AllThingsPLC Magazine Vol. 8, Issue 2

PLC things all

Volume 8, Issue 2

Features

Creating & Maintaining High Levels of Academic Achievement

Jeff Byrnes, Janel Keating, and Meagan Rhoades

One school’s journey to leave no student behind.

Kaizen

Nathaniel Provencio

A change for the better.

After the Storm What Next?

Anthony Muhammad

Examining the impacts of COVID shutdowns on educators.

Igniting 5 New Narratives

Anthony Reibel

PLCs as a catalyst for change.

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14

18

25

Tools & Resources

First Thing

“All” includes adult learners.

FAQs about PLCs

The relationship between mission and culture.

Data Quest

School community perception survey.

Case Study

A PLC journey: The Marco Forster Middle School story.

Words Matter

What does high levels of learning mean?

Skill Shop

Seven steps for coaching an emerging team.

Research Report

PLCs cast a light on the dark side of school culture.

Why I Love PLCs

For the love of family.

“All” INCLUDES ADULT LEARNERS

PLC things all MAGAZINE First Thing

Scott Carr

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SOLUTION TREE:

CEO

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Jeffrey C. Jones

In12

PRESIDENT Edmund M. Ackerman

SOLUTION TREE PRESS:

PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER

a Professional Learning Community at Work, we frequently hear the mantra “All means all.” This usually refers to our commitment to ensuring high levels of learning for all students. But what if we expanded this commitment to include all adult learners as well? How would our schools be transformed if we engaged with the adults in our learning community with the same level of passion for and commitment to successful learning? Would this have a positive impact on student learning?

Douglas M. Rife

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ART DIRECTOR

Rian Anderson

PAGE DESIGNERS

Laura Cox, Abigail Bowen, Kelsey Hergül, Fabiana Cochran, Julie Csizmadia, Rian Anderson

AllThingsPLC (ISSN 2476-2571 [print], 2476-258X [Online]) is published four times a year by Solution Tree Press.

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Copyright © 2024 by Solution Tree Press

In his book Learning by Heart, Roland Barth (2004) found that “teachers and students go hand in hand as learners—or they don’t go at all” (p. 23). Having highly trained edu cators in every classroom is a must. But let’s take this one step further and consider the other adults in our school community who come in contact with students every day. Do they have an impact on our students’ success? Consider the bus driver who might be the first adult some students inter act with in the morning. Consider the cafeteria server who feeds hundreds of students each day. Do these adults, and many others, have the power to make or break a student’s learning experience?

Let me give you a personal experience to make my point. When my daughter was a new, nervous freshman at a large high school, her irresponsible father forgot to put money on her lunch account. When the server at the checkout no ticed she had no money available, she reminded my daughter that charging was not allowed. Then she took her lunch from her and threw it in the trash. While I don’t think that was the best response, I don’t believe the cafeteria server did it to spite my daughter. She was following the school policy to the best of

her understanding. But you can bet that my daughter’s ability to learn that day was overshadowed by her embarrassment. Do we ensure that all adults in our school understand our mission, and have they been given the tools to meet this mission with confidence?

Before I retired, I had the unique experience of training our district’s support staff teams in the PLC mission and process. I trained the custodial leaders at each building, the building directors of each cafeteria, and all bus drivers. The most bittersweet comment I received came from a custodial leader. He said, “I have been in this district for 15 years, and this is the first time I felt like what I do is important.” While I appreciated his support, I was concerned that many members of our support staff felt the same way. Let’s utilize the three big ideas of a PLC—a focus on learning, a focus on collaboration, and a focus on results—to consider how we can ensure that all adults feel successful in the work they do for our students.

In Learning by Doing, Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos (2016) state, “PLCs operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators” (p. 10). If we apply this focus on learning to support staff teams, then we are committed to ensuring that each adult is receiving the personalized professional training they need to be successful. We know this means more than just technical learning. We need to spend time clarifying our mission as a learning community and providing training in social-emotional learning, communication skills, and child development research. We need to be intentional about ongoing opportunities throughout the year as well. Doing a large group training at the beginning of the year might check the box for “training,” but if we are honest, we know that job-embedded learning is much more effective. To create this focus on learning, a principal or assistant principal could schedule a monthly meeting with each support staff team. The meeting should focus on learning and sharing together rather than covering housekeeping items. Team members should be allowed to offer ideas for topics that are important to them to create a higher level of engagement. I would encourage the principal or assistant principal to bring in other staff members, such as a counselor or guiding coalition leader, to share their insight and experience.

