An interesting email landed in my inbox yesterday.  Richard Carlander—of San Fernando High School—wrote:

Mr. Ferriter:

I attended the PLC event in Hollywood last week and I had a question I posed to Rick DuFour and he gave me your name.

So here's my two-part question: What was the biggest challenge for you adopting the PLC approach, and what was the biggest improvement and benefit once the PLC was successfully implemented?

Thank you, I am most grateful for your time.

Richard’s questions are really important for anyone who believes that the key to reforming schools rests in the hands of the teachers, leaders and support personnel working in America’s classrooms—and any leaders who begin PLC initiatives without clearly defined answers to both are flirting with disaster.

I think Richard’s first question—what is the biggest challenge of adopting the PLC approach—is at once the most important to consider and the most likely to be overlooked.  I’ve seen team after team embrace their early collaborative efforts with energy and enthusiasm, only to stumble to a full stop when predictable—yet unexpected—difficulties smack ‘em in the collective face.

As a result, I’d say the biggest challenge of restructuring schools and/or teams of teachers into highly functioning learning communities is building awareness about what exactly it is that teachers need to know and be able to do in order to work together effectively.  

There are a TON of new behaviors and skills that are necessary before a collaborative community can flourish.  They include:

• Teachers need to learn about the stages of team development and be introduced to the structures and processes that can move teams forward. 
• Teachers need to understand how to build trust between team mates and how to resolve the conflict that is inevitable between passionate colleagues. 
• Teachers must be able to structure conversations around data and adopt a spirit of experimentation, innovation and focused action. 
• School leaders need to recognize the importance of a shared mission, learn to use a core team of teachers to spread that mission, and quickly differentiate professional development opportunities for the range of learning teams in their buildings.

The good news is that countless writers and school change experts—including little ol’ me—have written at length about all of these topics.  With a bit of determination, ANYONE can find practical tools, resources, strategies and suggestions for supporting the development of any learning team and/or community.

The bad news is that widespread organizational knowledge about the PLC process is still uncommon in most schools, which leads to simplified processes and practices OR frustrated teams ready to throw in the towel because they are convinced that PLCs are impossible at best and downright crazy at worst!

What’s the solution for overcoming this challenge? 

A broad guiding coalition that reads, writes and thinks about PLCs at every turn.  Schools need to have book studies together to build shared understandings of what IS happening in their buildings as well as what is LIKELY to happen in their buildings. 

Awareness takes nothing more than a determination to understand—and determination costs nothing except for time.  The schools that succeed in their efforts to restructure as professional learning communities make understanding the process a priority.

Richard’s second question—what was the biggest improvement and benefit once the PLC was successfully implemented—is my favorite to answer.  The biggest benefit of successfully implemented PLCs is highly motivated and energized teachers and school professionals.

Now I know what you’re thinking:  “Shouldn’t the biggest benefit of PLCs be more successful students?"

And I guess if I wanted to be all lofty and high-minded, that would be my answer.  But as a teacher-leader type that likes to speak the uncomfortable truth, I think conversations about improving student performance need to start and end with improving teacher working conditions. 

I mean, think about the professional culture and life in schools that are constantly facing sanctions because of shortsighted state and federal policies.  Teachers work from heavily scripted curriculum guides developed by “experts” who haven’t set foot in a classroom in 20 years. 

Test preparation takes up ridiculous amounts of class time.  Innovation is not only tacitly discouraged, it is actively stifled.  Consequences for ‘failure’ (read: low scores on multiple choice exams) are severe, and as a result, the ONLY thing that matters is not failing.

What kinds of teachers do you think you’re going to be able to recruit to those buildings?  Will motivated, intelligent, passionate professionals be drawn to schools where motivation, intelligence and passion is just plain frowned upon?

Now think about the professional culture and life in schools that function as professional learning communities.  Teachers are seen as experts and there is a real belief that the answers for reaching every child can be found in the collective knowledge of the adults in the building.

