In a recent New Yorker article, noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande makes an interesting observation: Professional athletes – who are already at the top of their game – almost ALWAYS hire a coach to guide their continued growth yet successful professionals in fields like medicine and education somehow believe that “being coached” is beneath them.

This dichotomy stood out starkly to Gawande after squeezing in a tennis lesson with a 20-something tennis pro who helped him to improve his already impressive serve – Gawande was once a highly ranked high school tennis star in Ohio – in just one lesson.

He writes:

“Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel.

The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t.

I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?”

(p. 2)

Determined to experiment with his theory that coaching carries potential for professionals working beyond the courts, Gawande contacted Robert Osteen – a general surgeon that Gawande had admired and trained under during his residency – and asked him if he’d be willing to serve as a surgical coach.

Osteen agreed and began observing Gawande’s practices in the operating room over the next several months.

From the first procedure – a routine thyroidectomy that Gawande had performed thousands of times – Osteen’s observations proved to be invaluable.

He picked up on seemingly minor things – the way Gawande held his elbows during the procedure, the negative impact that patient draping curtains were having on aides and assistants, the positioning of surgical lights – that Gawande could work on immediately.

As Gawande explains:

“That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.

It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us…

Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice.

Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes.”

(p. 7)

The principals of PLCs can learn real lessons from Gawande’s coaching experience.

Here’s three:

Finding coaches for every faculty member – including singletons – is essential for continued improvement.

Perhaps the most important lesson in Gawande’s coaching experiment is that every professional – experienced teachers included – can benefit from the guidance and advice offered by talented peers who observe their practice.

That is a lesson that resonates with the principals of professional learning communities, doesn’t it? After all, we’ve embraced the notion that collective reflection around practice can change educators.

The challenge, however, is ensuring that EVERY teacher – including singletons and teachers working in small schools – has access to a capable reflection partner.

While finding logical intellectual pairings for singletons and teachers in small schools can be difficult, it’s not impossible.

New digital tools and spaces can make giving and receiving feedback around instruction possible for every teacher.  Physical boundaries are no longer an insurmountable barrier for creative schools and teachers who are willing to explore the potential in electronic teaming.

 

Coaches don’t automatically HAVE to have experience in the field where they are coaching in order to be valuable.

One of the most interesting twists in Gawande’s story is that he wasn’t initially sure that Osteen – a general surgeon who spent the bulk of his career removing cancerous tumors – would be able to offer any kind of meaningful support simply because he was a specialist in endocrine surgery.

What he learned, however, is that there are a TON of skills – body positioning, tool management, patient monitoring, pre-surgical planning – that transfer across surgical disciplines.

While Osteen may not be able to offer specific advice about thyroidectomies – the first surgery he observed Gawande conducting – his input on the skills that DO translate across disciplines has helped Gawande to reduce his surgical complication rates.

For those leading small schools or trying to support singleton teachers, this lesson is perhaps the most important, isn’t it?

Just like the skills that cross surgical disciplines, there are PLENTY of skills that cross educational disciplines – and interdisciplinary teams of teachers focused on these skills can result in productive learning for teachers, too.

Why can’t art teachers join together with language arts teachers to study persuasion or giving and receiving feedback?

Students in both fields must master the skills of influence and critique, right?

Why can’t social studies and language arts teachers join together to study nonfiction reading strategies?

Students in both fields must master the skills necessary to tackle challenging texts, right?

Why can’t teachers in ANY domain join together to study 21st Century skills like problem solving, information management, and collaborative dialogue?

EVERY student must master these skills if they are going to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce.

The point is a simple one: The content of our curricula isn’t the only factor that teams of teachers can study together.

Meaningful learning can occur when educators with disparate professional expertise focus on shared skills that cross disciplines.

 

Non-instructional staff can and should be involved in improving the performance of a PLC.

Perhaps the most troublesome part of Gawande’s coaching experience, argues medical specialist Virgina Tyack, is that he never mentions any efforts to learn from the nonsurgical personnel that are a part of every procedure.

“Gawande, like all surgeons,” she writes, “operates with other members of a surgical team, and his piece doesn’t explore the shared experience of his team members, all of whom are vitally aware of the progress of a surgery.

“I once worked in a lowly position in an operating room. I was never consulted about how any aspect of a procedure, however minor, might be improved, until the hospital was faced with a malpractice lawsuit” (Tyack, 2011).