Many times, I have been asked to do a preservice kickoff workshop for a school or district, and everyone is required to attend— the dreaded “one size fits a few” model of training. Support staff will respectfully ask me how this applies to them. They can feel disenfranchised when collaboration is solely defined as teams of teachers working together. A true collaborative culture focuses on all adults working interdependently toward the school’s mission. To ensure this commitment to collaboration, there must be

clarity about the organization’s mission and clarity about each adult’s investment in pursuing that mission. During my support staff trainings, participants would share how frustrated they were with being on the outside looking in. In many schools, a newsletter or email is the only way they receive information. This does not project a feeling of value or importance. A practical way to increase a sense of belonging would be to include support staff in the monthly staff meetings. These “staff huddles” become a great opportunity for learning together from each other and create a sense of belonging for all adults. I would also recommend that the support staff have a standing representative on the school’s guiding coalition to ensure they have a voice when decisions that impact them are being discussed.

A focus on results pushes our learning community to concentrate on tangible measurements of improvement to ensure that our efforts are having the intended positive impact on student learning. We rally around SMART goals to define our expectations and the path to reaching success. A support staff team’s goals might look different than traditional school goals, but they can generate the same level of commitment to having a positive impact on student learning. When I helped support staff teams set their goals, I noticed how energized team members became when they had something to shoot for and they saw the positive impact they could have. We all want to feel like our daily tasks have a higher purpose and move the success of the school forward. Some examples of goals include student and staff satisfaction surveys in the cafeteria, an increase in training certifications for custodians, and reduced student discipline referrals for bus drivers.

If your school is working to become a true Professional Learning Community at Work, I encourage you to continuously invest in the adults—to pursue opportunities to grow, to challenge, and to celebrate one another. As Doug Reeves (2004) says, “The effort you invest . . . will be rewarded in better student achievement, improved professional practices, greater personal satisfaction, and more fun every day in the world’s most important job” (p. 12).

References

Barth, R. S. (2004). Learning by heart. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., Many, T. W., & Mattos, M. (2016). Learning by doing: A handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (3rd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Reeves, D. B. (2004). Accountability for learning: How teachers and school leaders can take charge. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

The study found that these three realities resulted in higher rates of teacher sick days, resignations, and generally unpleasant behavior, like irritability and impatience, during the pandemic. In many cases, the stress of teaching during a pandemic caused many teachers to leave the profession altogether, and we currently face one of the greatest teacher shortages in the history of American education (Sparks, 2022).

How has the pandemic affected students? Achievement gaps existed before COVID-19, but the realities of inequity in student learning outcomes were enhanced during the pandemic. One of the major barriers to quality instruction and learning during the pandemic was virtual instruction. A challenge of virtual instruction is the limitation it introduces for engagement. At best, direct virtual instruction can be three-dimensional (Natason & Meckler, 2020).

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A PLC JOURNEY

The Marco Forster Middle School

PLC Night (2004–16)

For years at Marco Forster Middle School, we have found ourselves facing significant challenges in meeting the needs of all students. Even though we adopted the PLC model as the process to meet student needs, we, unfortunately, did not experience the level of growth for which we had hoped, and by 2016, our district identified our school as a target for improvement. We were then forced to ask ourselves, “Do we really understand the PLC process, and are we implementing it with fidelity?” We began to reexamine our understanding and approach, and it became clear that most of our teams were not committed to the right work, and a portion of the staff was fundamentally resistant to the process altogether. Once we acknowledged that we were not working off of a solid foundation and that our culture needed to change, we started slowly moving in the right direction.

PLC Lite (2016–19)

Over the next several years, our teachers and administrators were given opportunities to attend PLC conferences and explore the guidance laid out by Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2016) and Transforming School Culture (Muhammad, 2018). In fact, we were so inspired by Dr.