Colleagues are encouraged to polish practices together.  Innovation is not only encouraged, it’s required and celebrated. 

Sharing—core beliefs, instructional techniques, students—is a part of the fabric of the community, successes are a result of collaborative efforts, and a commitment to continuous improvement is more than a cliché tacked onto the front cover of the faculty handbook.  It’s a way of life.

What I’m trying to say is that good teachers—like any good professional—are drawn to the kinds of work environments where they can be challenged and where they know that their efforts are valued and respected. 

That’s exactly the kind of environment that you’ll find in highly functioning professional learning communities.  As a result, teacher retention rates rise in the best PLCs, turnover drops, and principals end up buried in resumes from really talented folks who want to get on the right bus. 

Oh yeah—and test scores go up, too.  That’s a given considering that one of the single greatest school-based factors influencing the success or failure of a student is the quality of their classroom teacher. 

Does any of this make sense?

If not, you might want to check out these PLC posts that I’ve written that carry some of the same themes:

I Finally Drank the Kool Aid

Drinking the Kool Aid: Part Deux

The Vision-less Learning Community

Whaddya’ Think of This Vision

Of course, you could also poke through all of my PLC related posts here. There’s GOTTA be something there worth reading!

It’s hard to believe, but our focused three-day conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour—authors of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap—is quickly coming to an end! 

This conversation has been unique to me because it was driven by a small handful of really bright minds.  While there weren’t dozens of participants, those who came engaged deeply:  asking and answering questions, challenging thinking and allowing themselves to be challenged.

The end result is a conversation that will challenge your thinking, too!  Take a few minutes exploring the summaries from the first and second days of our conversation and then poke through our thread online. 

You might also be interested in the comments that I found most interesting today:

On Slide 2, David C asks a really interesting question about essential outcomes when he writes, "Paring down the curriculum can be a bit tricky, though.  When we talk about 8-10 outcomes, how specific do we want an outcome to be? 

For example, a math teacher can determine an outcome to be "students can identify and apply linear relationships between two variables," but this outcome can involve multiple skills.  We can also break things down to the specific skills, but then 8-10 outcomes may be too narrow of a focus."

For my learning team, focusing on the smallest measurable skill has become a driving force.  Our objectives---which are developed at the state level---are often incredibly broad and they require fluency with several independent skills in order to demonstrate mastery.

As a group, we've gone through the process of breaking these broader objectives down into discrete skill sets and have designed a series of lessons for each objective that incorporates practice with the skills that we've identified. 

By breaking everything into discrete skills, we've made reporting and tracking mastery far more targeted and specific---which makes intervening for students easier. 

Does this make any sense?  Our "essential outcomes" are broad objectives that we break down into independent skill sets that are targeted in our instructional planning and reporting.

On Slide 3, Matt Townsley asks a question that I'd love to see people answer---both here in the comment section of this blog and in our Voicethread conversation. 

He writes: "Does anyone have a great story they could share about addressing common content while teaching in a much different way than a colleague, but still producing parallel student learning?"

Wouldn't it be great if we could collect a bunch of tangible examples of the kinds of "parallel student learning" that Matt is asking about?  We'd finally be able to dispel the myth that PLCs are about standardizing practice!

On Slide 5, Bill Ivey---a great friend who teaches in a small boarding school in Massachusetts---spends time explaining how his faculty works diligently to tap into the knowledge of everyone when targeting the needs of individual students. 

He mentions how coaches, guidance counselors, academic teachers, school principals and house parents are involved in designing solutions for struggling students.

What I'm wondering is how common are these practices in traditional schools?  Are your buildings doing a good job eliciting information from all of the important adults in the lives of your struggling students? 

How have you created time for this kind of cross communication?  What are the barriers to seeing more faculty-wide collaboration around individual students.

On the final slide of the conversation, Matt Townsley raises another interesting question when he asks:  "What is the role of non-core academic teachers in collaborative teams...specifically those without as much  "core content?" I'm thinking of the vocal music teacher or the industrial tech teacher."

