In this interview with author and professional learning teams expert Anne Jolly, you’ll learn at least three things:

• Details of a new edition of her book Team to Teach, a practical guide to organizing and sustaining PLCs and PLTs that promote continuous professional growth.

• Jolly’s eight secrets of PLC success.

• Her answer to the question: If you were asked to create a school reform design, what would its chief components be?

“Effective PLTs are teacher leadership hothouses,” Jolly tells us. “They’re places where teachers increase their professional knowledge and leadership skills – and they can also serve as perfect vehicles for teachers to begin to put leadership into action at several levels.”

NSDC describes Team to Teach as a “step-by-step book…written
in plain, easy-to-read language.” Jolly provides backgrounders that set
the stage for each of 10 chapters designed to familiarize teacher teams
with a proven process that can help them become high-functioning
working groups. The book also offers a comprehensive set of tools that
facilitators will find useful along the way.

Anne is a
second-career teacher who began life as a lab researcher and evolved
into an accomplished middle grades science educator — and Alabama’s 1993
Teacher of the Year. A charter member of the Teacher Leaders Network,
Anne continues to consult with schools and districts interested in
translating the learning-community concept into a viable vehicle for
everyday school improvement. We invited her to talk about Team to Teach and the current state of PLC development in American schools.

Continue below to read our conversation and learn more about Team to Teach.

Author Anne Jolly: Team to Teach

Since its first publication as a regional ed lab product in the early 2000s, the “Facilitator’s Guide to Professional Learning Teams” has been an underground bestseller in schools and districts across the U.S. A few years after its initial release, as the PLC movement caught fire, the National Staff Development Council wisely selected this spiral bound how-to guide (subtitled “Creating On-the-Job Opportunities for Teachers to Learn and Grow”) for distribution through its web-based bookstore. Sales were brisk.

In 2008, the time came for a completely new edition. NSDC invited author Anne Jolly to revise the guide, incorporating her learnings from nearly a decade as a PD consultant working with school-based learning teams in the southeast.

The result — published just in time for the NSDC annual conference last December — is Team to Teach: A Facilitator’s Guide to Professional Learning Teams. We began our conversation with some background about the book itself.

Team to Teach is subtitled “A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams.” Tell us something about its potential audiences.

I wrote Team to Teach for those who are directly involved in setting up professional learning teams and making them work, and for those who are involved in enabling and supporting the teams. This includes teacher leaders, principals and other school staff, and central office administration.

Think about it this way: Educators often leave conferences and workshops revved up and excited about establishing professional learning communities in their schools. They understand the value of teachers collaborating on their work and they know what needs to happen. But when push comes to shove, the key to having successful PLCs is knowing how to implement the learning teams and make them work. Educators often don’t have much experience working together as adult learners on the “big stuff” of effective teaching and learning.

It's one thing to agree you need to establish teams and that these teams need to research, reflect, implement, redesign, etc. But unless you are able to organize yourselves effectively and move forward in ways that anticipate the common problems of collaboration, the initial excitement often begins to fade. In a nutshell, this book is written for the people who need to make successful teamwork happen. And that includes principals!

Would you describe your book as more theoretical or practical? And who is the "facilitator" in the title?

This book is definitely a practical guide. Each chapter addresses a different stage in building successful teams. Each chapter begins with a background section for the facilitator that builds knowledge about what needs to happen during that particular stage of implementing and sustaining the teams. The remainder of the book consists entirely of a selection of tools that may be used during specific stages and actions. I’ve included suggestions for how, why, and when to use those tools. There are over 100 pages of just tools in the book.

The facilitator mentioned in the title is primarily the person who will work directly with team members — training them, guiding them, troubleshooting, and sustaining team momentum through times when the old way of doing things as individuals seems so much easier. That person may be a teacher in a leadership role or another educator from inside or outside the building.

The book was first published in the early 2000s. Tell us something of its history and how you came to write it.

In 1999 I taught in a brand-new middle school that used a teaming approach. I was in a team of five teachers who taught the same students and had a time set aside each day for teachers to work together. We even had our own team meeting office in the center of our circle of classrooms.

All of us were excited about the possibilities. I'll never forget our first team meeting. We all came in, smiled as we poured cups of coffee from our very own coffeepot (we had scrounged an old but usable microwave for our office too) and sat down around our new, circular table in reasonably comfortable chairs. We looked at each other expectantly. Then it slowly dawned on us. We had no idea what to do.

