Anthony, you want to jump us into the next two linking them? It’s a shift in the work of teachers and a shift in focus and culture.
[00:21:12.290] – Anthony
Absolutely. Well, Mike did a great job addressing the four critical questions that guide the work of teams. And in my literature, I refer to practices in two different dimensions or realities of an organization, one I call the technical and the technical refers to the non-human components of the system. As you mentioned, Steve, changing the schedule to give teachers collaborative time will be a technical change. Setting up a protocol to allow students multiple tiers of support will be a technical change. Changing a grading practice will be a technical change. And Mike and I joke, Mike is the technical king. He can give you any technical structure you want. His brain works that way. Our PLC framework provides for that technical structure, and it’s great, but what it requires is cultural change. And cultural change is a change in something not quite as tangible. That’s an attitude. That’s a disposition. That’s a theory. That’s a belief. It’s a behavior. And we found for years that changing the culture is much more challenging than changing the structure. So we’ve been doing sold out PLC at work conferences for years, but we can count less than a thousand who’ve really taken it to the next level of really having a great impact on student learning and outcome.
[00:22:48.030] – Anthony
So when you get to the work of teams, the work of the PLC at work teams is not even new practice. When I was a teacher, I always set a target unless you’re going to go up there and talk. I understand before you develop a lesson what I want my students to learn. I always assessed. It was typically summatively, but I assessed, and I helped kids who needed extra time. And I would sometimes extend kids. All we’re saying is, do that together. You’ll learn from one another, you’ll be more effective, and you’ll pull together all of the different expertise among the team. So the technical work of the PLC work process isn’t rocket science. When I sat and I listened for the first time, as I said earlier, I was attracted to the elegant simplicity. My mindset, culturally, was already there. The hardest part that a leader has when it comes to teams is helping them make that paradigm shift and making those technical practices a priority. So in my literature, I refer to the culture of an organization like the soil. It’s the environment and the technical, like the seeds. And we’ve done a great job for 26 years of providing seeds.
[00:24:03.330] – Anthony
The challenge to really scale it up to the next level is to change the culture. So I wrote a book called, “Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap,” and I really wanted to understand why some schools were much more engaged in the process of equity or equitable outcomes than others weren’t. And I wrote about what I call the difference between equity talk and equity walk. And the difference was the culture of that organization. And in most American schools, we were all socialized into what would be defined as a meritocracy. And a meritocracy is a system in which the so-called talented are chosen and are moved ahead based upon our perception of their merit. And what’s been the merit of American school values? Background knowledge, English mastery, the ability to learn faster. So we’ve all been socializing this belief that if I come with background knowledge, I am submissive and compliant, I learn faster, and I don’t pose any behavioral threat, that somehow I deserve greater acknowledgement and greater merit by the system. Well, the work of teams in a PLC at work process requires that you share those assumptions, that it doesn’t make any difference how quickly Steve learns it.
[00:25:30.130] – Anthony
Our focus is we are fixated on the fact that Steve learns it, and we’re going to ensure that by engaging in those four technical questions. Well, if some of us believe that Mike doesn’t deserve extra time and support because Steve learned it quicker, and that’s not fair, and somehow that challenges tradition, now you have a clash of values, and values are an issue of culture. So that shift is much more complex than creating the systems and the practices. It requires that a team in the system at large go through this evolution of their culture in their system and their thinking. And a real PLC team operates in those four questions under a concept called egalitarianism, meaning that we believe that all students are capable, and our job is to figure out what the obstacles are to their capacity. No matter when they get it, this is a group of people on mission that is not controlled by time, background knowledge, English mastery, how much money your parents make, the color of your skin. It’s really some of the best human work that a group of people can do. And Dr. Bob Baker, in the last chapter of this fourth edition, really wrote about the compelling moral dilemma of the PLC at Work process and really the “why” behind what we do.
[00:26:59.390] – Anthony
So it’s bigger than the frame of technical change. That is essential. But the technical change is implemented within the context of a very significant shift in our thinking, our beliefs, our assumptions. It’s really a beautiful transition when you see it. And Mike and I have had a chance to work with some really great schools that have made that transition, and it’s magical. And those practices take on a whole new meaning, and their teams are so engaged. You can play PLC, but to get the result, you have to become one.
[00:27:38.290] – Mike
I think it was nice of you to reference, Steve, our fourth edition of the book, Running by Doing the Best – How to Book of the PLC Award Process. Someone asked, what’s different in the fourth edition compared to the first three? My opinion of that is this, being a co-author of the last two editions, it was being able to add Dr. Muhammad’s expertise, the cultural piece, to frame so much of the technical changes that need to go on, as well as, to be candid, so much of… we have 25 years or more of compelling research on the tenets of the PLC process, now their proven best practice. Anthony says they’re elegant and their common sense than what holds schools and districts back from doing this work and achieving greater and greater results for their students? It’s the adults. And it’s not because we don’t attract the right people to our profession. I am honored to be part of our profession. I can count on one hand the number of educators I ever worked with on site that probably should not have been in the profession, but countless scores of people that work beyond contract hours everyday just because they care about students so much.
