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.

What are the costs and benefits to teachers as they learn within PLC’s? Chad Dumas, the author of Let’s Put the C back in PLCs, answers this question and highlights how teachers can assess the effectiveness of their current PLC process along with strategies to improve its effectiveness.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

What might a coach consider as she plans to introduce a PLC mindset to a middle school staff? Listen in as this coach shares her questions and wonderings. Steve provides his thoughts, experiences and recommendations as she proceeds with her preparations.

Visit the “hot topics” section of Steve’s blog here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Zachary Herrmann published an article in ASCD’s EL titled, Cooperate or Collaborate, that made connections for me in my work with Professional Learning Communities vs Professional Working Communities and Teams vs Franchises. I’ve been defining these as:

• PWC – Professional Working Community –teachers collaborating to get work done.
• PLC – Professional Learning Community- teachers collaborating to learn how to get a student learning outcome they are not getting now.
• Franchise – teachers meeting and working together to design things that they implement in their classrooms independently.
• Team – teachers taking shared responsibility for the success of all students across their various classrooms.

My experience is that many of the groups being called PLCs, are really PWCs and that most of the groups labeled as teams are at best well-functioning franchises.

Herrmann differentiates between cooperative teams and collaborative teams.

Cooperative teams are those that aim to achieve goals more efficiently and effectively, while collaborative teams explore and solve problems that individuals alone cannot.

That matched my thinking regarding the difference between PWCs and PLCs. The PWC is asking, “What is the best way for us to get this done?” The PLC is asking, “What do the students need us to learn?” The PLC focus is on getting a different outcome in student achievement than what we have now. Thus, we need to learn something; that is the purpose for our collaboration. Some groups I work with have identified they have the need for both PWCs and PLCs. I have suggested that they identify PWC and PLC sections in the agenda for their meetings, as the two activities require different member behaviors. It’s important to know in which activity one is engaged. I worked with a school that had a room for PLC meetings that had an oval table with white boards on each end of the room. They handled their PWC agenda on one wall and then switched for PLC. Physically turning signaled the time to shift membership behaviors.

Herrmann pointed out that cooperative teams are most common in schools. Teachers share resources, coordinate joint efforts, work to improve processes, and build standardization and quality. That fits my description of the franchise. Plan and design together but implement individually. Cooperation can be important in having teachers agree on what “mastering a standard” means. For 8^th grade science teachers from two different middle schools to identify that students entering high school have mastered a standard takes substantial cooperation.

However, there is often no understanding of what is occurring in each other’s classrooms as a common plan is implemented. I had an opportunity to observe three fifth grade teachers each conduct a science lesson that they had designed at a grade level meeting. All the students completed the same “group activity.”  One teacher’s questioning and probing of the groups throughout the activity generated a much deeper level of engaged thinking and richer student learning as shown in the products produced. When the teachers debriefed the lesson, this difference in outcomes was identified as stronger or more interested students.

Herrmann stated, “While teachers who share resources may benefit from each other’s work, simply sharing lesson plans and materials likely won’t help teachers delve into issues like what sorts of learning experiences will engage the students they are most struggling to reach or gain ideas on how to build stronger relationships with their students. These questions require deeper inquiry and more extensive problem solving. Such questions are ripe for collaborative teams.” He adds that collaborative teams utilize the experiences, perspectives, ideas, and insights of its team members to explore what’s really going on beneath the surface and work together to create new approaches.

That’s the reason I see it as a necessity to have student work consistently present at collaborative PLC meetings. It’s also a strong indicator of the value of PLC members observing student learning production behaviors in each other’s classrooms. These concrete elements of “what is happening” will lead to greater insights and discoveries of enhanced ways to generate the desired learning outcomes.

Reading Herrmann’s thoughts I am thinking that some of the dissatisfaction within PLCs could be the lack of clarity in when members are cooperating and when they are collaborating:

• Cooperative teams make concessions or attempt to reach quick compromises to resolve conflict and keep the work moving.
• Collaborative teams value conflict; differences fuel the team’s collaborative efforts. Solving complex problems requires learning, and we stand to learn the most from those who are different than us.

Consider reading Herrmann’s article at a PLC meeting and after a short discussion labeling some elements in the agenda as topics for cooperation or collaboration.

