“Don't do that.”
Those were the words out of Dr. Richard DuFour’s mouth more than a decade ago as he enthusiastically and passionately explained how my district was doing our work.
DuFour and Dr. Robert Eaker are the two co-founders of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) movement at work. Needless to say, I was baffled, disappointed, and a little hurt.
And yet, he was right.
Approaching professional learning communities: in theory
What I shared with DuFour was our plan to implement the Four critical questions for a PLC, as detailed by Solution Treesystematically throughout the district.
Year One: What do we want students to know and be able to do?
We had forms and processes in place to ensure that, throughout the year, each teacher identified eight to ten essential elements per course and per semester. This meant that teams also had to come to a common understanding of what those essential elements meant, when they would be taught, and what resources they would use to teach them.
Year Two: How will we know when they know or can do it?
We called our summer course “PLC Q2 Boot Camp” and the goal for the year was to develop high-quality formative or end-of-unit assessments. The length and type of assessment didn’t matter. Nor did the student’s performance on any of those assessments. The emphasis was simply on creating assessments where the objectives and evidence matched each other.
Then, after two years of work, we finally arrived at critical questions 3 and 4: “What will we do when students don’t know or can’t do it?” and “What will we do when students do know or can do it?” Two full years later, with hours and hours of training and team meetings, the district began helping teams adjust their instructional practices.
DuFour quickly identified the problem with our plan: We weren’t moving into action quickly enough. We were spending too much time planning—too much time in the realm of theory rather than practice—and too much time not directly impacting student learning by implementing the four fundamental questions of a professional learning community.
While the work we did ultimately led to significant improvements in student learning (five of the seven school buildings were identified as PLC Model Schools in Action), the results could have come more quickly, positively influencing even more students. The process likely would have gained momentum more quickly than we experienced it.
How to Quickly Move to Action in a Professional Learning Community
What was DuFour's alternative? Recurrent cycles of inquiry and action research.
This means that educators must work on all four critical questions within the span of a single unit and that this cycle must be repeated four or five times over the course of a single year.
As a fun example, in one district I worked with recently, the team was reluctant to get started. You may be familiar with some of the common refrains: “Everything we teach is essential for students to know” and “If we remove content for students, we’re making the curriculum simpler” were just a couple.
Despite their doubts, they agreed to clarify what the students really mean. necessary to learn in your next unit, what was important for students to learn in that same unit, and what was nice to know in that next unit.
To be clear, we focused only on the next unit and not on an entire year of study. The standard they focused on had to do with students evaluating the impact of the people, places, events, and symbols of the Greeks, Romans, Turks, Russians, etc. As you can imagine, there was no shortage of content built into that standard, and as we all subconsciously know and woefully fail to acknowledge out loud often, there was, and often is in any single unit, too much content for students to master it all. So we started with one civilization and tried to narrow down the number of specific people, places, events, and symbols that students would need to understand. necessary To learn, those who were important to teach, and those who were nice know.
What is taught versus what is learned: the most important differences
The result was a table like the one shown below. Of course, it was filled with the content that the teachers would teach. However, the difference between this practice and the previous practices was that the need The team was committed to ensuring that students learned the following: Everything else was not considered essential and would therefore be taught, but not guaranteed. In other words, a chart like this distinguishes the difference between what was to be taught and what was to be learned.
How to pivot a professional learning community to try again
Just six weeks later, I was back working with the team. The results of that September activity? A reduction in the failure rate on the unit’s final exam from the usual 15 or 20 students to just two. Frankly, all they did was clarify the objectives that students needed to learn. From there, they created some graphic organizers to help kids with that content.
The team claimed that not only were there fewer children who failed, but the understanding of the objectives that needed to be known was much greater than before. As an added bonus, the students were actually interested in the important and nice content and established more connections with the need-more complete content than in previous years. It was a total transformation in just a few weeks, No years.
Lesson learned: How to improve the answer to the four questions
DuFour was right, of course. Spending years preparing to improve our practice without doing anything about our work now doesn't work. For one thing, it's a disservice to our current students. For another, it doesn't build momentum. If you're considering the four critical questions about year-long processes, follow DuFour's advice: “Don't do that.”
Instead, make sure you implement rapid improvement cycles, as it only takes a few weeks to see dramatic results and build momentum for improvement. Move quickly into action.
Start and then improve.