Great question, huh?  And one that comes up often in conversations about professional learning communities.  Schools often have trouble figuring out how best to integrate non-core professionals into the collaborative work of their schools. 

I'd like to put an interesting twist on Matt's question:  What role can non-core teachers play in a school's system of interventions? 

I mean, so much of our attention is on whether or not students are mastering the core academic skills that are required---both for success in any subject and for success on standardized measures of student performance---that the work students do in elective classes is completely overlooked.

What's strange about that is many of our struggling students are more successful in their elective classes than they are at any time during their school day!
How can (are?) schools taking advantage of this reality? 

How are they taking advantage of the elective teachers in their building to reach students who aren't being successful in their core academic classrooms?

Interesting stuff, huh?  And questions that any school working to create a system of interventions are going to have to wrestle with at some point or another! 

Now, our conversation is officially over, but I’ll leave it open for commenting until the end of the day tomorrow.  That way, you can sneak in to leave any final thoughts that you want to share.  Rick and Becky will be stopping by once more as well, so if you’ve got specific questions for them, get ‘em up quick!

Also, Solution Tree will be leaving the link to a digital copy of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap open until the end of the day tomorrow…so if you haven’t gotten your copy yet, be sure to click here.

Just remember that some readers have been having trouble getting their copy to download.  While the link is definitely live and working, you definitely have to register for a free account and you may have to click the link more than once to get the PDF file to load.

Hope this all makes sense to you---and thank you for being a part of my professional growth.  I love listening to and learning from y’all.

Honestly, I couldn’t be more tickled with how Day 1 of our conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the challenges of setting up school-based systems for intervention has gone! 

In just a few short hours, we’ve had BRILLIANT questions asked and answered by professionals working in positions across the educational spectrum.  Classroom teachers are thinking alongside principals and professional developers.  Teachers in large schools are thinking alongside teachers in small, rural communities. 

That kind of diversity leads to a collectively intelligent group, y’all.  My thinking has already been challenged about a dozen times, and that’s cool. 

Here's a few interesting strands of conversation that you might want to jump in on:

On Slide 2, Dan Greenberg---who is a professional developer from Houston---asked an interesting question about our perspectives towards curricula when he asked: 

"In the realm of multicultural education, we hear a lot about some teachers having a deficit view of students and their potential and it seems that deficit view can be applied to curriculum as well.  Are we looking for what should be cut out or is the focus on what should be our essentials?"

That's got me thinking simply because I've never really considered the impact that my own view of the curriculum might have on my teaching and learning---and more importantly on the way that I choose to interact with students or to deliver instruction. 

Is it possible that a deficit view---what in our curriculum do we need to get rid of---might carry implications for our belief systems about what is possible and/or impossible to teach to our kids?

On Slide 3, Eric Townsley and Becky Goerend have introduced the challenges of regrouping for differentiation in high schools, where teachers can often be the only instructor of a particular subject, and in small schools, where there may only be one teacher at each grade level. 

That's really got me thinking, simply because I work in a large school where there are no fewer than 4 teachers in each content area at every grade level.  What I'm wondering is how regrouping to provide differentiated instruction looks different in small schools. 

How can faculties---regardless of their size---make opportunities for reteaching possible?

On Slide 5, Matt Townsley---a full time math teacher---wonders whether school wide systems of interventions are even possible in buildings where faculty members haven't bought into the idea that all teachers serve all students. 

He writes, "Rick talked about the need to think of students as "ours" instead of "mine."  I think having conversations leading to this mindset may be a pre-requisite to the interventions themselves.  A culture change of sorts.  How has it started in your schools?"

I think this is an important question to consider.  How do schools that have embraced the idea that every teacher serves every child---and that logical interventions require redistributing the intellectual capital of a building----make this philosophical shift. 

Are there specific steps that school and teacher leaders can take to develop this mentality in their faculties, or are such attitudes just the random result of a group of likeminded teachers coming together?