The brain works in a natural process of finding patterns within complexity.  If you think about young children, living in very complex adult worlds, their brains find patterns that they bring into learning. One of my favorite examples is when you hear a young child say, “I ‘goed’ outside”. You realize that, hopefully, the child isn’t repeating a word that they’ve heard someone at home use.

When a child says, “I ‘goed’ outside”, the child’s brain has identified that ‘ed‘ sound as communicating a past tense. Having not received any instruction on letters yet, not alone any instruction on past, present, and future tense, the child has figured out a pattern and is now applying it to actually create a word that the child has never heard before. It’s actually a form of creativity. I’m awed when I stop to think about the quality of learning that the young brain is designed to do.

This process is often flipped when the child starts school. We break learning elements down into their most simplistic form and try to build from that simple form to the more complex understanding. It’s part of why I’ve struggled with writing a lesson plan where a learning outcome is sought within a class period.

If I’m starting a class and students don’t know something and within 45 minutes the students are going to learn it, I have to reduce learning to the simplest elements.  I’ve always encouraged teachers to look much broader at a timeframe for learning so that the activities in class today aren’t looking for an immediate outcome at the end of today’s lesson. Instead, engaging students in the learning production behaviors that will lead to an understanding further in the future.

I had a great example shared with me by a band director who introduced a new, complex, difficult piece of music by passing it out and saying, “Let’s take it from the top.”  Within a few moments some band members are laughing, some are crying, many have put down their instruments. The students now understand the complexity of what they will work to achieve. The band director called it an “orchestrated train wreck.”

Having understood that complexity, you can back up and look at an individual measure of music or a note sequence and practice that in isolation. Then, put it back into the whole piece of music. I ponder what it would be like if the band director took the approach that most of our math textbooks take to instruction.  Picture students walking into band practice and on their music stands would be two notes, “di da”. They’d practice it, “di da”. They’d be told by the band director, ” Practice tonight. Come back tomorrow and we’ll add another note, di da da. Trust me, by Christmas time you’ll find there’s a song here.” I think too often that’s what we’re asking kids to do; believe that all these little pieces eventually add up to something interesting.

Imagine a student walked into middle school PE class and the teacher showed her a basketball and said, “This year we’re going to learn how to dribble. Next year we’re going to learn how to pass, and in eighth grade, we’re going to learn how to shoot. When you get to high school, you will be playing a game.” We’d never be able to keep kids engaged. I think way too often that’s the engagement task the curriculum is handing to teachers.

“Part of what makes us human is the need for our brains to search for meaning. Educators should understand this fact and create learning opportunities that honor this reality. Students who are given complex patterns to discover and interpret send their brains on this important search for meaning. At the same time, students are building the connections so vital to higher learning and critical-thinking skills.”
Patterns, the Brain, and Learning
   – Robert C. Barkman

Sometimes standards, and almost always textbooks, work from simple-detailed elements that eventually lead to something more complex. If teachers look ahead at that more complex issues, they can begin instruction there and plan backwards to the detailed elements being mastered.

If my students are going to be assessed on a standard that I as a teacher decide is rather simplistic, I might decide to teach substantially above the standard. I don’t have to assess at that higher level but I’m going to instruct at that higher level as a better way of having my students meet the standard that’s required.

A professional learning community of first-grade teachers was exploring a standard for telling time to the hour and the half hour. The usual approach would be for the teacher to do some modeling and explaining and then provide students with manipulative clocks and worksheets to practice identifying the time or given the time, draw the hands on the clock to illustrate it.

What if that unit started instead with students discussing and exploring the concept of 24 hours making a day? What if a video camera recorded a whole day of a clock and students watched with speeded time? What if students were engaged in conversations about:

• Why is the time of day when I call Grammy different than the time here where I’m living?
• What if Daylight Savings Time was explored?
• What if we spent some time looking at airline schedules in Europe and noticed that there is no two o’clock in the afternoon listed on the airline schedule; why is it that they would call it 1400?

While teachers explored that depth, they’re using clocks that the students are manipulating and clocks for teacher’s modeling. Clocks with the hour and half hour are part of the discussions rather than the specific standard being taught. Eventually, in this process, students would reach understanding and be able to work with clocks and put the time on paper, like the way it will be assessed.

Complexity in learning opportunities increases engagement and the quality of learning, adding greater joy for the teacher.

