In one of the more interesting twists of digital fate, my recent post on interactive whiteboards has been making a bit of a splash in cyberspace over the past few days.  It was first picked up by Teacher Magazine.  Then, the Washington Post spotlighted it in their Answer Sheet blog. 

And while the majority of the comments in both places have been surprisingly supportive of my argument that IWBs are a waste of cash, there have been a few negative arrows slung my way.  One in particular---added to the Teacher Magazine post by a guy named Mr. D---caught my attention.

He wrote: 

I think the problems is that either you are
resistant to technology ie change, or you have not been exposed on how
to integrate it properly.  Bill
why would you give up so quickly in trying to implement it in your
classroom? Don't you have higher expectations for your students? Would
you let them give up so quickly?

What bothers me in Mr. D's comment is an attitude towards teachers that I see often in conversations about school change.  "Teachers all resistant to change and lazy!" the argument goes.  "If they'd just be persistent and determined, our schools would be saved."

I hear this kind of thinking across domains in education.  Talk about technology use---including some of my own posts here on the Radical---targets teachers who just won't "get on board."  Conversations about professional learning communities and collaboration are driven by those who "won't get on the bus."  The general belief is that teachers lack determination and commitment in almost every circumstance.

In many cases, that's a flawed assumption.  Want to know why your teachers "give up" in the face of new initiatives?  It's simply because the amount of effort that most changes take doesn't align with the corresponding benefits that change is designed to produce.

Download Slide_TransactionCosts

Like professionals in any field, teachers judge the transaction costs that change requires before taking action. When new practices or strategies require tons of investment---complicated planning, intensive research, sophisticated interactions with colleagues, specialized resources or tools---teachers must be convinced ahead of time that the benefits are going to outweigh these new costs of action. 

Take my whiteboard argument:  I "gave up" (to borrow Mr. D's lingo) because the amount of effort that it took to design truly innovative, student-centered learning experiences with my IWB was almost overwhelming.  The software wasn't designed to naturally facilitate the kinds of teaching that I believe in and limited access to the hardware required that I restructure learning time in my classroom almost every day. 

Was it possible to make the IWB work in my room?  Sure---I'm a pretty talented teacher and I could probably figure out how to create meaningful lessons with any tool or technique---but the benefits were limited and the costs were high.  That's a recipe for failure every time. 

It might also surprise you to know---considering that my first book on professional learning communities was published in September---that I was ready to give up on collaboration after the first few months of working with my colleagues.  Why?  Because collaboration was completely exhausting.  Designing common assessments required difficult and time-consuming conversations.  Identifying instructional strategies that work required compromise.  Remediation and enrichment required research and restructuring of traditional practices.

Nothing that we created together during those first few months seemed to be of any real value.  Sure, we had simple successes---but those successes paled in comparison to the time and energy that we had to invest in learning to work together.  I still remember the anger that I felt every time I heard our principal---a guy I still respect and admire more than most any school leader alive---wax poetic about how great PLCs really were.  He, after all, wasn't having to plug through new work with little support and/or guidance.  

The key for school leaders interested in seeing change efforts succeed, then, is simple:  Work diligently to reduce the costs of new changes for your teachers.  Begin by identifying the practices that are the easiest to implement and introduce those early and often. Teachers will see instant benefits with little effort---and instant benefits with little effort builds momentum and confidence.

Then, target increasingly sophisticated practices that are likely to carry greater costs and find ways to make that work easier for your teachers and teams.  Provide exemplars and templates.  Hire specialists to come in and advise.  Create additional time for teachers to work with new practices on the clock.  All of these actions can balance the costs and benefits of change---and balancing the costs and benefits of change is the only way that you're going to get your teachers to truly embrace anything new!

Richard Elmore, an educational leader, once wrote,
"Accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of
performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to
provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for
every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a
reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in
performance."

Instead of harping on "those lazy teachers" who won't embrace change, true instructional leaders work to build capacity by decreasing the transaction costs associated with change efforts and by ditching practices that will always require more energy than they are really worth. 

Any of this make sense? 

I guess I'm just tired of being told not to give up in the face of practices that I know hold little value for my students.  Change is about more than determination, you know.  It's about careful choices. 

