Tag: PLC

Our resources are not our curriculum

Earlier this summer, I led a group of teachers and the assistant principal from our school to the PLC (Professional Learning Community) at Work Conference in St. Louis. This conference, hosted by Solution Tree, gathered some of the leading experts in PLC. As you read this blog over the fall, you may see a few references to the invaluable learning that occurred there, and this post is the first one that will draw from that experience. Whether you are already engaged in true PLC work or not, the PLC process’s premise, built around 4 key questions, is crucial to our discussion.

These questions come from Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work by DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos. Today’s post will focus on question 1. One of the key quotes I’ve heard about question 1 comes from Rick DuFour and explains why we need to spend time thinking about that question: “It does not matter which teacher your child has at our school… your child will receive the highest quality instruction, the best assessment practices, and extra time and support to learn at high levels.”

There have been some swings in education over the years. Do we teach our subjects based on the resources we have? Or do we focus on our standards and the skills our students need based on those standards? I will be honest: the teacher in me causes my eye to twitch when I hear talk about teaching from the resource “with fidelity.” At the same time, I know that when I look at the list of authors involved in the writing of any of our resources, there are lots of people with Ph.D. or Ed.D. after their name and their accolades listed. It tells me that some intelligent people put the resources together to support student learning.

I also know that resources are often put together based on alignment with national, state, and local standards. However, when I look at most of our resources, they list Common Core standards at the front and then list what unit or lesson will cover those standards. Some resources even seem to have created their own standards. And the reality is that, just like anything else, publishers are in the business of making money. That means they often pay attention to states like Texas or California for what should be included in a textbook because those two states are the two biggest buyers of textbooks in the US. It’s essential to know that these states significantly influence textbook content nationwide.

So as a school leader in Indiana, the question arises: is it best practice to encourage my teachers to have a goal of teaching a whole textbook “with fidelity”? I’d argue that the answer to that is no. Instead, we should be guided by the Indiana Academic Standards, the cornerstone of our curriculum. These standards help us identify what to teach, ensuring that we focus on the skills our students need based on those standards.

Standards are the center of everything we do. Based on the standards, we create learning targets written in student-friendly language, design classroom activities, and develop common assessments. When we do this work within the PLC, we develop a shared understanding of our standards and the rigor that they entail.

Committing to the work of the PLC means that we will commit to genuinely understanding the guaranteed and viable curriculum that we offer our students and their families. It means that we know what kids need to do by the end of the year to show mastery of the priority standards and the progression of work that needs to happen for a student to achieve mastery by the end of the year.

Given that it is the beginning of the school year, I encourage you to find a team you can collaborate with. Take some time to dig into your standards and your resources. Once you have a clear understanding of your standards, then review your resources. Can lessons or chapters help your student master those priority standards? Or do you have lessons or chapters that don’t align with your standards? Use this knowledge to help you understand what from your resource will help you move students towards mastery and where you might need to supplement the resource.

The key takeaway: Our resource is not our curriculum, and just because we “did it all” doesn’t mean that we have necessarily moved our students towards mastery of the most essential standards!

Have you done work like this on your own or with a team? What did you learn about your resources and standards? Please share some of your key insights in the comments below.

Page 19 Thinking

Page 19 Thinking

A while back, I was listening to an episode of The Tim Ferris Show. For those of you who don’t know who Tim Ferris is, he is an author, blogger, and businessman, but I came to him as a podcast host. On the podcast, Tim does long-form interviews with a wide variety of people on many different topics. While it is rare that a guest on the podcast has direct ties to education, I often find value as an educator in aspects of the interviews. I will say that at times, the topics are not interesting to me, and when that happens, I’ll skip that episode, but often I find myself sucked into the conversations that I wouldn’t have expected to find interesting.

Last May, Tim had Seth Godin on the podcast (you can find the show page here). Seth is the author of 21 international bestsellers, and while the topics are generally related to marketing, his books and blog often venture into topics far beyond the realm of marketing. In addition, Seth has given multiple TED Talks, each with millions of views.

What stood out to me about the conversation was a five-ish minute clip about the concept of “Page 19 Thinking.” Honestly, the title of this concept could have been any number, but Seth chose to use 19. He described it as thinking about working on a book as part of a team. In the beginning, the team knows that there will be a page 19 in the book, it must be written, illustrated, footnotes added, etc. As a team of authors, you say “We know there will be a page 19. We know it’s coming from this team, but we also know that nobody here knows everything about what’s going to go on page 19.”