How do we get teachers to be more open to observing in each other’s classrooms and discussing their thoughts and ideas with each other to create increased teacher learning leading to greater student achievement? Many school leadership teams need to explore strategies that decrease teachers’ reluctance to making teaching more public and teachers’ discussions more vulnerable. Here are three strategies for some entry points to new experiences: technical coaching, observing student behaviors, and studying student work.

Technical Coaching:

Technical coaching is connected to observing and providing feedback on a specific skill that a teacher is consciously practicing. These observations are often experienced as less threatening as the teacher knows the focus of the observer and the type of feedback she will be receiving. The observing peer feels comfortable in that technical feedback can be very concrete and specific, minimizing any sense of judgement.

A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is examining how teachers might increase student engagement by avoiding having students raise hands and thus communicating an expectation that all students should  be developing a response to every teacher question. They set up observations in each other’s classrooms recording teachers’ use of alternative strategies and noting students’ responses. Their observations generate PLC discussions to continue shaping student learning behaviors.

Teachers looking to increase student perseverance and willingness to grapple with problems could observe each other and record how the teacher responds to students’ questions or requests for help. Key in technical coaching is to record the actual phrases the teacher uses. Then, sharing those in a post observation conference, the teacher can assess effectiveness of responses and create alternatives. This may lead to a follow up coaching session where the new alternatives are implemented.

When suggesting technical coaching, I’m often asked, “Won’t the presence of the observer impact the teacher behavior?” The answer is, “Yes!”. And that’s the good news. The coaching creates conscious practice. Without the observer present the teacher may have strayed from the strategy as the lesson progressed or as issues arose, missing the conscious practice opportunity. Conscious practice is needed for teachers to internalize a new instructional strategy.

(Bruce Joyce/ Beverly Showers)

“Training consists of four main components: developing knowledge, through exploring theory to understand the concepts behind a skill or strategy; the demonstration or modelling of skill; the practice of skill and peer coaching.”

Observing Student Behavior

Frequent readers of this blog know that I have often written about creating opportunities for teachers to observe student behaviors in other classrooms to develop a clear picture of “what student behaviors/actions are needed to gain the student achievement they seek”.

I have found that teachers are often more comfortable starting their observations in colleagues’ classrooms focusing on “what students are doing”. Teachers often report going back to their own classrooms and “seeing” things that they noticed in colleagues’ classrooms.

Observing what students are doing can provide data for a discussion about changes we as teachers need to make. An elementary school is concerned with low performance of their students on the state science test (5th grade is the first year that science is tested). The leadership team decided to ask that for a three-week period, teachers share when they would be teaching science. Then everyone on staff would agree to do three or four observations of 15 minutes in science classes and record what they saw students doing. Then at a faculty meeting they would share and post their observations (without naming where the observations occurred). Now the faculty is ready for a discussion, “What changes in what students are doing or experiencing are needed to gain the student achievement we seek? What changes would teachers make to get those changes in what students are doing?”.

A PLC focused on at risk freshman might begin their study by observing those at-risk students in each of their classrooms and recording student learning behaviors in each class.

Studying Student Work:

Without even entering each other’s classrooms teachers can get a peek behind the door by looking at the work that students do there. When we look at student work, we are seeing teachers’ assignments. If we are looking at student work with teacher grades or comments, we are seeing teachers’ expectations.

When teachers tell me they can’t spare any of their planning time to observe in a colleague’s classroom because they have student work to grade, I suggest that they spend the planning period grading work, at least sitting next to a colleague or better yet, let’s grade mine first, then yours….Doors are opening and colleagues are getting a peek.

Here’s a strategy for later in the school the year. Have students produce a written assignment and give it to a next grade level teacher to comment on how it might be improved. No grade, just comments on strengths and how to improve. Then, working with this year’s teacher, students learn, practice and redo the task. In a few weeks they submit it again to next year’s teacher who returns with another set of comments on strengths and how to improve. Following a repeat of the process, the student work is returned with a grade that serves as their first grade in next year’s class. The writing is given to next year’s teacher as a starting point for the coming year. This process has teachers communicating between  grade levels…seeing into each other’s classrooms. “What are expectations?” “What are students learning?” “How are students doing?”

Principals, coaches, department leaders, and teacher leaders can promote strategies like these to increase teacher vulnerability, trust, and growth to gain increased student achievement.