On Slide 7, Matt Townsley asks another key question when thinking about the common "yeah, buts" that prevent teachers and schools from creating effective systems of intervention. 

He writes, "Yeah, but as a classroom teacher, how do I get my principal on board if they're resistant to the idea of restructuring?"

Great question, isn't it?  In the end, classroom teachers have little organizational authority.  We can't require the kinds of changes necessary beyond the classroom to make school-wide intervention systems possible. 

So if we're working in a building where there is little momentum from the top to work differently, what kind of actions should we take to move responsible practice forward?

On Slide 10, Russ Goerend argues that in order for school leaders to get faculty members on board, they've got to present the "whys" behind both professional learning communities and systematic interventions designed to meet the needs of every learner. 

By presenting the "whys," school leaders get skeptics on board and provide supporters with knowledge that can be used to bolster their gut instincts. 

I'm wondering, though, just how many school leaders do an effective job of outlining the "whys" of professional learning communities to their faculty members. 

I've worked with far too many skeptical teachers to believe that a clear case for professional learning communities and interventions for students is being made in most districts.  There's still a lot of doubt---especially in the face of new and challenging work. 

So my question is a simple one:  How important is it for school leaders to clearly, convincingly and constantly outline the "whys" to their faculty members?

A pointer for participants:  Many users have asked whether it is possible for one person to leave more than one comment on each slide.  The answer is yes---and I hope you will!  Ongoing dialogue between participants around one concept is what makes a conversation healthy.

When you do, though, you won't see a new icon added around our focusing quote.  In order to keep a slide from getting cluttered with icons, whenever a participant adds a second comment to a slide, Voicethread adds the comment to the conversation without adding a new icon. 

Other participants will know that you've added a second comment by looking at the timeline found beneath each slide, where they will see a new yellow comment tab.  They will also see a yellow box---and a groovy yellow speech bubble---surrounding your icon.

Here's to hoping that you'll take the time to stop by our conversation before it ends on Friday!  Not only will you learn a ton....we'll learn a ton from you!

Preparing for our upcoming conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the steps that highly functioning professional learning communities take to provide enrichment and remediation opportunities for every child has gotten me thinking a ton about the intervention efforts of my own learning team.

You see, even though I work with some of the most accomplished teachers that I’ve ever met—people who have changed my practice in deep and meaningful ways over the course of our time together—we’ve struggled to craft team-based remediation and enrichment opportunities for our students. 

What’s crazy is that even though we know that taking action on evidence is essential to ensuring success for every child that walks through our classrooms, organizing that action has been harder than we could have ever expected.

I think a major part of our struggles is that we haven’t really had the chance to see examples of team-based interventions in action. 

We wonder how other teams are efficiently collecting learning data to determine which students need extra time to master content and which students are ready to move ahead.  We’d love to see how other teams are creatively restructuring the blocks of time built into our master schedule to create additional opportunities for learning. 

We’re curious about how other teams are using human capital—tapping into school professionals like our academically gifted teachers and guidance counselors—to create smaller groups for remediation and enrichment.

My guess is that we’d probably hit the ground running if we could replicate the work of teams that had successfully created additional time for struggling students to learn. 

Philosophically, we’ve bought into the idea that first attempts at remediation and enrichment should take place at the team level.  We’re just not sure how to put philosophy into practice. 

What lessons can you learn from our struggles? 

That’s easy:  If you’re a school leader interested in seeing team-based interventions spread across every grade level and content area in your building, you’ve got to bring transparency to the process.

The chances are good that somewhere in your building, teachers and teams are collecting data efficiently and using time in innovative ways to reach students, right? 

Your job is to systematically document those efforts, building your organization’s collective knowledge about what works.  In the most effective professional learning communities, no team develops intervention efforts from scratch.  Instead, they learn from the successes and failures of colleagues working with the same students, schedules and resources. 

Intimidated yet?  Well you shouldn’t be! 

