PD

Surgeons, Singletons and Coaching in a PLC

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

Are YOU Intentionally Creating a TED in Your Head?

One of the key points that I've picked up from The Innovator's DNA -- a book that I've been talking about for months (see here, here and here) -- is that the most innovative thinkers are those who can think across domains.

When we work systematically to explore thinking that occurs OUTSIDE of our field, we can often find ways to transform the work that we are doing INSIDE of our own organizations.

So how exactly does one come into contact with thinking beyond their own worlds? 

For many cutting edge business professionals, regular interactions with innovators outside of their own fields happen at conferences like TED, which was intentionally established as a forum where thought leaders in technology, entertainment and design could have sustained intellectual collisions with talented peers in adjacent professions. 

Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen explain the power of Ted like this:

"TED's underlying beauty springs from the intentional diversity of participants and presentations.  This diversity forms the foundation for innovators to potentially connect the unconnected.

Innovators in our research not only frequented places like TED, but literally constructed a TED in their heads through an intentional depth and diversity of life experience, creating a personal Medici effect."

(p. 47)

"Constructing a TED in their heads" is a cool phrase, isn't it? 

It is an approachable reminder that when we are building our own learning networks using social tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we need to intentionally reach beyond the thinking of leading educators. 

The question that people constantly ask, however, is:

"So who should/could/would we follow if we wanted to introduce meaningful intellectual diversity into our own learning networks, Bill? 

It's not that we're opposed to the idea of adding new thinkers to our information streams.  We just don't know where to find them!"

While that's a tough question to answer -- the kinds of thinkers who will challenge individual educators is largely dependent on the specific fields that teachers are interested in and/or responsible for -- here are three non-educators that I learn a ton from.

The 99 Percent

(blog, Twitterstream)

When I first stumbled across this stream, I almost skipped it because I thought it had something to do with the Occupy Wall Street protests that are all over the news.  It's not, though -- and I'm glad that I took the time to figure that  out!

The 99 Percent is the blog and Twitterstream of Scott Belsky, founder and CEO of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen.  His central arguments are simple ones: (1). good ideas are useless if you can't implement them and (2). productive, creative teams are the best at moving good ideas forward.

The 99 Percent blog and Twitterstream is literally FULL of examples of innovation in action.  I learn tons about collaboration, experimentation and progress from the stories shared here -- and anytime I can learn more about collaboration, experimentation and progress, my ability to drive change on my learning teams and in my school is enhanced.

 

Amber Mac

(blog, Twitterstream)

Whether conservative educators like it or not, social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook are changing almost everything about life in today's world. 

We interact with friends and family differently than we did 20 years ago.  We interact with businesses and organizations differently than we did 20 years ago. And perhaps most importantly for schools, we LEARN differently than we did 20 years ago.

That means if we are ever going to successfully transform schools, we are going to need to figure out how those same social media spaces can play a role in our work with students.  Choosing to just ignore Twitter and Facebook is a careless and arrogant choice that only serves to make us more irrelevant than we've already become.

Understanding social media spaces can be intimidating, though -- especially for people who grew up thinking that the park or church or Cub Scout meetings were the only social spaces that mattered. 

That's where Amber Mac comes in. 

The author of Power Friending, Mac helps businesses to understand how to leverage social media spaces for growth.  Her writing is direct and approachable -- and the examples that she shares can translate nicely to the work that we do in classrooms and in schools. 

 

Fast Company

(blog, Twitterstream)

Every Saturday morning, I sit down for about 2 hours worth of reading.  As I poke through the collection of blogs that I'm following in my Google Reader, I find myself constantly drawn to the content on the Fast Company website.

With a focus on technology, innovation, leadership and design in the business world, Fast Company shares content that crosses a ton of domains that are important to educators. 

Knowing that schools need to sell themselves in today's tight economy, I find myself especially drawn to the branding articles on Fast Company's site.  The tips and tricks that I pick up there can be applied to the work that schools do when reaching out to their communities.

I'm also drawn to the leadership content on Fast Company's site simply because I know just how essential effective leadership is to driving real change in schools.