PLC expert Rick DuFour has started an interesting strand of conversation over at the All Things PLC blog this morning.  Referring to some of the interactions that we had in our recent Voicethread on professional learning communities, Rick wonders why teachers are unwilling to question colleagues engaged in questionable practices. 

He writes:

Not all behavior is professional. Not all ideas are of equal value.

If the very essence of a team is people working interdependently (rather than in isolation) to achieve common goals (rather than individual interests) for which members are mutually accountable (rather than every man for himself…then we must have the courage to engage in crucial conversations with one another.

The culture of every organization is determined to a large degree by the worst behavior people are willing to tolerate.

Now, I agree with Rick completely that questioning colleagues in a PLC is a professional responsibility.  Professional learning communities are defined by a collective commitment to ALL students.  No longer are teachers interested only in the 50 kids on their class lists.  Instead, they’re interested in identifying the kinds of practices that can result in learning for EVERY child.

But questioning colleagues is still really, really difficult in most schools!

I know that in my years as a member of a learning team, I've worked to question more than once and it rarely goes well---even when I remember to use my favorite Crucial Conversations tip:  Asking why a reasonable, rational person would act in a way that runs contrary to my vision of what is "right" or "should be." 

I think the barrier is that PLC work---especially in the early stages---is really, really difficult.  Teachers and teams wrestle with new practices and processes far more than ever before, and that wrestling can be completely exhausting.  It can also cause teams to question themselves.

I can remember several times where conflict felt like failure to our learning team.  We'd have intellectual disagreements (read: borderline brawls) about practices where feelings would get hurt and doubt would seep into our meetings.  Honestly, we got to the point where we didn’t even think PLCs were even possible.

Worse yet, we didn't have the skills for resolving our conflicts—preparation  for collaboration consisted of nothing more than crafting a set of norms and a template for meeting minutes—AND we were fighting against a constant barrage of "be a team player" messages that still surround schools. 

It felt like everything we were doing was "wrong"—and  because other teams weren't having powerful conversations, they weren't having conflict, which looked "right" to us. 

Crazy, huh? 

Luckily, we stumbled across a phrase—I think my friend and mentor Nancy Flanagan said it first to me—that we made our PLC mantra:

"Questioning isn't about the person, it's about the practice."

By remembering that simple idea, questioning became safer for those doing the asking AND for those being asked.  It served as a constant reminder that we valued one another as individuals even when we had disagreements about our course of action.  It helped us to pose questions—and to be questioned—in a neutral, dispassionate way. 

And it worked.

Teachers are so wrapped up in our practices—we own them, we craft them, we believe in them—and in the nobility of our work that being questioned can be one of the most painful and personal "offenses."  It is only when we take the focus off of the person that questioning becomes safe on a learning team. 

Any of this make sense?

Have you had a chance to stop by our ongoing Voicethread conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of structuring professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour yet? 

If you haven't, you're missing one of the most amazing opportunities to learn more about professional learning communities. 

Not only are participants like Dan and Joel asking the kinds of provocative questions that make a guy think, Rick and Becky have been incredibly active in our conversation (and generous with their time!), providing the same kind of practical advice and suggestions that fill their newest book, Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work. 

Every time that I stop by the conversation, I learn something new----and learning something new ain't half bad!

If you're looking to get caught up quickly, check out this summary of yesterday's comments.   You might also be interested in these highlights from today's conversation: 

Slide 2 sees participants engaging in a great conversation about the role that formative assessments play in the professional learning community process.  Responding to Joel, who worried that common assessments limit a student's ability to demonstrate mastery of critical content, Rick DuFour laid out a powerful argument for developing a balanced approach to assessing students that includes more than one measure of student mastery. 

Which has me wondering how many learning teams do a good job balancing the types of assessments that they use to measure student understanding.  I know that our learning team probably over-relies on multiple choice assessments simply because multiple choice assessments make data quick and easy to collect. 

But I haven't spent enough time thinking about what the consequences of an over-reliance on one type of assessment really are. 

(Note to self:  This is an area where my learning team can improve our practice!)

Slide 4 is an important slide for district level leaders to visit because when answering a question asked by Parry Graham (the co-author of my new book on PLCs), Rick lays out three key criteria that successful district-level leaders do in order to facilitate the work of the learning teams in their districts.  What makes Rick's response so interesting is that it is drawn from research that he's just completed on three districts doing great things with professional learning communities.
 