Professional learning communities make the same mistake, don’t they?

Instead of working to incorporate the voices and experiences of non-instructional staffers – secretaries, janitors, teachers’ assistants parents, community leaders - we tend to fall into comfortable patterns where important choices are informed by teachers only.

The fact of the matter is that we inadvertently hobble ourselves when we overlook the experiences and expertise of the people in our professional learning communities that are working beyond the classroom.

 

In the end, Gawande’s argument that coaching matters for professionals regardless of their level of expertise is fundamentally sound.

He writes:

“Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.

You have to work at what you’re not good at.

In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed.

Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.

The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.

(p. 5)

Our challenge as leaders of professional learning communities, then, is to make sure that EVERY teacher – regardless of their field or the size of our schools – have coaches to learn from.

Whether we embrace electronic tools to pair teachers of similar content areas together or choose to encourage teachers of interdisciplinary teams to focus on the kinds of broader skills that transcend content, we have to make sure that peer coaching plays a role in the professional growth of our entire faculties.

We also need to ensure that we work to maximize the contributions and to take advantage of the expertise of our non-instructional personnel. Overlooking their contributions is nothing less than shortsighted.

_____________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Twitter for Singletons in a PLC

Electronic Teaming for Singletons in a PLC

Organizing Learning Teams in a PLC

I've said it before and I'm sure that I'll say it again: The Innovator's DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen has really had an impact on my recent thinking. 

The book's central premise is that organizations can figure out how to become more innovative by studying the key actions of the most innovative companies---Amazon, Apple, eBay, PayPal, Virgin---and one of those actions is systematically hiring innovative people.

Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen put it this way:

Clearly, if companies want innovative ideas from employees, they should screen for innovation potential in the hiring process.  Most companies rarely do it, but highly innovative ones do.

They explicitly screen candidates for creativity and innovation skills as part of the new-hire process.

(p. 194)

Interesting, isn't it? 

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure that I've ever been a part of an interview team that was thinking specifically about the innovation potential of the teachers that we were considering for positions in our building.

So I decided to whip up a few interview questions that might just help schools do a better job spotting the most innovative minds in their applicant pools. 

They are designed to spotlight the five skills that Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen believe are characteristic of innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

Here they are.

Tell me about a lesson that you have tinkered with over the years.

What did that lesson originally look like? What changes have you made to it over time?

How did those changes impact your students? Your peers? Which changes were the most successful? Which changes failed miserably?

What did you learn—about teaching, about learning, about students, about yourself—from those instructional successes or failures?

How do YOU learn?

Are you constantly reading? Constantly writing? Constantly practicing?

More importantly, who are the most interesting people that you currently learn with? How did you meet them? How do you connect with them?

What have they taught you? What have you taught them?

What well-established professional practice are you skeptical about?

What is it about this practice that leaves you doubting? Can you give tangible examples of places where this practice has let you—or your students—down?

Tell me about the most interesting idea that you’ve learned outside of education.

What is it about that idea that captures your imagination? Can you find any connections between that idea and your work in schools?

Can that idea change the work that you are doing with students, colleagues and/or peers?

Tell me about a profession that you are curious about.

What is it about that profession that captures your imagination? Why would working in that field leave you energized? How does that profession compare—positively or negatively—to education?

 

You can download a PDF version of these questions here:

Download Handout_InnovationInterviewQuestions

Hope they are helpful---and more importantly, I hope that if you use them in your interview process that you'll leave me some feedback and tell me how they've worked!

 

____________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Innovation in Social Spaces

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions

Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

More on Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

 

Ross Smith—the director of Window’s Core Security at Microsoft spotlighted in The Innovator’s DNA (2011)—knows a thing or two about structuring collaborative groups.

Responsible for managing almost 70 teams focused on Window’s security issues, Smith noticed that one group—the Defect Prevention team—had been the most innovative for five straight years.

Specifically, this six-person team had developed a series of productivity games designed entertain users while simultaneously gathering feedback on the functionality of Windows products.

As Smith explains, this novel approach to gathering feedback from end users was incredibly successful:

“We saved millions of dollars and improved quality to a level that we’ve never seen before”

(Ross Smith as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 181).

What WAS it that made the Defect Prevention team uniquely innovative in an organization known for innovation?