In this situation, the solution is to start with somebody writing a sentence, then someone can take that sentence and add to it to create a paragraph. The team may say “Let’s make this better” so then someone else will do some research and add another paragraph. Someone else might create an illustration, and someone else might add a footnote. Eventually, the team gets to a version of page 19 that they are happy with, and they “ship it” to the printer or publisher.

Along the way, team members relentlessly criticize the work, but they never criticize the person who did the work. And remember, criticism is closely related to the concept of a critique, where there is careful judgment, expression of opinion, and evaluation of both the good and bad qualities of something. If the goal is to create the best work possible, we must start somewhere. Rarely is our first idea also our best idea. Criticism forces us to reflect on our work and the ways to make it better.

Page 19 thinking allows people the freedom to speak up and contribute. Think about some of the best-known companies in the world. Whether you’re talking about Google, or Apple, or Amazon, what they are known for today is not necessarily how they began their work. Take a moment to look at your phone – personally, I have an iPhone. This is now the third iteration of the iPhone that I’ve had. Each has been different – they have changed in size, features, etc. Most people feel that the new features added have made the device better. But if we think about what the original iPhone could do, compared to the phone you are probably carrying with you each day, the changes have been dramatic. (If you want to see an interesting comparison between the original and the most recent iPhone, you can check out this short video) Those changes would not be possible without the work of a team to iterate and improve the device. And what’s interesting to think about is that Apple wasn’t a phone company in the beginning. It was formed to create the Apple I computer, but over time has become the maker of the iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, and various other accessories. The company has iterated many times.

Now, when we talk about criticism, sometimes when an idea is criticized, it can feel like personal criticism. But if we’re working as part of a team to create the best thing possible, we understand that the criticism is of the idea or the work, not the person. Hopefully, when we take on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we can allow ourselves the freedom to speak up and contribute, as well as to take feedback. Then as a team, we can iterate our way to excellence.

This whole process has me thinking about the PLC structure. When we get together as a PLC team, we have a goal of helping one another be the best teachers we can be to help our students grow. In the PLC process, questions 3 and 4 are about what we’re going to do if students aren’t learning, or what we will do if they are. In this portion of the process, we’re creating ideas to help our students continue to learn. If our PLC takes on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we know that the ideas we share are going to be criticized, but that criticism is about making the idea better, which in turn leads to better outcomes for students. We must let our own work be generously criticized, and we must generously criticize the work of others.

The teamwork that goes with allowing others to contribute their talent will always help our ideas become better. In a collaborative environment, it’s important to make sure that we all are welcome to the ideas of one another because the work of the team helps all our students.

What are your thoughts on page 19 thinking? How might this way of thinking impact the work your team is engaged in? Is there a time that criticism from someone else helped you to get better at the work you were doing? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.

Habits and teaching

I recently finished reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. If you’re into understanding human psychology, it’s a really solid read. The gist of the book from my perspective is about laying out the framework for how habits are formed. It gives insightful strategies for forming new habits we want to have, and methods for breaking bad habits that we want to lose. While I think that there are many parts of the book that I already knew in some way, I’d never seen anyone lay it out in such an actionable way.

As educators, many of us have developed our own set of habits around the ways we do things. How we plan, what our day looks like, and what our learning environment looks like. These are just some of our own form of habits. Recently, the staff in our school has been devoted to a professional learning cycle that really digs into some of the pieces of the PLC. This work is happening with the hope of helping each of our PLC teams build some new habits around the PLC.

You see, in my mind, the PLC is all about the work of ensuring learning in our school. This learning is not just for our students, but also for the adults in our building.

This quote from Rick DuFour helps to lay out the values of the PLC. As a learning organization, we have to first, believe in the values in the PLC, and second, behave as though we believe them.

And let me be clear, I don’t think that anyone in our school is doing something “wrong” in the way we are utilizing the PLC process, but based on some recent conversations at our PD, and in the follow-up conversations I’ve had with some after our PD, it has become clear that there were some pieces of the PLC process that we can strengthen.

In an ideal world, this is kind of an outline of the process of the PLC:

  1. Map our curriculum
  2. Identify Power / Priority Standards
  3. Unpack the standards
  4. Build common assessments – both formative and summative
  5. Bring assessment data back to the PLC meetings during a learning cycle or unit
  6. Adjust our teaching during the unit based on the data
  7. Celebrate the learning and growth that has taken place during a unit
  8. Restart the cycle for our next unit

If you can say that all these pieces are in place with your PLC consistently, then that’s great! You’re a model for what we want to be doing, because if we follow this process, we as teachers have learned about our students and about our teaching practices, and we can ensure that our students have shown learning in our assessment data.

