Connoisseurs of Interactive Tools and Strategies: How Teams Use Process to Achieve Results

the essential elements of a PLC. While Amplify Your Impact offers strategies that help teams with the implementation of the more explicit tasks of PLCs—things like prioritizing and unwrapping standards, identifying learning targets, developing common assessments, holding productive data conversations, and using protocols to ensure that results drive decisions—How Schools Thrive shifts attention to coaching teams around the essential elements of the PLC process— continuous improvement, collective inquiry, action orientation, and a focus on results—drilling deeper into the more complex aspects of the PLC process. Amplify Your Impact and How Schools Thrive introduce a framework and processes proven through our work in schools as successful with coaching collaborative teams to higher levels of effectiveness in dozens of schools across the United States. We know coaching provides teams with more clarity, ongoing feedback, and continuous support of their efforts to improve, which substantially increases the likelihood of implementing the PLC process successfully. Simply stated, coached teams go further faster than un-coached teams (Joyce & Showers, 2002; Killion & Harrison, 2007; Neufeld & Roper, 2003; Thomas, 2019).

In this book, we provide school leaders with concrete methods and materials to help build shared knowledge and strengthen collaborative teams’ PLC practice. We include key coaching points, important vocabulary, protocols that foster a deeper understanding of PLCs, and links to resources leaders can use to extend professional development activities. While this book can be used independently, readers of the trilogy will appreciate that concepts from Amplify and Thrive culminate into applicable professional development here in Energize. The beauty of this book is that schools at any level of PLC implementation can use it, from those just beginning the journey to those who have been practicing PLCs for a number of years and are ready to re-energize their teams!

A Flexible Format

We intentionally structured Energize Your Teams so those who are coaching teams (principals, department heads, instructional coaches, teacher leaders, or others) can identify an area of need, locate that topic in the book, and deliver a meaningful professional development experience in an hour or less. This flexible format allows coaches to differentiate professional development by content and format. Coaches can deliver modules to grade-level or departmental teams or to the faculty as a whole.

This book is organized into three parts. • Part I presents a practical overview of coaching collaborative teams in a PLC. • Part II includes professional development activities that support the five essential prerequisites of a PLC: (1) educators work in collaborative teams, rather than in isolation, and take collective responsibility for student learning; (2) collaborative teams implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit; (3) collaborative teams monitor student learning through an ongoing assessment process that includes frequent, team-developed common formative assessments; (4) educators use the results of common assessments to improve individual practice, build the team’s capacity to achieve its goals, and intervene and enrich on behalf of students; and (5) the school provides a systematic process for intervention and teaching (DuFour & Reeves, 2016).

• Part III offers a glimpse into how one organization transformed the PLC process in their schools by coaching collaborative teams.

Part I: Introduction to Coaching Collaborative Teams in a PLC

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the five prerequisite conditions of a PLC (DuFour & Reeves, 2016) and describes how school leaders can use this book to facilitate coaching collaborative teams.

Chapter 2 introduces a continuum of PLC practice and describes a way practitioners can use it to reflect on how deeply their collaborative teams are implementing the PLC process.

Chapter 3 identifies the characteristics of effective coaching and presents a coaching cycle built on research, experience, and evidence from the field. The coaching cycle is designed to support collaborative teams and describe how coaching impacts teams’ PLC practice.

Part II: Modules for Coaching Collaborative Teams

The purpose of this middle section of the book is to provide those responsible for coaching collaborative teams with a single source of targeted professional development activities they can use as a springboard to deeper learning or differentiated coaching based on the level of each team’s PLC practice.

In each of chapters 4 through 8, we focus on a single prerequisite condition of PLCs as the main topic of professional development modules coaches can grab to help teams grow. • Chapter 4 presents tools to support educators’ work in collaborative teams as they take collective responsibility for student learning. • Chapter 5 supports coaches as they coach collaborative teams to implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit. • Chapter 6 helps coaches support collaborative teams as they monitor student learning through an ongoing assessment process that includes frequent, teamdeveloped common formative assessments. • Chapter 7 focuses on supporting teams as educators use the results of common assessments to improve individual practice, build the team’s capacity to achieve its goals, and intervene and enrich on behalf of students. • Chapter 8 helps coaches support teams in the systematic process for implementing intervention and teaching.

Each individual module is organized using a consistent three-section format. 1. Before the learning: These sections include an overview and provide the rationale, purpose, desired outcome, key coaching points, and important vocabulary associated with the module. 2. During the learning: These sections contain directions (similar to a lesson plan) for using each module, a step-by-step process around an article or activity to engage

teams in the experience, and an opportunity for reflection. These sections identify the why, what, and how for each prerequisite condition of a PLC. 3. After the learning: These sections provide coaches with strategies for helping teams identify the next steps they should take to operationalize each specific aspect of the

PLC process.

Part III: Practical Implications for Coaching Collaborative Teams in a PLC

Finally, we conclude with a case study from a practitioner’s point of view describing how one district successfully shifted the focus of coaching from individual teachers to collaborative teams using the SIG and pathways tools to delve more deeply into the PLC practice of collaborative teams.

Know Better to Do Better

As school leaders, we sometimes assume because we know something, our staff know it too; but what leaders know and expect is often different than what teams know and are able to do. By coaching collaborative teams on specific PLC practice, leaders and coaches help them improve the quality of collaboration, which leads to improved teaching and learning. Like Maya Angelou is credited as saying, when we know better, we do better. We believe Energize Your Teams will be a constant companion to those coaching teams so they can help teams know better and do better.

CHAPTER 5

Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

Prerequisite two: Collaborative teams implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit (DuFour & Reeves, 2016).

The second prerequisite of a PLC, implementing a guaranteed and viable curriculum or GVC, requires all students to have the opportunity to learn the same rigorous curriculum. A GVC involves much more than publishing a list of standards in a binder or on a website; it takes time, commitment, and a concerted faculty effort.

In a PLC, creating a GVC manifests itself as teams respond to critical question one, “What knowledge, skills, and dispositions should every student acquire as a result of this unit, this course, or this grade level?” (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 36). Collaborative teams learn and work together to reach agreement on precisely what teachers will teach and students will learn. Once teams achieve consensus on the essential standards, they commit to one another—and to their students—that before the students move on to the next class, course, or grade level, they will learn the essential standards. It is the teachers’ commitment to teach what is essential that matters most.

As teams respond to critical question one, they engage in a three-step process involving standards, learning targets, and I can statements. While all three structures share some common characteristics, “The biggest difference among a standard, a learning target, and an ‘I can’ statement is the intended audience and how each can promote high levels of learning” (Mattos, DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2016, p. 76). The overarching goal of this process is to create greater clarity, coherence, and commitment around the GVC, but it is only after completing all three steps of this process that teachers can truly respond to the first critical question of a PLC with confidence.

Teacher teams begin the process of responding to the first critical question by prioritizing the standards to identify those absolutely essential for all students to learn. Educators sometimes refer to power standards, priority standards, or promise standards (which all mean basically the same thing) as the standards students need to know as opposed to standards that are nice to know. Prioritizing standards does not mean eliminating standards; rather, it acknowledges that while all standards are important, they’re not all equally important. Prioritizing standards is a crucial first step, “However, the prioritization of standards alone does not ensure clarity around what students are expected to understand and do” (Clayton, 2017, p. 1). Clarity is the primary goal of the next step: unwrapping the priority standards.