Any of this make sense to you? 

Essentially, what I've done is sought out sources that regularly introduce me to the role that concepts I care about -- driving tangible change, using social media spaces to communicate and connect, building a brand that can be embraced by stakeholders and leading in complex organizations -- play in fields BEYOND education.

The 99 Percent, Amber Mac and Fast Company's content helps me to find ways to connect the unconnected and to bring new, fresh and innovative thinking into my information stream. They are a crucial part of my very own "Ted in the Head."

So what non-educators are you following? 

More importantly, how have they changed your learning?

Learning Teams Develop at Different Rates [New Slide]

One of the key points that my Building a Professional Learning Community at Work co-author Parry Graham and I often make is that the learning teams in any given building develop at different rates.

As a result, they need different support and are ready to tackle different tasks at different times. 

Just like we are pushing for differentiation and a customized approach to the individual learners in our classrooms, school leaders must take the same approach when working with professional learning teams.


Download Slide_TeamsDevelopDifferentRates

 

What does that mean for leaders of a PLC?  Perhaps most importanty, it means you need to be regularly monitoring just where your learning teams are.

What kinds of tasks are they ready to tackle?  What kinds of tasks rest too far outside of their current developmental abilities to introduce? 

These two handouts can help you to gather the kind of information necessary to make nuanced choices about the support that you provide to the individual learning teams in your buildings:

Stages of Team Development:  This document details the six main stages of team development that Parry and I see in learning communities.  More importantly, it provides a list of suggestions for supporting teams in each stage of development. 

Professional Development for Learning Teams: This checklist covers the kinds of team-based collaboration and instructional reflection skills that define highly functioning learning teams.  Consider giving it to each team in your school to gather first-hand information about what each team is struggling with. 

I hope these handouts help.  More importantly, I hope that you'll stop by and leave me some feedback about the handouts if you actually use them in your work. 

Parry and I are constantly polishing our own thinking about PLCs, and feedback from others helps us to do just that.

___________________________________

Original Image Credit: Night Run by Phil Roeder

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/5663010874/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on October 10, 2011

 

Just How Much DOES the Composition of a Professional Learning Team Matter?

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?

What CAN Principals of PLCs Learn from Love Labs?

University of Washington psychologist John Gottman—introduced in Malcom Gladwell’s Blink (2005)—has a seemingly amazing ability: Given 15 minutes with any married couple, he can tell you with near certainty—90% accuracy, in fact—whether or not they will stay married or end up divorced.

How does Gottman do it?

By carefully monitoring—second-by-second in laboratory experiments—the emotions attached to the interactions that occur between spouses.

Over time, Gottman and his associates have developed a sophisticated emotional coding system, using nuanced observations and digital sensors to identify the seemingly fleeting moments of deception, defensiveness, contempt, neutrality, sadness, and support that occur during conversations.

Gottman convincingly argues that these fleeting moments of emotion—even when observed for a short period of time—are evidence of the larger pattern of interactions that “arises naturally and automatically” and that inevitably defines any human relationship.

While Gottman’s strategies for predicting the long-term stability of relationships may seem overly complex—he is, after all, strapping couples into sets of electrodes and using computers to spot patterns in huge sets of data collected by colleagues and interns—they are actually more approachable than you think.

Essentially, Gottman argues, all he is doing is tracking the emotional ups and downs in a couple’s interactions.

What’s more, when predicting the long-term stability of a relationship, all emotions are NOT created equal.

In fact, Gottman has discovered that he can accurately predict the strength of a relationship without any gadgets and gizmos simply by looking for just four emotions in a conversation between two people: Defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt.

And of these four emotions, the presence of contempt between two people is the single best predictor of the inevitable demise of a relationship.

He explains the power of contempt like this:

“You would think that criticism would be the worst because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism…

Contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it’s an insult…it’s trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It’s hierarchical.

Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community.”

(Kindle Location 408-417)

What does all this mean for the principals of PLCs?

Perhaps most importantly, the quality of the relationships between members of professional learning teams matter more than you may think.

