It's a classic trial-by-fire story: As a freshly minted principal, Deborah Wortham was assigned to one of the worst elementary schools in Baltimore, Md. There were bars on the windows, she recalled, and a sign above the door that read, The School for Coloreds. The school was located in an area of the city renowned for its poverty and crime, all the students were on free and reduced meals, and the student attendance record was the worst in the state. It was at this school that Wortham first realized that "we don't have three to five years" to enact reforms.
Deborah Wortham
What Wortham did have was an instinctive impulse to "rally her teachers" and create a culture of high expectations—for teachers and students alike. She and her staff created a mission statement and began "inspecting what we expected" at regular intervals. They would "constantly talk about what to do when students didn't learn." They benchmarked best practices and learned how to use those strategies in the classroom. In short, Wortham instituted a professional learning community.
It was an approach that worked. After one year, the school gained national recognition for significant improvements in student achievement.
Lessons in Leadership
The experience of turning a school around helped Wortham refine some key ideas about leadership, which she shared during her workshop at the conference. According to Wortham, school leaders interested in establishing professional learning communities should take the following steps:
- Clarify beliefs first. A team can't work together if its members haven't reached consensus on what they believe about learning. If improved student achievement is the goal, she added, then teachers must believe that they can "mobilize available resources to solve problems and promote achievement." Teachers who hold this belief have a sense of efficacy, Wortham explained. These teachers "believe it is their responsibility to see that others learn—and they examine their own performance when others experience failure."
- Hold meaningful faculty meetings. "Our faculty meetings became purely professional development," Wortham stated. School-related information, such as schedule changes, can be disseminated in other ways, she noted—through a daily e-mail or a weekly bulletin, for example.
- Review the data and "be restless" about the pace of improvement, Wortham advised. And spend time in the classroom—let teachers know immediately what is working well and what they need to focus on. "Don't wait until the test to make a change," she instructed. "Act immediately."
Above all, school leaders need to "feed teachers" emotionally and professionally, said Wortham. Celebrate their successes and cultivate their leadership qualities. True leaders reproduce, she observed. True leaders "make other people great."