First, its members possessed the kinds of discovery driven skills that define innovators: associating, questioning, observing, idea networking and experimenting (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

These skills enabled the team to think creatively about the challenge of getting users to provide feedback on Microsoft products. They were willing to challenge the status quo and find connections between seemingly dissimilar ideas: gaming and gathering feedback.

They were also able to draw on their own networks—of ideas and individuals—to polish their thinking and they were willing to tinker with their ideas over time.

Equally important, however, each member of the team was particularly gifted in a different discovery skill. While some were expert networkers, others made associations or asked questions with ease.

This diversity, notes Innovator’s DNA authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen, defines the most successful collaborative teams:

When complimentary discovery skills exist, the rich skill diversity increases the team’s overall ability to innovate.

Thus, the team’s capacity to generate new ideas consistently outstrips the ability of either any individual team member or another team when team members excel at the same discovery skill (e.g., networking is the primary source of new ideas for all team members).

Moreover, when different team members shine at different discovery skills, they can learn more from each other, creating further innovation synergies.

(Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 182).

But discovery driven skills aren’t the only skills necessary for driving innovation on collaborative teams.

Delivery skills—analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, self-discipline—are equally important (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

As Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen explain:

Successful innovation as a team requires the ability to generate novel ideas and the ability to execute those ideas on the team.

Both skills sets are necessary.

Smart leaders know this and consciously think about team composition, making sure the team is balanced enough in terms of discovery and delivery skills.”

(p. 184).

Pierre Omidyar—eBay’s discovery-minded founder—recognized the essential role that delivery skills play in successful innovation and intentionally added Jeff Skoll—a detail-oriented Stanford MBA—to to his leadership team (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011).

Omidyar explains his relationship with Skoll like this:

“I’d say I did more of the creative work developing the product and solving problems around the product, while Jeff was involved in the more analytical and practical side of things.

He was the one who would listen to an idea of mine and then say, ‘OK, let’s figure out how to get this done.”

(Omidyar as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 183)

And Omidyar’s not alone. The most successful period of professional growth at Dell Computers came when Michael Dell—the creative founder of Dell—worked closely with delivery-oriented president Kevin Rollins.

As Rollins explains:

“Michael simply owns more of the entrepreneurial juice stuff. He has an idea a day, an hour.

In big companies, you can’t do an idea a day. I’m the governor of the innovation engine.”

(Rollins as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 183)

So what lessons can the principals of PLCs learn from the successful collaborative teams at Microsoft, eBay and Dell Computers?

Here’s two:

If you care about instructional innovation, team composition is an essential ingredient to consider.

I’ve grown increasingly disenchanted with the content-first-and-nothing-else-matters approach to creating collaborative teams that has become so common in many professional learning communities.

The fact of the matter is that just because teachers share a content area and/or grade level doesn’t mean that they’re automatically going to be a successful collaborative group.

Think about Microsoft’s Defect Prevention team: They weren’t successful simply because they were all Defect Prevention specialists.

They were successful because they were Defect Prevention specialists who brought a broad range of complementary discovery and delivery skills to their team.

The lesson is a simple one: To be successful, a team has to have the right mix of discovery and delivery oriented members.

Sharing a specialty alone just isn’t enough to hold a group committed to innovation together.

 

Delivery skills are as important to successful teams as discovery skills.

Think about the teachers in your building who regularly wow you. They’re discovery-oriented, aren’t they?

Constantly dreaming about new ways to transform learning environments for today’s students, their practices seem revolutionary.

Sustainable change in organizations, however, isn’t about revolution—it’s about evolution.

The best ideas aren’t the ones that are the most radical; the best ideas are the ones that can actually be implemented systematically across a schoolhouse.

Like Michael Dell, every learning team needs a “governor of the innovation engine,” and those governors are often the delivery-oriented people in your buildings.

While delivery skills aren’t sexy, they make the difference between a dream and a tangible change in a learning team’s practices.

Sure, a learning team needs dreamers. Schools have earned a well-deserved reputation for being resistant to new ideas, y’all.

But school leaders must recognize that a group of teachers with great imaginations but no follow through is just as weak as a nose-to-the-grindstone group who never dreams.

 

Long story short, team assignments in a professional learning community require a level of nuance that often seems to be missing from our current practices.

If we want to give every team a chance to succeed at the kinds of innovative behaviors that define the most accomplished collaborative groups in the private sector, we need to think carefully about more than just the content and grade level that teachers are working in.