This semester, we have chosen to devote large chunks of our professional learning time to helping each team strengthen the PLC process. My hope is that through this work, we can all have data to share that supports the assertion that our school has helped each student to learn during the school year. None of the topics of our Professional Learning are intended to be stand-alone topics or something that you do once and forget. This cycle of learning is about making sure we have built a process for each PLC team to be able to work through the four big questions of the PLC (What do we want students to know? How will we know that they know it? What will we do if they don’t know it? What will we do if they do know it?)

When we talk about identifying priority standards, we don’t just want to pick one standard in one subject to focus on forever – the PLC is meant to be an ongoing process in multiple subjects. When we come together as a team, everyone should be bringing data – assessment data, student samples, etc., to help guide our conversations around the four questions. It means taking feedback strategies back to your classroom to provide students with steps for how they can grow from where they are to their next step in learning progressions. Then it’s about building a new formative assessment to check how that feedback strategy has worked.

For many of us, this may feel different than the way you might have utilized PLCs in the past. But going back to the Dufour quote above, it is our job to constantly be assessing our own practices in the light of student learning. If something is not successful, then there might be a strategy or practice that needs to shift. And going back to the concept of Collective Teacher Efficacy, I believe that the answers to our questions lie within our staff. We have lots of smart people with lots of great ideas. The PLC model allows us to talk about our own practices, and trust that the people around us will help all of us learn and grow.

What has been your experience with the PLC? Where have you seen the greatest strengths? What are your current pain points where you still need to grow as a PLC? This reflection can help you work with your team, your coaches, your administrators to build a stronger team concept and ensure learning in your school.

Are we a teaching organization, or a learning organization?

Recently I’ve been thinking about a statement I heard once – I honestly can’t remember who I heard it from first, but I think I recall versions of the quote from Dave Burgess, another version from Matt Miller, and yet another version from George Couros (all are some of my favorite authors in the educational space). The quote basically says that teachers who have a 25-year career need to avoid teaching 1 year 25 times.

Let’s unpack that a bit – the gist of what they are saying here is that as teachers, our students change from year to year. Their needs change from year to year. The world changes from year to year. A teacher who teaches 1 year 25 times is someone who has their “January” binder or folder that they pull out every year and it has all the activities for the month of January pre-created. In environments like this, the focus is on the teaching – often it’s about “what is easier for the adults in the building?” The problem is that it may not be what’s best for our students.

Instead, what these authors say we should strive for is to teach each year one time. We adapt our lessons and curriculum to meet the needs of our students, to meet the needs of our community, and to meet the needs of what’s happening in the world right now. And to me, that’s the beauty of the Professional Learning Community! Your PLC team is there to support one another in identifying needs, doing some research on how to meet those needs, and then testing it out.

As I think I have shared before, I’ve been reading the book Professional Learning at Work this school year. I finished it over winter break, and it has me thinking about what it takes to be a school that is focused on learning rather than just on teaching.

Let’s take a moment to define the differences – in a teaching organization, we might have our list of standards and skills or lessons from the textbook, and we say “I have to get through all of this!” It’s almost like we create a checklist for learning. Once I get through item number 1, I move on to number 2, and so on down the list. Can you see a problem with this? I don’t think students can be thought of like items we’re producing. A checklist will not meet the need of every learner in a classroom. Learning is not about developing a lesson design, implementing the steps, and ending at a finished product. I think we all know that students don’t work that way. Learning rarely happens as a straight line – instead, it’s often made up of a bunch of squiggly twists and turns.

On the other hand, a learning organization is all about looking at learning as a process of perpetual renewal – for us as teachers and faculty, for our students, for our community. We get there by focusing on the emotions that have brought us to the career path of teaching, and the emotions that keep us coming back each day (no matter how good or bad yesterday may have been). Ultimately a learning organization is a place where the community is passionate, driven, and in a continuous process of growth.

In a previous blog post, I wrote all about “My Why” – the things that motivate me to do what I do (You can see that post here: Starting with why). I encourage all of us to do a little self-assessment – where are you now? Do you trend towards the teaching mindset? Or do you trend towards the learning mindset? Are you comfortable with where you are? Is what you are doing helping your students to learn and grow?

If you feel completely comfortable with your answers, good for you (To be honest, I’m not sure I can say that I am 100% comfortable with my answers). But if your reflection leads you to feel like you have some growing to do, then go with that. Reassess what you can do to improve. My goal is to help lead a school that is a true learning organization. I see our process as one of continual growth and renewal, and I’m always thinking about how I can help in that process. We will never get to a point where everything is perfect! Even when we meet our initial goals, that creates a place where we can set a new goal. 

What are you working on? What growth do you seek? Share with us in the comments below!