Muhammad’s work, we invited him to our school to talk about the importance of school culture. We also benefited from districtwide gatherings where Mike Mattos and Luis Cruz shared the essentials of the PLC process. We realized that we had implemented some of the technical aspects of a PLC, but our foundation was not really built on the three big ideas of a professional learning community:

1. A focus on learning

2. A collaborative culture

3. A results orientation

Subsequently, we recast our mission and vision statements from long, unfocused, and overly detailed ones to statements placing student learning at the forefront of our work, ensuring achievement for all through a collaboration whereby we would unite and lead all students to success.

Of course, merely stating that we would collaborate, unite, and lead all students to success is one thing, but actually doing it is another. We had some staff members willing to engage in the hard work of answering questions 1 and 2 of the PLC process by defining what we wanted all students to know and be able to do and determining how we would know if they had learned these essential

JOURNEY School Story

ALEX GOTTDANK

standards, but most of the staff was not ready to do so with fidelity. By 2018, we simply jumped instead into answering question 3, “What will we do if students haven’t learned?” and focused our attention on the intervention process. We naively assumed that student growth, success, and achievement were tied solely to completing assignments and retaking assessments, and so our tutorial focus never really engaged students in learning the essential standards required to achieve success.

In addition, most of our teams at this time were unprepared for data discussions, either failing to give the common assessment as agreed on or not taking the time to compile their data prior to the discussion so that student results could be evaluated. When these discussions were held, a pattern of avoidance surfaced. No one wanted to be exposed with lower student scores than their colleagues. On top of this, we weren’t even discussing student struggles by name and by need, nor did we benefit from a rich discussion regarding the strategies used by the most successful teachers, which could then have been replicated by the other teachers. Clearly, we were functioning as a lite version of the PLC process, compliant in some structures but not aligned with the purpose and spirit of the process. Fortunately, a few subject-area teams were starting to wrestle with and reflect on all four questions of the process, and these teams were starting to see tremendous growth. Their willingness to be engaged in the right work would be tapped into by the next administration.

Virginia Bennett, executive director of academic support services, Bulloch County Schools, Georgia

Words Matter WHAT DOES HIGH LEVELS OF LEARNING MEAN?

We define high levels of learning as “high school plus,” meaning every child is on a trajectory to graduate from high school with the academic skills and knowledge needed to continue to learn. A high school diploma will not be enough to compete in the global marketplace and make a living. Postsecondary education can include attending a university, community college, trade school, internship, apprenticeship, or some other type of specialized training.

To achieve this, all students must learn at grade level or better every year. For example, a first grader who ends the year unprepared for second grade is at risk of ultimately not graduating from high school, let alone successfully transitioning to postsecondary levels of education. A school focused on high levels of learning would not allow students to be tracked in below-grade-level learning.

Why I Love PLCs

For the Love of Family

When I reflect on my time as principal at Tongue River Elementary School, I truly believe that the PLC family we intentionally created was the catalyst that led us to achieve the National Blue Ribbon. A true PLC is not just about creating high achievement; it is also about creating a sense of belonging and care.

This story begins at our school’s annual Outdoor Education Week, which takes place in the Big Horn Mountains every summer. Third-grade teacher Mr. Kozlowski and the students wrote the Tongue River Elementary (TRE) song around the campfire. It begins, “We are TRE; we are one big family.” Throughout this song’s verses and chorus, it talks about the fun things that make TRE and the people within it special. I immediately fell in love with the song and adopted it as our theme for the school.

Beginning my first week, we stood up in every classroom on Thursdays and sang it as a whole school. Classes took turns singing the song with me in the office as I played guitar and our music teacher played the ukulele over the intercom. The schoolwide callback came from the song, we created a new logo based on it, and there was a family tree introducing staff in the lobby with our “We are TRE; we are one big family” phrase. We began to act like a family and treat one another as family. The level of celebration and tradition became ingrained in all of us. Knowing it was best practice, the PLC process and belief system was solidifi ed in our family structure and elevated us to the next level. Every teacher lived our mission, vision, values, and goals. In every classroom, the things that we agreed on were happening. Not buying in wasn’t an

option because we all felt morally bound to do the work.

