smart talk

“The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.”
Sid Caesar

One of the goals of educational leadership is to combine isolated expertise in order to achieve success at the organizational level, as stated metaphorically in Sid Caesar’s humorous remark. In other words, the days of the solo-close-the-door-do-it-alone approach are over. It is time to share expertise and craft knowledge in order to meet the demands of accountability. Structuring teachers’ dialogue about instructional strategies is a means to build on the strengths inherent in a school system. This structural approach to systematically creating a culture of reflection about best practices is referred to as Professional Learning Communities.

Fred Newmann’s landmark study of effective educational practices (Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools: Final Report, 1996) concluded that successful schools utilized Professional Learning Communities. Judith Little's article, Looking at Student Work in the United States: A Case of Countervailing Impulses in Professional Development (2004), cites research that shows it to be a value-added endeavor, but that teacher groups need good protocols, a good facilitator, and school-level support. Little states that the reason teachers need to refine their practices is because “Students can do no better than the assignments they are given” (p. 102). The take-away tidbit is this: If you want to improve students' performance, then improve the quality of the tasks that you are asking students to complete. So convene with your peers and enhance the quality of the tasks.

Professional Learning Communities.

The key operational word in that term is community. Will the nature of the discourse be direct and polite? This is difficult since some teachers I know are good about making direct comments about someone else’s teaching (usually when the person being spoken of is not in the room, so I guess it should be called indirect direct commentary) but if the person is in the room then the reverse is true, there tends to be too much politeness and the commentary is reduced to bland generic statements that do not move the conversation forward. The book, Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning, offers a 4-step protocol utilized in the medical field to conduct discussions in a professional manner; 1) description, not judgment; 2) analysis of the descriptions, examine evidence for patterns or contradictions; 3) prediction (the structure of the task predicts/sets the parameters for the student’s performance, so the question becomes: if the students are being asked to X, then they will be able to do X, not Y or Z. If what you really wanted was Z , then restructure the task for Z); and 4) evaluation. But the evaluation is not the typical “good, bad, or ugly” labeling, but the evaluation is focused on what the next level of professional practice should look like.

Seek the Holy Grail rather than sit around and bemoan how dirty the coffee mug is.

Notice how the process is virtually absent of personal opinion and resembles a clinical examination, like an autopsy. But in this case we are looking beyond placing a toe tag on the cadaver, we are looking forward to evaluating what a healthy specimen looks like. The focus is on success, not criticism. This is the climate in which a Professional Learning Community can maximize the expertise of the teachers and have them feel good about their work. Success can be contagious.

So be a genius, get all the wheels working together, and avoid the road rage.

Make a good day,
Tod

PS. City, E., Elmore, R., Fiarman, S., Teitel, L. (2009), Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

PSS. Little, J.W. (2004). 'Looking at student work' in the United States: Countervailing impulses in professional development. In C. Day & J. Sachs (eds.), International Handbook on the Continuing Professional Development of Teachers (pp. 94-118). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press; and for a list of her other publications: http://gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/JWLittle/JWLittle.html#Publications

PSSS. For an extensive list of literature on Professional Learning Communities that includes Newmann's report: http://www.allthingsplc.info/tools/bibliography.php

PSSSS. How NOT to have a discussion, Sid Caesar arguing with Nanette Fabray set to Beethovens 5th Sympathy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhF-7suDsM

PSSSSS. The Sid Caesar quotation was taken from Daniel Pink’s (2005) A Whole New Mind. New York: Riverhead Books.