Building the organizational knowledge of your school starts by answering the following four questions about each intervention strategy that has already been tried by your teachers and learning teams:

• What did this intervention strategy look like in action?  In a few short sentences, describe each team-based intervention effort that has been tried in your building. Include the name of the team involved and the reason the intervention was initially designed.
• How effective was this intervention strategy?  How do you know that this intervention effort was effective or ineffective? What evidence has the team collected to show that the intervention has impacted students in a positive way?
• What resources were necessary to ensure effective implementation of this intervention strategy? Include consumable physical supplies as well as professional development, additional time, or additional faculty members. Can your school support the expansion of this intervention strategy?
• What teams could benefit from learning more about this intervention strategy? Which faculty members were essential to the success of this intervention? Who are they connected to in your building? How can you use their relationships to spread this intervention?

Once you’ve collected information about each intervention strategy that has already been tried in your building, you’ll have an incredibly valuable source of customized information about what’s working—and what’s not—in your building. 

You’ll be able to use this information to spot patterns and to answer questions like:

• How can our schedule be manipulated to create more time for learning?
• Are other school professionals making a direct impact on intervention efforts?
• What professional development does our faculty need in order to effectively intervene on behalf of students?
• Where are the pockets of innovation in our building?  How can I use relationships to spread this innovation?

More importantly, your learning teams will have access to tangible sets of plans for innovation efforts that they can tailor to their own grade levels and/or content areas. 

Does this make any sense? 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that systematically documenting the intervention efforts that are already happening in your building can help to close the dreaming-doing gap for teachers.

And if you’re interested in learning more about interventions in action, be sure to mark your calendars for May 19-21, when we’ll explore systems of intervention together here on the Radical with Rick and Becky DuFour. 

(Blogger’s Note:  If you’re interested, you can download an interactive PDF that includes my four key questions here.  It’s a part of a collection of handouts from my book on professional learning communities.)

Having worked in a professional learning community for almost six years now, I can tell you that nothing is more challenging for traditional schools than crafting a school-wide system of interventions. 

Even my building—which embraced the concept of ensuring success for every child from day one—has struggled to fully implement an effective plan for providing much-needed remediation and enrichment.

And it' ain’t like we haven’t tried! 

Like many schools, we offer opportunities for extra learning at every grade level and we’ve got a student support team that brainstorms solutions for students who continue to struggle after classroom teachers have done their best—but those pieces don’t always work together in a systematic way and they’re not always implemented consistently by every teacher, team and/or grade level.

Crazy, isn’t it?  We’re committed, but commitment alone hasn’t been enough to get the job done. 

Which is why I’m completely jazzed that Rick and Becky DuFour have decided to join me here on the Radical for another 3-day asynchronous conversation, scheduled for May 19th through the 21st! 

As two of the foremost experts on restructuring schools as professional learning communities—remember that in addition to their work with buildings across the United States and Canada, both Rick and Becky led successful change efforts in their own schools—they’ve got tons of experience with effective interventions.

In fact, the best part of Rick and Becky’s newest book—Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap—is that it is FULL of practical examples of specific intervention strategies being implemented in schools of all shapes and sizes. 

If Rick and Becky are willing to share even a small piece of their knowledge during the course of our conversation—something they did times ten during our first conversation back in September—we’ll all walk away more confident in our ability to collectively respond to the needs of every student in our buildings. 

So mark your calendar. 

Plan on stopping by our conversation—which you’ll be able to access from here on the Radical—for a few minutes each day.  Bring questions about interventions.  Share examples of what’s working in your building.  Listen to others working through the same challenges as you are.

There’s no two ways about it:  This is a great chance to strengthen your school’s intervention practices, and I hope you’ll join us!

(Blogger’s Note:  Even though I would have done it for free, Solution Tree—the DuFour’s publishing company—is paying me a bit o’ cash to moderate this conversation.  To learn more about my relationship with Solution Tree, read my nifty new disclosure policy.)