[00:29:07.980] – Mike
The catch, though, is change is hard. And what we’re advocating for is Anthony captured so beautifully, the opposite of how schools have run for literally hundreds of years. And so that level of change is going to be difficult. And it’s that cultural foundation of our assumptions and beliefs collectively about why we do what we do that smart leaders leverage research around, too, of how do you lead such change processes. One last point here because you talk about the work of teams. One of the things that I think is powerful about the PLC process is that it honors teachers as experts. I become extremely fearful right now that in the name of improving student learning and improving teaching, that some leaders are settling. Honestly, I think it’s a cop-out. It’s, well, we’re going to buy an instructional program and take away teacher professionalism and instead ask them to follow scripted lessons with program fidelity. And that’s the key. In other words, we can’t trust teachers as professionals to make important critical decisions in pedagogy, in curriculum, in assessment, instruction. No, we want to let some other people that we deem more knowledgeable to script out what teachers do.
[00:30:42.340] – Mike
And then teachers are more like minions, carrying out someone else’s plan. There’s just a very, very, very little research that says, forget its best practice, that it’s good practice at all. Instead, in the PLC process, we would say, okay, teachers, you are professionals. Not one of you have cornered the market on all the practices needed to succeed. We work collaboratively, but empower teachers to make critical decisions on what’s most important within your curriculum and what’s the best way to teach it, best way to assess it, best way to intervene when students don’t learn, best way to extend. But teachers do it collaboratively, and you’re not just sharing opinion. I like to do it this way. I think this works. But what? Use research and actual evidence of student learning to validate if you’re on the right track. I think that is powerful stuff. If you look at the meta-analysis work of Marzano or of Hattie and the power, you said, Steve, early on, of collective efficacy, when we collectively feel this is best practice, it will increase student learning. Powerful, powerful stuff. In the PLC process, Marzano says he knows of no better way to increase teacher efficacy than the PLC at work process.
[00:32:07.580] – Anthony
I’d like to add one more piece, Steve, about culture before we move on. It’s something that’s profound, but I believe it’s simple in its essence, and it’s a question education has to ask themselves because I think we’ve laid out in learning by doing fourth edition, a pretty common sense, research-affirmed, airtight case about what schools teams and teachers would do to raise student achievement, improve student learning. But it really comes down to this question I’m asking you to consider, what is your threshold for failure? How many students are enough? When is too much enough? Eric Offer, who was a 20th century philosopher, wrote a book called “The True Believer” in 1951, it was a study of mass movements. He said, movements begin when discontent turns into dissatisfaction. And my observation after 34 years in this profession is that we have discontent around student failure. We don’t like it, but there’s not a mass level of dissatisfaction. That I’ve seen educators look at evidence and see 20, 30% of their students do poorly, and they’re happy. Hey, we’re killing it. And of course, you celebrate gains, but how many students are enough before it triggers a sense of urgency?
[00:33:35.690] – Anthony
As long as they’re acceptable casualties, then teams will alibi away why they don’t need to deeply engage in continuous improvement.
[00:33:44.360] – Steve
That’s powerful. Thank you for plugging that in. Time’s coming to a close here on us, and we got one more shift left that I want to be sure to get in, and that is talking about a shift in professional development you want to jump in there?
[00:34:02.020] – Anthony
Yes. That was something that just a happenstance. As a principal, I walked into, and I’ve coached a lot of the PLC associates and some of the emerging leaders on this concept. When I was a principal in Metro Detroit, and we started this PLC work process over, now, 25 years, 24 years ago, 23 years ago. 65% of my staff were first or second or third year teachers. And they were almost all in the core academics. Most of my veterans were elective teachers, they were band directors, PE teachers. So it was a necessity that have them work together with little experience capacity. It’s just going to share ineffective strategies. So in a book that Mike and I got to cut our teeth on called “The Collaborative Administrator,” I laid out a process that was essential to us, where I put together a leadership team, what we call the guiding coalition. And every summer, my leadership team or guiding coalition would look at a comprehensive set of student learning trends. In literacy, in numeracy, we also added behavior, and that’s something that we haven’t really addressed. We say learning, we don’t just mean state academic standards. Anything that’s essential, we want students to learn, whether it’s resilience, whether it’s cooperative behavior, whether it’s socially acceptable responses to challenges or stress.
[00:35:35.760] – Anthony
Those are social and emotional standards that we can teach students. So we looked at a comprehensive set of data, and then from that data, we would choose our biggest gaps. And then the guiding coalition would lead the process of collective inquiry. We take those targets. We would choose no more than five. Five was our limit. And we would go look for best practice. And we go to Eric and Google Scholar and all the prominent educational research databases and look for best practice, bring it back later that summer and vet the research. We put our teachers through a PD regimen that was directly correlated with where our students from our trend data show that our students struggled most. And then we transitioned our staff meetings, which were twice a month, into what we call learning centers. We put together these heterogeneous teams that was a mix of new teachers and veterans, core and elective, regular and special Ed. And each team was a microcosm of the diversity of our staff. And they had five study teams. We had 64 teachers, so five study teams. And every study team had a study group leader that was a member of the guiding coalition, was familiar with the literature, who understood the data that we had vetted, and they had readings that we were supposed to engage in and guided study discussion around best practice, around the areas that we struggled most.