I’ve spoken to dozens of principals and school leaders about their strategies for organizing teachers into learning teams over the past few years and most tend to place content first when making team assignments.

And in MOST cases, this makes perfect sense.

Content-specific teams are the most effective because they allow teachers to study student learning efficiently. Collective inquiry is just plain easier when you are studying practice with people who teach the same subject as you do.

But some of those same principals seem to profess a blind commitment to content-specific teams under ANY circumstance.

“What if you’ve got two teachers who just CAN’T work together productively?” I’ll often ask.

“They’ll just have to figure it out,” is the most common reply. “I’m not asking them to like each other. I’m asking them to work professionally with one another.

If Gottman’s lessons about marriages are translated to other human relationships, though, it might literally be impossible for two teachers to “just figure it out.”

As he explains:

“Some [interactions] go up, some go down, but once they start going down, toward negative emotion, ninety-four percent will continue going down.

They start on a bad course and they can’t correct it. I don’t think of this as just a slice in time. It’s an indication of how they view their whole relationship.”

(Kindle Location 373-378)

Long story short: Principals of high-functioning PLCs are rarely COMPLETELY committed to organizational concepts.

Instead, they’re completely committed to individuals and relationships.

While they know that the most efficient and effective learning teams are those that include teachers working in the same subject areas and grade levels, they also recognize that NO learning team is efficient and effective if the relationships between individuals are characterized by defensiveness, criticism, stonewalling or contempt.

The question, then, is what are you doing to monitor the quality of the relationships in your building?

Are you giving regular team surveys designed to elicit evidence of unhealthy perceptions of peers? Are you sitting in on meetings and looking for obvious signs of troublesome behaviors?

Are you engaging in ongoing conversations with every teacher about the emotional—instead of the academic—work of their learning teams?

Are you asking teachers to reflect on the kinds of peers that they hold in high regard and then using those reflections when organizing your collaborative groups?

Should you?

__________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Make Like an Obstetrician and Deliver

Evolutionary Lessons for Principals of PLCs

The Power of PLCs

 

PLC Tip: Finding Time for Collaboration

An interesting email landed in my inbox this week from a private school teacher—we’ll call him Jim—who attended one of my sessions at this summer’s Solution Tree PLC Institutes.

Jim wrote:

One of the main messages I picked up on [at the Institute] was that you need to have the school schedule designed in such a way so that teachers have time to collaborate with one another in order to do this right.

Collaboration couldn't be something extra you did before or after school. My principal seemed to be on board with that while at the conference.

Well...things have changed…In our meeting yesterday, our principal mentioned that we probably wouldn't be able to alter the schedule for next year. She mentioned that we would have to "find the time elsewhere."

Any advice?

Anyone who has worked to see their school transition from a traditional structure to a professional learning community is nodding their heads right now, right?

The simple truth is that there is always going to be tension around collaboration in new professional learning communities simply because teachers still have a TON of individual work to do.

Add new team meetings on top of traditional-yet-essential tasks like planning, grading, answering emails and doing hallway duty and we buckle, y’all.

Luckily, there are a few practical steps that both Jim AND his principal can take to make the time challenge more manageable.

Here’s three.


Remember that teachers should be working on one—but no more than two—collaborative teams at any given time.

Easily the biggest mistake that principals new to learning communities make is requiring that teachers meet with EVERYONE.

Rightly convinced that collaboration can change practices and improve student achievement, they push for new meetings with new groups on new days and at new times.

In our middle school—which was led by a remarkably brilliant guy that I believed in completely—that well-intentioned reasoning resulted in teachers meeting with a grade level team, a content team and a vertical team every single week.

I went to every meeting because I was required to, but I sat silently in most of them waiting—often impatiently—to get back to the tasks that mattered the most for my own day-to-day survival.

We went from being a professional learning community to being a professional minute counting community in no time.

What does this mean for principals?

Unless your school board is flush with cash and you have the cabbage to provide your teachers with 3-5 MORE hours of planning per week than they currently have, keep your expectations for new collaborative meetings to a minimum.

Remember that sustainable change starts with thinking at the edges of the boxes. It’s about evolution, not revolution.

