Two Days to a More Collaborative Culture

Jodi A. Lamb

Students learn a new concept best when they have a chance to use it. The same applies to teachers, and we can use this insight to invite more teacher collaboration and buy-in for teacher evaluation criteria. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act last December, teacher evaluations no longer need to include student outcomes, so many school evaluation systems are going through big changes, and leaders are looking for ways to increase teacher confidence and fluency with new systems while building a collaborative community that supports inquiry and data-driven instructional change. At my school, we used peer reviews as a way to unpack new evaluation rubrics, visit other teachers' classrooms, and introduce the practices of lesson study.

To launch peer review at your school, explain how it will help teachers feel more at ease with the new system, and draw parallels to any process of hands-on learning. Next, ask teams of teachers to spend some time reviewing each of the indicators and the associated scoring rubric on teacher evaluation forms. Then, schedule times for each team to visit a few classrooms and look for evidence of the different teaching indicators. As an elementary principal, I divided my faculty into four teams on two levels—two intermediate and two primary—and asked them to visit classrooms taught by the opposite team and at the opposite level. I gave each team a half day for this work. Once each classroom visit was completed, we returned to the conference room to debrief.

The real learning happened during the debriefing session. First, teachers compared the practices demonstrated in the classrooms to the observation indicators and the rubric. As teachers discussed, they created a chart of pluses and deltas for each teacher they visited. The pluses were the practices that provided solid evidence of an indicator, and the deltas were items the observing teachers either wondered about or had suggestions for improvement. Again, these items were all linked to indicators of effectiveness from the evaluation criteria. Teachers who hosted the classroom visits received the charts for their private reflection.

To maintain the integrity of the evaluation system, I worked with each team in the exact same way—as tour guide on classroom visits. Before visits, I'd review the evaluation indicators and rubrics, but took no pen or paper with me on the actual visits. I did this because I wanted to maintain teacher trust by assuring them these peer reviews would, in no way, count toward their formal observation and evaluation score. I also deliberately formed the teams to increase collaboration among primary- and intermediate-level teachers, and I scheduled the visits so that all the teams completed rounds in two days and substitute teachers would only cover a class for about three hours.

The plan worked more beautifully than I imagined. Not only did I see an increased respect for teachers at other levels, I saw teachers sharing ideas, and a few even started meeting after school to do some collaborative planning on multigrade level projects. A majority of the teachers asked if we could do peer reviews the following year because they felt the process helped them grow so much. As teachers became inured to peer review, I began to notice ways to fine-tune this method, like giving teachers formal structures and practice providing peers with feedback. Fluency in feedback naturally supported teachers in becoming more adept at lesson study. Although the original intent of peer reviews had a narrow focus, the results were far-reaching and very positive. Never did I dream that we could create such a sense of collaboration in just two days!

Jodi A. Lamb is an associate professor of educational leadership at Saint Leo University in Florida.

ASCD Express, Vol. 11, No. 18. Copyright 2016 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.