Typically, teachers work in isolation. They come to school, head to their classrooms, and do what they know best. When they collaborate, it may be to share an idea or lesson plan. In my school, we are aiming to change that.
Northwestern Middle School is located in the suburbs of Atlanta, Ga., with approximately 1,350 students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. We are a high-performing school that has demonstrated improvement in a variety of areas, yet we do not focus on differentiation, rigor, or higher-order thinking. Instead, we create systems and processes to allow for better teacher collaboration. This focus required a change for us. For some schools, it may be a huge change, but transforming your school into a professional learning community (PLC) demands it (DuFour & Eaker, 1998). Here are some of the key changes we made.
Mix It Up, Watch It Gel
Just as we expect teachers to strategically group students for specific purposes, we should also intentionally assign PLC membership. Learn teachers' personalities and try to create high-functioning teams based on that information. As administrators, we continually assess and use every data point (e.g., classroom observations, peer-to-peer interactions, personality profiles such as True Colors or Compass Points) to make decisions on which teacher to move to which PLC. When we noticed recurring conflict because of the mix of personalities in one of our PLCs, for example, we used feedback and observations of the PLC in action to inform our decision to dismantle that PLC and reassign members to teams that reflected a variety of different personalities and experiences.
For some teachers, their job profile segregates them from other teachers. For example, in our school, the advanced teachers taught in isolation because they were the only advanced teacher for that specific subject and grade level. So, we encouraged our on-level teachers to become certified to teach advanced classes. This approach allowed us to have multiple advanced teachers in each subject and grade level, and it meant the majority of our teachers were teaching a mixture of on-level classes and advanced classes. Now teachers could collaborate with their peers, across levels, compare and discuss relevant student data, and help one another improve. Advanced teachers no longer taught in isolation.
The physical environment can be a barrier to collaboration. In our school, we have three main academic hallways (one for each grade). Within each hallway, we moved teachers so that they were close to their PLC (as best we could, given the number of classrooms). Now, all 6th grade language arts teachers are in the same area, 6th grade math teachers are in the same area, and so on.
This arrangement allowed teachers to develop positive relationships through those short conversations between transitions or at the beginning or end of the day. As these relationships greww, our PLCs strengthened—so much so that our PLCs began meeting more than once a week. As neighbors and PLC members, teachers began organizing Monday morning meetings to touch base and Friday morning grading sessions. Some groups even met every day.
A Common Language
PLCs cannot function effectively without common assessments, where both the content and criteria for assessing are the same (DuFour et al., 2010). If teachers use different assessments or use different criteria to assess, how accurately or fairly can they compare data in their PLCs? Administrators should require common assessments that all members of the PLC create collaboratively. It can take time to implement these assessments because it can be a big change for teachers, but it is worth it to ensure everyone is working with identical data.
At our school, entire PLCs worked together to create common on-level and advanced assessments. In addition, each PLC member had to have the same number of grades in their gradebook. The classwork or assignments that make up those grades could differ from teacher to teacher, as long as each child received the same number of gradable experiences. This alignment was important because administrators discovered that some teachers in a PLC were giving 9 or10 grades for an entire reporting period, while others were giving 25. This difference could affect a child’s grade significantly because each assignment would end up being worth more or less in different classrooms. We want every child in our school to have an equitable education; their educational experience should not depend on which teacher they have.
Likewise, each PLC member had to have the same grading policies (for recovery, late work, etc.), which they had to detail on their syllabus, and each PLC distributed one uniform syllabus for each level. This rule meant that each PLC created two syllabi, one for all the on-level classes and one for all the advanced classes.
Our PLCs provided help sessions for students, at a variety of times, throughout the week. Because our teachers are certified in both advanced and on-level education; because each level has a common syllabus, assessments, grading criteria and policies; and because teachers are constantly collaborating with each other; students aren't limited to seeking help from one particular teacher.
Four Core Questions
At our school, the expectation was that PLCs meet on Thursdays for the duration of their planning period. (Although now, four years later, many of our PLCs meet almost daily even if it is for 20 minutes.) Once we communicated expectations regarding the frequency and duration of PLC meetings, then what? What exactly was supposed to occur in those meetings?
We created a simple meeting agenda template for every PLC that features the four questions that are at the heart of all PLCs (DuFour, 2004):
- What do we want students to learn?
- How do we know they learned it?
- What do we do when they don't learn it?
- What do we do when they do learn it?
Anything that cannot be addressed by those questions should not be discussed in that meeting. We gave teachers sample agenda items. For example, if creating lesson plans and unit plans was the goal of that week's PLC meeting, then that would fall under question one on the agenda. Designing common assessments would fall under question two, discussing interventions and strategies for students who are failing or struggling would fall under question three, creating enrichment activities would fall under question four, and so on.
Sometimes, PLCs could accomplish one of the four items from the agenda, and other times they might accomplish two or three. It depended completely on where the PLC was in its development and what they needed to get done. Over time, many of our PLCs began to see the value in meeting more frequently than just the required once a week, which further strengthened the collaborative culture in our school and strengthened the focus on results.Initially, we in the school administration went to every PLC meeting and read all the meeting minutes to closely monitor whether expectations were being met. Over time, the PLC process became so ingrained and organic to our school culture that we decided that we no longer needed to attend every meeting. We trust our PLCs, and our teachers have developed the interdependency to work together to set personal and community goals. Now, we check in with our PLCs just once every quarter to solve persistent challenges.
Our work will always be ongoing, but we are girded by the PLC structures and systems that have allowed our collaborative culture to take root and flourish. Our bottom line is not differentiation or rigor; it's teachers working together to get better and bringing our students along with them.