Tossing teachers new to PLCs onto three or four teams without providing any new time to collaborate is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Remember that high-functioning PLCs spend EVERY spare minute focused on collective inquiry around student learning.

EVERY spare minute, y’all.

I’ve become convinced over the past seven years of my work with professional learning communities that schools have PLENTY of on-the-clock time for collaboration.

We just waste too much of it on things that are unconnected to student learning.

What does that mean for Jim’s principal?

Faculty meetings need to change. It’s just NOT OKAY to spend 60 minutes a month on the kinds of email-able announcements that we typically fill our time together with.

What’s more, professional development days need to change. If collective inquiry around practice is important, then PD days need to center around the work of collaborative teams studying practice.

What does that mean for Jim?

Our notions of “team meetings” need to change. Agenda items need to be scrutinized carefully and anything that’s not connected to collective inquiry around student learning needs to be ditched.

The meeting agenda that I share with teams has spaces for 3 items and 3 items only. That’s intentional. If a team has more than 3 items on their agenda, none of the items is going to get any kind of meaningful time and attention.

More importantly, by forcing teams to choose THREE items to talk about, you are forcing prioritization—which naturally leads to more efficient collaboration.

Once schools and teams start to focus—truly focus—on the RIGHT kinds of conversations and behaviors, they often find that they have more than enough time to collaborate.

 

Remember to start small.

Strangely enough, the WORST thing that ever happened in my own work on professional learning teams was being assigned to work with some of the BEST teachers I’ve ever known.

Crazy, huh? I mean you’d think a guy would be excited to collaborate with excellence, wouldn’t you?

Here’s the hitch: My team tried to do too much straight out of the gate.

We were talking about instructional practices and trying to pace our daily lessons.

We were designing common assessments and trying to look at student learning data. We were dividing kids up across our grade level for instruction from several different teachers.

We were writing essential objectives for our entire curriculum and inviting parents in to be a more meaningful part of the learning process.

And while every one of those tasks was meaningful and productive, we were ready to quit 4 months after we started.

Today, I recommend that every learning team keep things simple in their first months together.

Pick ONE unit to focus your collective efforts on. Decide on 2 or 3 key skills that you want every kid to master in that unit.

Develop a short (10-15 question) common assessment that measures those skills. Let teachers design their own instruction. On a set date, deliver your common assessment and make a list of students who don’t pass the test.

Then, take action together to help the students on that list master the content that they are struggling with.

There’s nothing overwhelming or time consuming about that process, y’all. Learning teams can tackle those tasks in about 30-40 minutes of shared planning per week.

Over time, you’ll notice that your team is ready for increasingly complex work—but keeping collaborative tasks simple from the start means you’ll keep working at it.

 

Anything make sense here? I guess what I’m saying is that the good news is that you can begin taking initial steps towards being a more collaborative school without a TON of extra time.

It just takes a commitment to staying focused on the right work and a willingness to start small and then work towards more complex actions and behaviors.

_____________________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

PLC Tip: Teaming Structure

PLC Tip: Working Together With Wikis and Google Docs

Make Like an Obstetrician and Deliver

Evolutionary Lessons for PLC Principals

 

Why Parents Should Care About PLCs and #edpolicies

Let's start with another simple truth:  As Jerry Sternin proved in the rice paddies of Vietnam and as Joan Richardson demonstrated in school after school, the best solutions for local challenges rest in the hearts and minds of local experts. 

That should be great news if you're a parent, a teacher or a local policymaker, right?

Essentially what Sternin and Richardson PROVE is that at least some of the teachers in your schools have the answers to any #educhallenge that all y'all are facing. 

That's no surprise, though, is it.  Knowledgeable and active parents have been fighting to get their kids in the classrooms of THOSE teachers for as long as we've had schools.

If we really want to see our schools succeed, however, we've got to start caring about the kids in EVERY classroom.  It's not enough to know that there are a small handful of fantastic TEACHERS in every building. We've got to make sure that fantastic PRACTICES spread from one classroom to the next.