[00:37:12.600] – Anthony
Just an example, our data screamed at us across all topics that our boys were doing horrible. So we dug into the work of Pedro Nguera. We dug into the work of Dr. Juanza Konjufu, particularly, African-American boys. My school was 98% African-American. You should have seen the light bulb go off in our teachers’ minds as they were able to interact with some of the best thought leaders in our field around issues they were facing daily. And only did it have an immediate impact on their practice, had an immediate impact on their collaborative teams, because now they’re bringing more capacity together, more hypotheses, more research, more theories. And you really started to see that professional light bulb start to increase its wattage because of the enlightenment of the teachers. So we were able to take it at my former school and actually create a system around it. We didn’t do random, a few of my favorite things, PD. Our PD was always focused on that first PLC big idea, which is a focus on learning. So we look at what are our students learning biggest holes? How do we feed our teachers? Access to the best thought leaders, the best strategies, give them time to vet it, discuss it, and then take it to implementation and experimentation.
[00:38:37.140] – Anthony
So that’s one way that a leader can use the PLC at work process and mentality and culture to really transform their professional development.
[00:38:47.000] – Mike
I think that’s such a powerful example that Dr. Muhammad shared there. I think it’ll take our conversation full circle. We started by saying, what’s a PLC? A professional learning community. Think of the PLC, who’s doing the learning? The professionals. And not random learning and not every now and then PD days, job-embedded staff development every week. And what I love about the PLC process, we form teacher teams, too, you ask most teachers, and they’ll say, God, I hate meetings. No, they hate wasting their time. I would run to a meeting if I knew what I was to leave with actually help me do my job better. It saved me time. When we create teacher teams in the PLC process, these are teachers who share essential learning outcomes for their students. They would be individually planning on how to teach and how to assess and help kids around those outcomes if they were working in a traditional one-room schoolhouse of isolation. But if I could be meeting with colleagues who are grappling with best ways to teach and and support kids around some essential learning outcomes are absolutely critical to a child’s success next year and beyond, and if I was leaving with better tools and ideas on how to do that, then that is so worth my time.
[00:40:15.520] – Mike
That is working smarter, not harder in a time where our profession is hemorrhaging educators because we’re telling them no child left behind, but putting them in archaic structures, never designed to get that outcome. And now those problems are only worse coming off a once in a century global pandemic where we have more academic behavior needs of students than ever before. Some people are saying, I’m done. I can make a better living financially with my level of education doing something else because no matter how hard I work, kids still fail. We can set teachers and kids up to succeed when we set teachers up to have that that job-embedded learning every week directly related to what they were hired to do in the first place. That is truly powerful stuff. That’s a win-win for students and for the educators that serve students.
[00:41:15.950] – Steve
I’m going to say you’re increasing the rewards for teachers of their work. That’s critical. Well, gentlemen, this has been just an awesome opportunity for me. If If the listeners gain half from this, what I gain from it, they’re going to be applauding loud and clear. How can the listeners easiest connect with the two of you to follow up with questions that they might have?
[00:41:48.070] – Anthony
I’m on X, or Twitter, whatever it’s being called now, @NewFrontier21 and also on Facebook under Dr. Anthony Muhammad. But you can I can also reach out to me, and I believe Mike has the same access through our publisher, solutiontree.com. That’s where all of our resources are housed. But those two social media platforms are the ones I use most. Also LinkedIn under Dr. Anthony Muhammad. I haven’t done Instagram or TikTok yet, so forgive me.
[00:42:24.590] – Mike
In my case, it can be reached on X, so It’s @MikeMattos65, as Anthony said, through SolutionTree, which we’re not employees of SolutionTree, but they’ve published all of our works. We have a very close working relationship with them. People are free to email me at mikemattos@me.com. Steve, I cannot tell you how much we appreciate what an advocate you’ve been of teachers and of teacher collaboration for a long time. And truly, we both feel honored being part of your excellent podcast. But even more importantly, because an episode is cool, and we’re going to contribute to what you do for teachers, but your long-standing advocacy for teachers and for collaboration. Before, it had a name. As you said, thank you so much. Thank you.
[00:43:30.600] – Steve
Thank you both. You guys have a great day.
[00:43:32.110] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
During coaching conversations, PLC meetings, professional learning, data reviews, and school improvement planning, the questions often become fewer. Conversations move quickly toward conclusions. Teams feel successful when they reach agreement, even if they haven’t fully explored the possibilities. Rather than lingering in uncertainty, we often rush to eliminate it.