Instead, we need to think about the kinds of discovery and delivery skills that teachers bring to the professional table as well.

Sure, this kind of nuanced decision-making isn’t going to be easy.

It requires a willingness to screen the skills and abilities of applicants and in-house faculty members. It requires a willingness to tinker with team assignments, looking for the perfect blend of natural dispositions. It requires a willingness to question the current structure of the learning teams in our buildings.

All of this takes a heck of a lot more time than just finding people with the same certifications and then assigning them to collaborative groups based on the content area and grade level that they teach.

But the return on your investment of time is well worth it. As Dan Bean—a core member of Microsoft’s successful Defective Product team—explains:

“All I know is that the discussions we have in this team are the most creative and stimulating I have run into at Microsoft.

And that makes it really fun to work in the team.”

(Bean as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 182)

Aren’t those the kinds of comments that you want the teachers of YOUR professional learning teams to make about their collaborative work with one another other?

___________________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

What CAN the Principals of PLCs Learn from Love Labs?

Evolutionary Lessons for PLC Principals

Sustainable Change in Schools

What Can PLC Principals Learn from Hand-washing?

Let me start with a simple, researched-based truth:

Formative assessment—timely feedback gathered and reviewed during the course of a learning experience that serves to 'inform' both teachers AND students and allows for the 'formation' of new learning plans—matters.

Need proof?

Let’s start with the fact that after conducting a meta-analysis of every significant research study on achievement in the past three decades, Bob Marzano believes in formative assessment.

In fact, the conclusions he’s drawn in What Works in Schools suggest that providing students with timely and specific feedback on their levels of mastery can account for percentile gains of anywhere from 21 to 41 points—higher than gains caused by other school-based achievement factors including parent and community involvement, safe and orderly environments, and collegiality in the schoolhouse.

As John Hattie—an educational researcher cited by Marzano in What Works—writes, “The most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback. The simplest prescription for improving education must be 'dollops of feedback.'” (As quoted in Marzano, 2003, p. 37)

But I’m really starting to wonder whether or not effective formative assessment is even possible in the classroom.

Here’s why: I’ve spent the first four weeks of this school year trying to make formative assessment a bigger part of my own instructional practices—and it’s damn near killed me.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m proud of the work that I’m doing and am convinced that I’ve adopted some of the best practices suggested by assessment experts ranging from Marzano to Stiggins, Ainsworth, Chappius and Chappius.

Here’s what I’m doing:

I’ve got short lists of essential objectives (see here) called I Can Statements written in student friendly language that students refer to before every lesson and use to self-assess their own progress towards mastery.

I’ve developed exemplars demonstrating a full-range of performance for almost every subjective task that we’ve tackled (see here, here and here).

I’ve given two or three practice assignments—tasks that count for less than 10 percent of a child’s grade and are designed solely to give students feedback on their individual strengths and weaknesses and to give me a sense for the intellectual hiccups that my students are having around the concepts we are studying—for every essential skill that we’re required to study.

I’m using my Livescribe pen to record quick mini-tutorials on the concepts that great numbers of my kids seem to be struggling with (see here).

I’ve used student responders to quickly measure student mastery and to give my kids a chance to instantly see whether or not they have a firm grasp on the content we’re studying in class.

I’ve used our peer tutoring program—a system of intervention that pairs struggling students with successful peers to rework tasks and to review content—to provide support before summative assessments.

I’ve used our working lunch program—a 30 minute one-on-one review session with the classroom teacher—to help kids that continue to struggle after peer tutoring.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Heck, I’d bet that there aren’t many teachers who are taking these kinds of steps on a regular basis anywhere in America.

Here’s are the problems, though:

First, I’m probably three-weeks behind in my curriculum—formatively assessing and then taking action on what I’m learning is a relatively time-consuming process, especially when kids aren’t mastering content at the rate that my district’s pacing guide suggests is possible.

Second, I’m completely exhausted and doubtful that I can keep up this work all year long. I haven’t seen my daughter or my wife much this month simply because responsible formative assessment is an incredibly time-consuming process.

Heck, just last night I spent 3 hours grading one set of graphs because I wanted to get them back to my students in a timely way—but that required working from 5:30-8:30 and missing dinner with my family and bedtime with my little girl.

The past two weekends in a row were similar stories as I spent 5-6 hours both weekends putting exemplars together, writing remediation activities and designing new lessons to review challenging content.