Here's the hitch:  NOTHING about current #edpolicy efforts---which are largely built around ranking teachers based on the standardized test scores produced by students---encourages teachers to share their practices with one another.

In fact, most of these competitive #edpolicy choices actively DISCOURAGE intellectual sharing between teachers.  Think about it:  If YOUR performance numbers were going to be splattered all over the front pages of the local newspaper, why in the Sam Hill would you want to help SOMEONE ELSE to look better?

Want a painfully honest example of what that looks like in action?

I'm currently working hard to perfect my classroom assessment and feedback practices simply because researchers have proven that heaping cheeseloads of feedback is one of the most important school-level factors influencing student achievement. My sixth grade science colleagues, however, aren't there yet professionally. 

Now, if my practices DO have a tangible impact on student achievement (translation: my kids start kicking a little sixth-grade science heiney), wouldn't you want me to share what I learn with YOUR child's teacher, too?

As it currently stands, there's NO WAY that I'd ever share what I'm learning, though.  Remember, I'm competing against YOUR child's teacher.  Policymakers have decided that publicly sorting and shaming teachers is a surefire way to Race to the Top.

Your kid loses. I win.

Crazy.

That's why I'm so excited about a recent #edpolicy proposal crafted by ten Seattle Metro area teachers known as the Washington New Millenium team.  Having spent the past year studying teacher evaluation and assessment models with the experts at the Center for Teaching Quality, the Washington NMI team has made a powerful recommendation:

Real change in schools depends on our commitment to developing and supporting results-oriented professional learning communities. 

For those of you who aren't professional educators, professional learning communities are nothing more than collaborative teams of teachers who are committed to studying student learning together.

They engage in an ongoing cycle of collective inquiry: Examining areas of weakness in student performance, researching potential solutions, implementing new strategies, collecting and studying results with one another, and planning new courses of action based on what they discover.

The entire process is transparent and public and shared.  Results don't belong to individual teachers; they belong to the entire team. 

The Washington NMI team recommends placing professional learning communities at the center of school accountability efforts because professional learning communities encourage responsible practices.  When collaboration is a priority, best practices are shared.

It makes sense, doesn't it?

Of course it does. 

It's high-time that we STOP thinking about teachers as individuals who are working against one another in isolation and START finding ways to incentivize the kinds of professional sharing that can lead to more productive learning spaces for EVERY child---instead of just those lucky enough to be assigned to the classrooms of our "best" teachers.

By recognizing this truth and arguing that professional learning teams should play a larger role in our #edpolicy choices, the Washington NMI team has given me something to believe in.

More importantly, by arguing that professional learning teams should play a larger role in our #edpolicy choices, the Washington NMI team has taken a step towards ensuring that YOUR children have access to the best instructional practices and professional know-how in your schools.

How can THAT be a bad thing?

 

_____________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Is Racing to the Top Even Possible, Arne?

The Power of Professional Learning Communities

Lessons Learned on Collaboration from One Fat Ox

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work

 

 

Five Twitter Hashtags That Can SAVE School Leaders Time

Whenever I talk to school leaders about Twitter, their initial response is usually something like, "Twitter?  I don't have time for Twitter!"

Heck, one of my favorite Radical comments of all time expressed a similar skepticism with Twitter as a tool for educational leaders like this:

“If the principal has time to maintain Twitter or Facebook, then they have too damn much time on their hands.”

Here's the thing, though:  Twitter can be a huge TIME SAVER for school leaders who use hashtags---short, unique identifiers added to the end of messages that make searching for content in Twitter easier---to search and learn.

When you start following hashtags that are connected to topics that you care about---professional learning communities, educational leadership, technology in education, standards-based assessment and reporting, educational policy---you instantly have access to resources and ideas that have been spotted by someone else and deemed valuable enough to share.

Essentially, following hashtags in Twitter allows you to find quality content quickly simply because someone else has already found the content FOR YOU!

Interested in learning more?

Then start by watching this Commoncraft tutorial which explains just how searching and sorting in Twitter happens:

 

 

And then, spend a few minutes poking through the content being shared in these Twitter hashtag conversations that often resonate with building principals:

#atplc -- resources and ideas connected to structuring and supporting school-based PLCs.