On Slide 6, Joel---who has challenged my thinking more than once in our conversation so far---asks a question that feeds right into my digital brain when he writes, "Clayton Christensen suggests in his book Disrupting Class that the next trend in education will move us toward individualized instruction and individualized assessment through computer software. As software improves, educators will play the roles of learning monitors and learning trouble-shooters, rather than instructors and assessors. Can the PLC model accomodate this shift in paradigm?"

Great question, huh?  Joel is right in his argument that the cutting edge thinkers about education would like to see digital tools used to individualize instruction for EVERY student...and my guess is that someday, we'll get to the point where that is more non-fiction than science-fiction. 

But what does that mean for PLCs?  

(My slightly pessimistic guess:  My learning team will completely perfect a system of regrouping students to provide remediation at the skill level just about the time when individualizing instruction will be made ridiculously easy by digital workstations!)

On Slide 10, Becky DuFour gives an incredibly thoughtful response to Kerri---a media specialist in Wake County---who asked how schools and districts could structure meaningful professional learning community experiences for singleton teachers.  Becky's answer (which was also right up my professional alley):  Think about electronic teaming!  Why can't digital tools like Skype and Voicethread be used by collaborative partners working across geographical boundaries. 

Honestly, I'd love to see more electronic teaming----not because it is a perfect replacement for human interaction, but because it would give more teachers experience with collaborative tools that are becoming more common in the workplace, and once teachers start using digital tools in their own work, they are bound to be more likely to use the same digital tools in their teaching. 

If you haven't stopped by our conversation yet, you should!  Here's the direct link.  I guarantee that you'll learn something.

If you have stopped by already, here's your day three challenge:  Rather than posting something new to the conversation today, go in and find a comment made by another participant to respond to.  It could be something that made you think.  It could be something you completely disagree with.  It could be something that you want to know more about.

Make today a day of interaction by interacting with an existing participant. 

After all, that's what good collaborative dialogue looks like in action, right?

Here it is, Radical Nation: The first day in our four-day conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities with Solution Tree authors and school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour.

Interested in joining the conversation?

Then click this link:  Enter Revisiting PLCs at Work Conversation 

You might also be interested in this set of directions on how to make digital conversations work for you and this set of directions about how to sign up for a Voicethread account. 

If you struggle at all with your own Voicethread login, you can use this generic login that I created this morning:

Username: billguest@wcpss.net

Password: billguest

You'll find a small box in the bottom left hand corner of the presentation that will let you change to any of a range of generic identity icons.  The only hitch with using this generic login is that only one user is allowed to login under an identity at a time!  If you struggle to get in using the generic login, consider waiting for 20 minutes and then coming back.

Something to know about navigating Voicethread conversations:

While working in a Voicethread conversation, participants can choose to hit the "Play" button at the bottom of any particular slide and watch the conversation around that slide from beginning to end.  That's probably the best strategy the first time you stop by our conversation with Rick and Becky because you'll get to hear my opening questions, Rick and Becky’s initial responses, and the thinking of other participants.

As you revisit pages, however----something you should do once or twice over the course of the week to see how conversations are developing----you can click on new icons surrounding the quotes that you are interested in to hear new comments that have been added.  You can also click on individual comments in the "Timeline" bar that appears at the bottom of each slide.

By doing so, you won't have to listen to every comment every time that you stop by our conversation!  Instead, you can focus your attention on the thoughts of new participants or participants you’re most interested in learning from.

Let's knock this out of the park, huh?

Take some time in the next four days to add what you know, to allow your thinking to be challenged and to challenge the thinking of others.  Be committed to walking away from this conversation with new information that you can use to push your building forward.

Professional learning communities can be powerful tools for driving change in our buildings, but only when the pieces are laid in place properly---and the first step towards assembling the puzzle is building shared knowledge together. 

Voicethread can help us to do that together.

In preparation for our upcoming four-day focused conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the nuts and bolts of transforming traditional schools into dynamic professional learning communities (see here and here), I wanted to review their newest book, Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work for you.

Here are my thoughts:

A little over six years ago, I walked into an interview that changed who I am as an educator.  Matt Wight—one of North Carolina’s finest principals—had been given the opportunity to open a brand new middle school and I wanted to work for him in the worst way.

Why?  Because it was five minutes away from home, of course!  Why else?