Add on top of this my need to work several different part time jobs simply to pay my bills—combined with the meetings I’m required to attend during 3 of my 5 weekly planning periods and the room cleaning that I’m required to do now that our district has cut back on janitorial services—and it becomes clear that I’m going to have to make a choice between formative assessment and living a life.

If a highly-motivated guy like me is starting to doubt formative assessment, I’ve GOT to believe that there are thousands—if not millions—of teachers doubting formative assessment too.

So what steps can school leaders take to make formative assessment a more widely-accepted and doable practice in their buildings?

Here are a few suggestions:

Make it painfully clear that you DON’T expect your teachers to march through their entire curriculum.

In my 18 years of teaching, I’ve NEVER heard a principal tell me that it was okay to choose a small handful of essential objectives from my curriculum to focus on.

That creates tension in teachers who know that to formatively assess their way through an entire curriculum would be simply impossible but who also worry about what their principals will say if they pare down the “required curriculum” without permission.

By making it clear that the first step in formative assessment is deciding on a manageable set of objectives that REALLY matter, principals instantly make the recursive nature of formative assessment practices more approachable for their teachers.

Find ways to reduce the number of students that each teacher serves.

I work with 120 students this year—and while that’s a pretty average load for a middle/high school teacher, it can make formative assessment a nightmare.

From strictly an assessment standpoint, I’ve got to find ways to collect information on 120 kids every time I introduce new content or skills.

Then, I’ve got to record that information and report it to parents, students, and other professionals in my building.

The entire process takes about 3 hours for a typical assignment—and that’s time I just don’t have.

Add on top of that the other clerical tasks that come with 120 students—communicating with 120 sets of parents, responding to emails, collecting permission slips, attending special programs meetings—and it’s painfully obvious that formatively assessing large groups of kids ain’t going to be easy.

That’s why I'd love to see principals working to find ways to reduce the number of students that each teacher serves.

Work in a middle school or a high school?

Hiring people who carry multiple certifications and creating integrated classes—middle schools could consider language arts/social studies and math/science classes—can cut student loads without requiring additional resources.

Work in an elementary school?

Convert beyond-the-classroom positions into teaching positions. I know of an elementary principal who cut class sizes to 15 in her building by eliminating teacher assistant positions completely.

While it’s a nontraditional move, she’s created a situation where teachers can really pull off sustained formative assessment efforts because they’re working with 15 kids instead of 120.

Eliminate meetings, Eliminate meetings, and then eliminate some more meetings.

If principals really believe in formative assessment, they’ve got to recognize that it’s an incredibly time-consuming process.

That means the limited planning and professional development time that teachers actually DO have in schools needs to be protected if we’re ever going to make formative assessment practices a priority in our buildings.

When we try to cram formative assessment practices into the time that we have leftover after faculty meetings, department meetings, grade level meetings, and professional learning team meetings, we just shouldn’t be surprised when they fail.

Instead, school leaders should ask that teachers meet with ONE collaborative group and one collaborative group only. Then, they should require that collaborative groups make formative assessment a priority.

Meetings should focus on studying formative assessment data, creating exemplars, improving rubrics, and designing remediation and enrichment opportunities for kids.

The simple truth is teachers just don’t have the time to do formative assessment correctly if their attention is divided between the kinds of traditional meetings we’ve always been required to attend.

Does any of this make sense? Essentially what I’m trying to say is that I’m convinced that formative assessment MATTERS—but I’m not convinced that formative assessment is POSSIBLE unless we take some drastic steps to make it a priority in our buildings.

I’m sure I’ll write about formative assessment again—it’s an area of professional focus for me this year. I’d love to hear your thinking, too.

How can I make this work easier?

One of the most popular sessions that I deliver at Solution Tree’s PLC Institutes is titled, “We’re Meeting.  Now What?”

The session is designed to introduce participants to basic tools—data conversation protocols, conflict resolution strategies, information gathering surveys—that can make collaborative meetings more efficient. 

Inevitably, though, participants ask tons of questions about what the “right” learning teams look like. 

I figured I’d answer three of the most popular questions here.

Hopefully, my answers—which are built on my own experiences as a teacher on collaborative teams AND on the hours I have spent learning from PLC experts like Rick and Becky DuFour, Mike Mattos and Bob Eaker—will help principals to structure meaningful collaborative teams for their teachers:

How many different learning teams should each teacher be assigned to?