We each taught different subjects, so where should we start? What should we accomplish? Like most other teacher teams in our school, we soon fell into familiar patterns of discussing kids, test scores, grades, and discipline. We did share ideas and put together an interdisciplinary unit, but this didn't result in changes in our classroom instructional practices.

Likewise, each month teachers across all grade levels in our school met together in department meetings. We talked about department business. The meetings were useful, but none of them actually resulted in teacher learning that led to improved instruction. How were we supposed to do that? We didn’t really know.

The "How to" idea loomed large in my thinking. I began contacting educators like Shirley Hord and Carlene Murphy who were working on teacher collaborative learning. They talked with me about the ins and outs of establishing successful teams. I read books on professional learning communities by Rick DuFour and others engaged in this work. I read research by Linda-Darling Hammond, Karen Seashore Lewis and others. And gradually a pattern begin to emerge on how this process might be laid out.

 
At this point, you must have been eager to put what you were learning into action.

You’re absolutely right. And I was fortunate to find funding that allowed me to work with two middle schools full time during the following year to establish effective teams. I learned a lot from these early attempts. My action research diary of that year's work relates all the ups and downs, sometimes in graphic detail. You can still read it on the Web, if you don’t believe I mean that!

My research and concentrated efforts to continually develop and revise this PLT work has really been ongoing since 2000. The first draft of the book emerged in 2000, as a part of some coursework for an advanced degree. After I finished my degree, I began working with SERVE — a regional education laboratory from that era that served six southeastern states. During my years with SERVE, my work was almost totally focused on researching, designing, and developing professional learning teams. SERVE put out the first published version of the book in December of 2004 and NSDC began distributing it in 2005-06.

The most recent edition, Team to Teach, was published with a new look and format by NSDC in 2008. I'm now happily "retired" and heavily engaged in working with professional learning teams. The power and the potential of teacher collaboration totally captivates me.

How has the book evolved in terms of content and target audiences over several editions?

The target audience for this book has never changed. It still speaks to the person or persons responsible for establishing, guiding, and facilitating successful teams of teachers. And the content hasn't really changed in terms of basic mission. The book continues to focus on establishing successful teams of teachers who engage in ongoing professional development to ratchet up their instructional practice in areas where their students need them to be better teachers.

In your articles, webinars, and talks, I often see you link the work of teacher learning communities and the roles of teachers as leaders in school improvement. Tell us about that.

When I was the Alabama Teacher of the Year, back in the mid-nineties, my field of vision gradually expanded beyond the issues facing my classroom and local community. I began to sense that schools across the nation had similar problems and that we teachers were the people who held the ultimate solutions. Teachers were the ones with the passion and energy to make real teaching and learning happen. And we were the ones who generally had less opportunity for real input into policies and procedures that either allowed or threw up barriers to good teaching and learning.

When I was at Cranford Burns Middle School in Mobile, Alabama, I had a principal who valued and encouraged teacher leadership. This school was fertile ground for me to begin my initial work on designing effective teams, and my principal was my biggest cheerleader. He encouraged my leadership inclinations and supported me in building my skills and taking the lead in developing teams in the school.

Effective PLTs are teacher leadership hothouses. They’re places where teachers increase their professional knowledge and leadership skills — and they can also be perfect vehicles for teachers to begin to put leadership into action at several levels.

 After nearly a decade of doing this work, what have you come to understand about what it takes to make PLTs function effectively and contribute to school success?

Well, let me just list a few of these with minimum elaboration.

1. The principal is the key to the success or failure of professional learning teams. The principal must understand the process and provide teachers with training and support. He/she must personally offer appropriate feedback to teams on a regular basis, and allow teachers to be risk-takers.

2. Team members must understand that these meetings are about professional learning and growth. I suggest that teams keep a visual reminder of this in front of them at meetings to prevent them from drifting back into old meeting habits.

3. Teams must set a clear purpose and goal for their work together. Otherwise they'll never get anywhere

4. Setting norms is often short-changed but it's critical for effective teaming. It generally works best when teachers set norms following discussions of behaviors they value in other team members.

