Resources for Restructuring Schools

 

From my experience in administration and being a teacher, creating a professional community is crucial for effective learning in a restructured system.  One challenge is that ALL teachers need to share responsibility for ALL students.  A professional community must also be committed to fundamental change in teaching practices.  As viewed on this blog site, elements of an effective professional community include reflective dialogue, teachers being open with their practice, collective focus on student learning, collaboration and shared norms and values.

There are structure resources and human or social resources that enhance a community.  Research collected from restructured school systems have shown that human resources such as openness to improvement, trust and respect, teachers being provided knowledge and skills, supportive leadership and socialization can be more critical than structural conditions.

Structural conditions such as time to meet and talk, physical proximity, interdependent teaching roles, communication structures and teacher empowerment are very important and necessary, but if a school doesn’t have social and human resources to use the structural conditions, strong professional conditions can’t develop. Improving culture, climate and interpersonal relationships lead the way to building a necessary foundation for restructuring schools.

We can learn from our students and the culture that we envision to create.  What do we want to model for the students we teach? Students learn in an environment that has mutual respect and trust.  If students are willing to learn and work together in and out of the classroom they will continue to progress.  Teachers provide the students with the tools to learn and the students have leaders throughout the school to guide their achievement.  The restructuring pathway takes dedication and time but if the fundamental resources are in place a successful school system will reap the benefits of a professional learning community.

 

Professional “Doing” Communities (PDCs)

As I visit schools which have requested my assistance with their Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), I am regularly exposed to what I have started calling PDCs – Professional Doing Communities.

PDCs are characterized by subject-specific (in the case of 6 – 12) or grade-specific (in the case of K – 5) teams of teachers who spend coveted common planning time doing any or all of the following:

(1)  deciding the pacing for the next topic to teach – which day will we introduce topic X, which day will we test topic Y, or

(2)  completing some (usually) administration-dictated template for the next week of lessons, or

(3)  sharing – almost always without feedback – various activities (usually from the more veteran teachers) that have worked in years past for some upcoming topic

Paradoxically, despite pinpoint focus on these teaching-related tasks, PDCs almost never talk about teaching and learning.  Not really.  They are so focused on doing – and planning the next doing – that they rarely engage one another in conversations that allow for serious questioning or discussing the why? and the how? of all the what? they talk about.  PDCs are characteristically focused on the what?.

In my work with these teacher teams, they almost always have a deep and obvious care for the kids in their charge.  They want to do right by them.  But for some reason (often explainable by the dictates of cookie-cutter-thinking administrators) these teacher teams seem unempowered to step back from the doing long enough to engage in serious talk about what we as teachers do and how that affects kids’ learning.  Maybe they put a little too much literal stock in DuFour’s Learning By Doing (DuFour, 2006).

I’m not convinced that teachers “learn by doing” so much as they merely “do by doing”, at least when it comes to working in collaborative teams.  Teachers learn when they “construct community knowledge” (Venables, 2011, p. 31).  They learn when they pursue new ideas and new knowledge together, in real time.  This puts the “L” in PLC for me, and it is something that PDCs – however well-intentioned – rarely get to do.  dven.

[Daniel R. Venables is author of The Practice of Authentic PLCs:  A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams (2011, Corwin) and Executive Director of The Center for Authentic PLCs.]

Reform Effort Du Jour

For a profession that is constantly bombarded by a continuous flow of reform initiatives like we are in education it’s amazing to me how slowly our wheel of improvement turns.  Maybe it’s because we’re constantly trying the next reform effort du jour and we never seem to stick to one effort long enough for it to show significant gains in student achievement.  Why are we so ADD about what we focus on?  How can we ever see significant and sustainable progress when we keep changing our minds about what we want to do and where we will put our collective and individual energies?

It’s easy to blame policy makers at state and local levels for this schitzo behavior patterns; but truth be told, I have seen this happen equally at the building level, by nervous school house administrators whose worries about student performance immobilize them from having a clear vision for what to do and how to do it.

It’s no wonder that teachers – particularly veteran teachers – who have weathered so many failed initiatives in their tenure become apathetic to the latest idea embraced by zealous administrators.

Then, when an initiative comes along that does have proven merit to really make differences for kids, like building authentic PLCs in school faculties; it is often met with cynicism, skepticism and resistance by otherwise caring faculties.  This notion is particularly dear to me; I’ve written an entire book on how to do PLCs well (Corwin press, forthcoming in early 2011).

It’s not that teachers don’t want to improve and be more effective.  In my work consulting in schools, I believe nothing could be further from the truth.  It’s that the history in many schools of constantly trying out the latest educational fad in half-hearted, short-lived and unsupported ways have created reasonable doubt that the next idea will work or be around long enough to bother personally investing in it.  The net results is a continuance of the status quo and a deceleration of the wheel of progress – all at the cost of our students’ education and their future opportunities. dven.

[If you are interested, go to corwin.com in January of 2011 to preorder your copy of Daniel Venables’ book, The Practice of Authentic PLCs:  A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams]

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

I have been doing some consulting work lately going to schools and helping them develop and implement effective PLCs within their faculties.  Most schools start with 5 – 10 teacher groups led by a teacher-leader who I train to facilitate the PLCs.  The work is intense and on-going; we establish protocols for examining student and teacher work in an honest way and establish strategies for improving student learning in a way that transcends simple common planning or the “show and tell” presentations that typically accompany team meetings.  We discuss common assessments, student work, and the complexities of facilitating adult learners as well as ways of dealing with difficult dynamics in teacher groups.   We look at strategies for giving and receiving warm and cool feedback.  The growth I have seen in these schools is incredible – especially in schools where the principal is not only supportive of PLCs, but also actively engaged in the process of developing PLCs.

Gone are the days where teachers are expected to work in isolation.  And PLCs – real PLCs, not the multitude of teacher meetings masquerading as PLCs – are the fastest and most effective way I have seen in impacting student learning.  But they don’t just happen because teachers are granted common planning periods.  They happen with intense training of the teacher-leaders who lead these groups and hard work and the realization that PLCs are not so much a thing as they are a catalyst of change in the teacher culture of a school.

If you are involved in an effective PLC, I’d love to hear your story on this blog.  If you are interested in developing real PLCs in your school or district, email me directly at danielvenables@mac.com and I can help you get moving in the right direction.

The research is abundant and clear:  PLCs, when done well, make a difference.  dven.