This question is asked dozens of times by participants at PLC Institutes and the answer given by Rick and Becky DuFour is direct, simple and consistent: 

Teachers should never be assigned to more than two learning teams—and ideally, teachers would only work on one learning team.

I think principals—especially those who have no experience as members of collaborative teaching teams—can fall into the trap of believing that if collaborative work with ONE group of colleagues is valuable, collaborative work with THREE or FOUR groups of colleagues is even better.

Unless your district is flush with cabbage and has decided to give teachers three hours of planning time per day, that kind of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen.

You see, collaborative work and collective inquiry around practice just isn’t as easy as you think it is.  It takes a TON of time and mental energy. 

Getting ONE group working smoothly will consume all of the shared planning time that you create for your teachers.

If you require teachers to work on multiple teams, they will attend every meeting—we’re smart enough to know that we can’t defy your direct orders—but they will also avoid challenging conversations at all costs.

Why?

Challenging conversations are time consuming and we just don’t have the time for three or four challenging conversations every single week. 

Remember that we still have papers to grade, lessons to write, parents to contact, IEP meetings to attend, hallways to supervise, teams to coach, faculty meetings to attend, classrooms to clean, families to raise and lives beyond school to live.

Long story short:  In an ideal world, teachers would have the time to work in several different collaborative groups per week, exploring several different topics together.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. 

If you want collaboration to be productive, you’ve got to limit the numbers of collaborative groups that you assign your teachers to. 

 

How big should learning teams be?

At every Institute that I have presented at in the past two years, I’ve heard HORROR stories about principals of large schools creating teams 8-10 teachers. 

If I could corner their principals, I’d ask them one simple question: When was the last time that YOU productively worked in a group of 8 or more people?

Better question:  What would you say to a teacher who regularly tried to pair students into groups of 8 or more in their classrooms? 

Right—because you know full well that the larger a group becomes, the more challenging it can be to find common ground, you’d suggest that teachers keep student groups small.

You also know that the larger a group becomes, the more likely it is that individual members will intellectually hitchhike, letting their collaborative partners do all the heavy lifting while they sit passively on the sidelines.

The same lessons apply to collaborative groups of teachers, y’all.  Bigger DEFINITELY doesn’t mean better when talking about learning teams.

So what is the right size for the PLCs in your building?  If it is possible given the size of your school, teachers should work on teams of 3-5.

Fewer than 3 teachers in a collaborative group makes it difficult to introduce intellectual diversity to a team. 

More than 5 teachers in a collaborative group makes it difficult to have efficient meetings that start and end on time. 

In large elementary schools with 6-10 classes per grade level, that means dividing teachers into two smaller groups. 

While both groups should sit down together a few times each year to write common assessments and to review collective progress, the regular weekly PLC meeting that teachers attend should always be in the smaller groups.

 

Who should teachers work with—peers teaching the same content or peers working with the same kids?

The most efficient and effective learning teams are those that pair teachers who are teaching the same content to students at the same grade level.

In my large middle school, that means the most efficient and effective learning teams are content AND grade level specific:  Sixth grade science teachers, Seventh grade math teachers, Eighth grade language arts teachers.

Teachers on teams with peers working in the same content and at the same grade level can easily develop—and spot trends in—common assessments with one another.

They can also offer targeted and timely instructional support to one another.

But content and grade level learning teams aren’t the ONLY learning teams that work in buildings—and for teachers in small schools or for teachers in unique content areas, content and grade level learning teams simply aren’t possible.

In those circumstances, I like to encourage schools to pair teachers into groups based on the kinds of skills that students need to master in order to be successful in their courses. 

An example:  In seventh grade here in North Carolina, students learn all about evaluation and persuasion.  They write countless evaluative and persuasive essays.

Interestingly enough, evaluation and persuasion are also an important part of the visual arts curriculum in middle school.  Students need to learn to set criteria to judge the final products that they are creating together.

That means our visual arts teacher could be paired with the seventh grade language arts teachers in a learning team. 

Over the course of the school year, they could study persuasion and evaluation because it is a skill that both groups share in common.

 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that all too often, PLCs stumble because they create structures that are not conducive to adult learning—or feasible, given the time that we have available for collaboration. 

Here’s to hoping that answering these questions will help your learning communities to move forward in a productive way.