It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that working at Salem Middle School was going to be unlike any experience that I’d ever had in my 10-year career.  “We’re going to do things a bit differently,” Matt told me from the moment I walked in the door.

“We’re going to work to become a professional learning community.”

Ninety minutes later, I walked out of Matt’s office with a copy of Professional Learning Communities at Work and a homework assignment.  “Read through this when you get a chance,” Matt said, “and let me know what you think.” 

I spent the better part of the weekend with PLCs at Work—as my dog-eared copy and agitated wife could attest—and I was hooked!  With each chapter, my excitement for what teaching could be grew. 

Finally, “experts” were arguing that teachers should be centrally involved in decision-making.  Finally, “experts” were arguing that conversations between teachers that were focused on teaching and learning were a meaningful form of professional development.  Finally, “experts” were arguing that the key to successful schools rests in the hearts and minds of classroom teachers. 

Needless to say, I took a job at Salem as soon as Matt called to offer it—and I’ve spent almost every day since working to put the kinds of pieces into place that PLCs at Work suggest form the foundation of a community committed to student learning. 

And my learning team members were deeply committed to each other and to our school from day one.  We believed in the shared mission that we developed during our August workdays together.  We made decisions that were aligned to our core beliefs and challenged those that weren’t.  We worked to find ways to identify and amplify accomplished practices and to treat every student as “our” student—all concepts that we’d drawn from DuFour and Eaker.

But despite our efforts, we struggled. 

We hastily skipped over the vision and goal setting process detailed in PLCs at Work, wanting to get started and not sure of exactly what visions and goals would add to the mission statement that we were already proud of.  We developed common summative assessments but failed to figure out that formative assessments were more meaningful to our students.  We believed in remediation and enrichment, but took action at the end of units instead of in the course of instruction.

To put it simply, we had a simple understanding of what exactly a professional learning community was supposed to look like in action.  We weren’t failing at the process, but we were working a helluva’ lot harder—and having less of an impact—than any of us expected.

We knew something was wrong as more and more of our colleagues across our district talked of “doing” PLCs as if it were some kind of part-time rehabilitation program!  The deep and meaningful vision for what schools could be was getting lost somewhere in translation, even as our building leaders and teacher teams were sent to training sessions and pep talks. 

We’d inadvertently watered down something designed to be powerful.

Which is exactly why Rick DuFour, Becky DuFour and Bob Eaker decided to write Revisiting Professional Learning Communites at Work!  In their travels around the country—which took them to schools of every shape and size—the 3Rs realized that experiences like ours were not unique. 

Districts were turning core principles into checklists and worksheets.  PLCs were being viewed as a new program instead of as an ongoing process.  Teachers and school leaders were looking forward to finally “becoming” a learning community so they could move on to something else, failing to recognize that learning never ends in a PLC. 

In Revisiting, Rick, Becky and Bob work to provide concrete, tangible support to schools struggling with professional learning communities. 

They begin by reemphasizing the important role that collective commitments play the success and failure of learning communities, providing examples of schools who have made their mission and vision statements the cornerstone of their work together and suggestions for creating the kinds of coalitions necessary for change to take hold in a building.

Next—in a nod to the idea that everyone can continually improve—they detail a collection of new discoveries and key principles that they have made during their work with learning communities over the past 10 years.  As they explain:

“In the time since we wrote Professional Learning Communities at Work, we have acquired much knowledge as we have worked with schools and districts to implement the PLC concept. This enables us to offer richer and more helpful ideas to contemporary educators.”

Readers of Revisiting learn more about the real work that learning teams wrestle with every day.  They look inside the cycle of professional reflection, wrestle with effective assessment practices, explore systematic interventions, and begin to understand the challenge of changing cultures. 

Throughout, they are exposed to practical tools, strategies and suggestions that can help to provide the kind of structure so often lacking for learning teams.  First steps are recommended, false steps are forewarned, and success stories are spotlighted.

In short, Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work serves to refocus well-intentioned schools who have taken a few wayward steps on the road to restructuring as professional learning communities.  It is a more practical title than its forefather, providing the kinds of tangible action strategies that can make the difference between energized and exhausted educators. 

And it’s left me excited all over again!

But don’t take my word for it. 

Go and download your own digital copy from the Solution Tree website (free registration required) and then come and join us from September 8th through the 11th as we work together to understand more about the actions necessary for making every school a professional learning community to be proud of.