5. Sharing teaching ideas is an important part of teamwork; however, team members are more likely to incorporate needed changes into their professional practice if they examine research and articles on instruction to broaden their knowledge base, and work together to develop and collectively implement new strategies.

6. Teams can be successful whether they are voluntary or mandatory. In either case it's important to provide the necessary help in terms of support structures and incentives. In the case of mandatory teams, it's especially important to roll out the initiative correctly and provide thoughtful and consistent follow-up.

7. It can take up to 3 years for professional learning teams to become ingrained as a way of doing business in the school. When this happens, the culture of the school begins to shift and teachers begin to support one another as professionals. In fact, team members begin to take responsibility for the success of each other as teachers.

8. There is no "one size fits all" in establishing a successful teaming process. Mechanically following suggested procedures in the Team to Teach book will not bring about magical results. The school leadership must be knowledgeable about successful teaming, committed to establishing collaborative teams, and understand how to tailor this process for the faculty.

Thinking a bit more broadly, after years of working with teachers and principals in many schools, if you were asked to create a school reform design, what would its chief components be?

I'd put a group of principals together and give them this challenge:

Imagine that you have freedom to design your school to operate anyway you want it to, and that you will be provided with sufficient resources do implement the design.

• What will your teachers be doing from the time they walk in in the morning until the time they leave in the afternoon?
• What would you (the principal) be doing during the school day?
• How would you like the school day to be structured?
• What types of meeting rooms, student learning rooms, laboratories, classrooms, and other space would you like to have in this school?
• What clerical positions would be needed? What would clerical staff responsibilities be with respect to facilitating teaching and learning?

In my best-case scenario, a good school reform design has teachers focusing exclusively on teaching and learning during the school day. The principal also takes a leadership role in the instructional process and involves teachers in helping him/her make instructional decisions.

The school day is structured so that teachers have two hours a day to work together to address student strengths and weaknesses and improve instruction. Teachers have comfortable and relaxed surroundings in which to work together. They have access to technology and a high comfort level in using it. School firewalls have been altered so that students in the school can access and create wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, rss feeds, and other digital tools when useful for learning.

Teacher class sizes are never so large that teachers are unable to give students the individual guidance that they need. Students who consistently disrupt learning for other students in class are temporarily placed with a smaller group of similar students within the school where trained teachers work with them in academics and behavior modification. There's plenty of opportunity for hands-on learning, projects and problem-solving. There's an attitude that if kids — as they did in my last teaching position — look out the window and see an environmental mess made by construction of
the new school they're attending, they can get their hands dirty doing something about it.

The school has enough clerical staff to handle non-instructional paperwork, and non-teaching staff monitors students at lunch, during class changes, and at other times when students are not engaged in instructional activities. This frees up extra time for teachers to meet with parents, attend IEP meetings, and prepare for classes.

Teacher leadership is viewed as a necessary role in the school. Opportunities are provided for teacher leaders who wish to remain in the classroom to expand their responsibilities and be rewarded financially for taking on more leadership roles and responsibilities.

Those are a few components I'd include.

What's next for Anne Jolly?

Other professional work I'm involved in today includes writing engineering curriculum for middle schoolers that addresses student science and math objectives while helping them apply this knowledge. I’m doing this with the Mobile Area Education Foundation in a system-wide initiative called Engage Youth in Engineering. It's exciting to be asked to design curriculum that is bound to engage kids – and to do it in my content area, where I still have a great passion.

I'm also exploring ways teachers can use digital tools to collaborate, save time, and help in their own learning and student learning. I'm working with a colleague, Skip Olsen, on this project and we find it endlessly fascinating. We'd love to have input from schools and teams that find digital tools to be useful and have had some success with them. If any readers would take time to give us input, please send ideas to ajolly@bellsouth.net. We are interested only in free digital tools, not vendor tools.

And, last but certainly not least, I'm still learning more about successful teaming. I'm compiling what I believe is an ever-stronger base of tools and information for facilitators. I’m also beginning to focus some of my work directly on principals as the linchpin people when it comes to enabling successful teamwork.

Other than that, I plan to keep flunking retirement!

Until November 10, 2009, you can view (at no charge) a recent Education Week webinar featuring Anne Jolly and Nancy Fichtman Dana as they discuss how to create the framework and establish ground rules for building successful professional learning teams.

[Photo of Anne Jolly by Joe Songer, for Teacher Magazine]