#sbar -- resources and ideas connected to standards based assessment and reporting.

#cpchat -- resources and ideas connected to the work of building principals. 

#edleaders and #edadmin -- resources and ideas connected to educational leadership.

#edpolicy and #edreform -- resources and ideas connected to educational reform.

If you don't find something that is of real value to you in the first five minutes of searching, I'll be shocked. 

You see, I poke through those hashtags a few times each day and ALWAYS walk away with something---a resource, a provocative idea, a person who I can network with later---of great value to my professional work.

Now, I'd HOPE that someday, you'd move beyond simply searching through the content shared by others and start sharing content yourself. 

That's when Twitter becomes really powerful simply because you develop professional relationships that you can turn to with specific questions.

But AT LEAST start turning to Twitter first when you're looking for resources. 

It will save you time and give you access to great minds all at once. 

______________________________________

 

Related Radical Reads:

Twitter Hashtags for Educators

Lathered Brilliance, Superman Underoos and Social Media Spaces

Twitter is Only One PLN Building Tool

 

 

PLC Logistics: Teaming Structure

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.

Make Like an Obstetrician and Deliver

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days working through Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.  In the process I’ve discovered that as a teacher, I share an unexpected kinship with obstetricians. 

You see—just like teachers—obstetricians have traditionally been underappreciated by other professionals in the same field.  As Gawande explains:

“Doctors in other fields have always looked down their masked noses on their obstetrical colleagues. 

They didn’t think they were very smart—obstetricians long had trouble attracting the top medical students to their specialty—and there seemed little science or sophistication to what they did.”

(Kindle Location 2317-21)

But just like teachers—especially those working on collaborative teams—obstetricians have committed themselves to collective inquiry around—and systematic implementation of—best practices.

“In obstetrics…if a new strategy seemed worth trying, doctors did not wait for research trials to tell them if it was all right,” Gawande writes, “They just went ahead and tried it, then looked to see if results improved”  (Kindle location 2327-2301).

This commitment to collective inquiry in obstetrics largely began with one woman—Virginia Apgar. 

Apgar—a brilliant doctor convinced to move into anesthesiology early in her career because women had little hope of being accepted in the surgery wards of the 1950s—loved working in delivery rooms.  The energy of birth and the joy of new life was inspiring to her.

She was troubled, though, by the seemingly callous treatment that many babies received at birth.  Any imperfection—struggles with breathing, poor coloring, being small—could result in a rushed judgment that a child was too sick to live and a new life would be left to quietly die.

What bothered Apgar the most was that these life and death decisions were being made based on nothing more than a doctor’s general impressions about the likelihood that a child would survive given its condition after birth. 

For Apgar, making choices about a child’s future based on nothing more than impressions seemed morally wrong.

So in 1953, she developed and published the Apgar Score—an indicator of newborn health that is still used worldwide today.

Designed as a repeatable procedure that could be conducted by nurses and doctors alike, Apgar’s test requires medical professionals to make simple observations of a baby’s color, crying, breathing, heart rate, and limb movements at one and five minutes after birth. 

Those simple observations in and of themselves were an improvement over current practices which resulted in doctors giving up on seemingly unhealthy babies quickly. 

More importantly, those simple observations resulted in new stories of survival.  Babies that medical professionals would have once given up on were surviving, showing dramatic improvements in the first minutes of life. 

Those simple observations also touched on the competitive streak in most doctors, who began to try to find new ways to intervene on behalf of babies with lower Apgar scores.

Doctors learned that warming and oxygen were simple strategies for improving an infant’s condition in the early minutes of life. They also learned that epidural anesthesia—instead of the general anesthesia that had been the norm in deliveries—led to higher Apgar scores.

Knowledge about successful strategies for saving infants who once would have been lost spread rapidly through the obstetrics community, resulting in rapid advances in neonatal care. 

Statistically, the rates of infant mortality prove that Apgar’s efforts made a dramatic impact:  In the 1950s, one in thirty babies died at birth.  Today, one in five hundred babies dies at birth. 