Our vision was to be known for our academics and our kindness while being recognized as a Model PLC and a Title I Distinguished School. We surpassed our own goals, which we felt were lofty at the time. Our students went from being known for their kindness throughout the Tongue River Valley to being recognized nationally for their academic excellence. This happened because we wholeheartedly, and intentionally, committed to the PLC process. We began every discussion and decision based on the knowledge gained and the data collected about the whole child. Opinions were taken out of the equation. The environment we created together seemed to have taken on a life of its own that people could feel when they walked through our doors. Laughter and positivity were equal to our academic rigor. We enjoyed being together, and our school thrived. Following the values and collective commitments that we agreed on as a staff meant we sometimes had to have tough conversations, but we had them because the work we were doing was truly best for the kids. The leadership was shared and celebrated, and in turn, we all thrived in our learning community.

I have learned through my educational career that there will always be the next best thing, but I know PLCs are not in that category. It is an embedded family culture that truly, positively, impacts students. I cannot imagine going backward and saying that all of this sudden collaborating and making instructional decisions based on results is just not something we are going to do. That is laughable! As a former teacher and now as a superintendent, I have seen the positive impact of

ANNIE GRIFFIN

collaboration and embracing the PLC framework. Knowing our students as individuals and as learners allows us to best serve them and, above all, support their growth.

Thus far, the highlight of my educational career was the day we celebrated our Blue Ribbon with a huge banner on our bell tower. To see our students, who were once known for their kindness, stand taller knowing they were now Blue Ribbon students was immeasurable. As a new superintendent in a beautiful rural district in Wyoming, I look forward to leading in this new capacity and once again creating a PLC family that can take our students to new heights. To say I love PLCs is a dramatic understatement. I wholeheartedly believe that embracing a PLC culture positively impacts our students and prepares them for their unique futures.

ANNIE GRIFFIN has been in education for 25 years as a teacher, instructional coach, principal, and now superintendent of Washakie County School District #2 in Wyoming. She is also a Solution Tree Associate.

Discussion Questions

Use this convenient tear-out card to go over and reinforce the topics discussed in this issue with the members of your team.

Creating & Maintaining High Levels of Academic Achievement (p.

8)

1. Are there any students being left behind in your school or district? What can you do to get them caught up?

2. Take a moment to think about whether your actions are unintentionally telling students they can’t do the work without your help. If so, how can you change this behavior?

3. Were you inspired by anything in Mountain Meadow’s story that could be replicated in your district, school, or team?

Kaizen

(p. 14)

1. How can the kaizen philosophy be applied to PLCs?

2. How can your team be better engaged, empowered, and encouraged to make your jobs more effective and efficient?

3. How is your team acknowledged and celebrated for being an agent of change?

After the Storm, What Next? (p. 18)

1. Take stock of how the pandemic affected your professional life. What steps is your school or district taking to recover?

2. In what ways can the PLC at Work process effect a better and brighter future post-pandemic?

3. After the storm, what next?

Igniting Five New Narratives (p. 25)

1. How do PLCs move beyond the traditional education narratives?

2. Of the five narratives discussed, which could benefit your PLC and how?

3. Describe the education narratives your PLC has ignited.

The fundamental purpose of the school is to ensure high levels of learning for all students. This focus on learning translates into four critical questions that drive the daily work of the school. In PLCs, educators demonstrate their commitment to helping all students learn by working collaboratively to address the following critical questions:

4. What will we do if they already know it? 1

1. What do we want students to learn? What should each student know and be able to do as a result of each unit, grade level, and/or course?

2. How will we know if they have learned? Are we monitoring each student’s learning on a timely basis?

3. What will we do if they don’t learn? What systematic process is in place to provide additional time and support for students who are experiencing difficulty?

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• No school can help all students achieve at high levels if teachers work in isolation.

• Schools improve when teachers are given the time and support to work together to clarify essential student learning, develop common assessments for learning, analyze evidence of student learning, and use that evidence to learn from one another.

• PLCs measure their effectiveness on the basis of results rather than intentions.

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• All programs, policies, and practices are continually assessed on the basis of their impact on student learning.

• All staff members receive relevant and timely information on their effectiveness in achieving intended results.