What lessons can collaborative teams learn from obstetrics? 

Here are four:

Our choices about children need to be based on something more than the general impressions of classroom teachers.

If you have read the Radical for any length of time, you know just how much I hate our efforts to quantify everything there is to know about the kids in our classrooms—and just how passionate I am about the knowledge and skills of classroom teachers.

But many well-intentioned teachers can fall into the trap of believing that their general impressions about the students in their classrooms are the only evidence that they need in order to make responsible choices.

“Johnny has no chance,” we sometimes think about struggling students.  “I’ve seen a million kids just like him.”

That reliance on impressions only—the same professional hubris demonstrated by the obstetricians in the early 1950s—can result in children who fail simply because we stop fighting on their behalf. 

When we pair quantifiable evidence with our impressions—something that collaborative teams do every time that they give common assessments—we are far likelier to find ways to save more of our students.

Our efforts to quantify what we know about our kids don’t need to be overly complex or sophisticated. 

The good news in Apgar’s story is that collecting “quantifiable evidence” doesn’t have to be a complex process that requires intensive data analysis skills.

Heck, Apgar’s rubric for the health of a child measured five basic indicators on a 2 point scale.  “Baby’s crying.  Check.  Baby’s limbs are moving.  Check.  Baby’s color is pink. Check.”

The key to the success of the Apgar test doesn’t rest in the complexity of the indicators.  Instead, it rests in the approachability of the indicators.

ANYONE can apply the Apgar test.  It’s not time consuming.  It’s not complicated—and as a result, it’s not avoided or overlooked.

For learning teams, that means our initial efforts to quantify what we know about our kids do not NEED to be sophisticated, validated, or approved by research gurus.

Instead, our initial efforts to quantify what we know about our kids just need to (1). encourage careful observation and (2). be simple enough that every teacher can implement them without excuses and/or extensive additional training.

As best practices are identified, they must be replicated.

Perhaps the most important lesson that can be learned from obstetricians is that as new lessons are learned about successful practices, they are implemented with fidelity across the profession.

It is no accident that giving birth in Chicago looks a lot like giving birth in Chattanooga. 

While obstetricians are constantly improving their practices based on evidence, they are also committed to learning from their peers and establishing standards of care based on practices that are proven.

For learning teams, this lesson is equally important. 

While standardization of practice should never be the primary goal of any learning community—rigidly scripting curricula strips innovation and experimentation out of our profession—we should be ready to replicate the practices that we know are working with our students.

When we ignore evidence of successful practices in favor of personal preferences, we are failing as professionals.

The most successful practices are practices that can be implemented by every practitioner. 

Equally interesting is that obstetricians are committed to identifying and adopting practices that can be reliably implemented by all practitioners—instead of practices that can be implemented only by a small handful of obstetrics superstars. 

Take forceps deliveries for example:  While research shows that forceps deliveries are far less invasive for both mothers and newborns, they have been largely abandoned in challenging pregnancies for Cesarean sections (Gawande, 2007).

The reasons obstetricians have abandoned forceps are relatively simple:  Forceps may be safer and less invasive in the hands of a highly accomplished practitioner, but in the hands of a novice, they can be deadly (Gawande, 2007).

Deliveries by Cesarean section, on the other hand, are far simpler to master.  What’s more, the actions taken by obstetricians during a Cesarean section can be observed and coached by mentors standing alongside the birthing table (Gawande, 2007).

That’s important for collaborative teams that are committed to improvement to understand.  Our goal shouldn’t be to collectively identify practices that are beyond the ability of most of our peers.

Instead, our goal should be to find ways incrementally improve practices that are within reach of every teacher.  Large scale improvements across entire teams are otherwise impossible.

Any of this make sense?  How successful have your schools been at devising systems for collecting evidence on student success and then at developing instructional practices that work?

Which of these core actions is your learning team struggling with?  How are you going to change the work that you are doing together to overcome those hurdles?

____________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Evolutionary Lessons for PLC Principals

What Can PLC Principals Learn from Amazonian Explorers?

1234next ›last »
Syndicate content