Over three years ago our district, with the support of the Bryan Foundation, embarked on a journey to create a Professional Learning Community within each school. A Professional Learning Community, as created and written about by the duFours and other reformers, means creating a collaborative culture for continuous improvement within each school. That culture fosters collaborative teacher teams that are able to use data, staff development and their experiences in teaching to plan, implement and evaluate continuous improvement in instructional strategies to address the student learning needs they identify. These communities are quite difficult and time-consuming to create, given that many teachers have not been trained to work with their colleagues as a team to improve instruction and student results. In many schools it is a major school culture shift, to go from individual planning and accountability for results, to collaborating with fellow teachers and administrators to plan and improve instruction. However, Professional Learning Communities are crucial to creating the shared ownership and commitment to continuously improving work with students, and to combine research and data-proven effective instructional strategies with the specific context of schools, teachers and their students.
Dr. Michael Fullan and his associates helped us create and train a “STARS” team in each school: Students and Teachers Achieving Results. Unlike elected School Improvement Teams, teachers were appointed to these teams by the principal to champion efforts to improve instruction and thus student results in their building. Members were trained in leading change, promoting teamwork and collaboration, dealing with conflict, and in effective instructional strategies, including cooperative learning, graphic organizers and differentiation. The idea was that these teacher-leaders would first implement these strategies in their own classrooms, and then become trainers and coaches for their colleagues in using these instructional strategies. Some schools maintained a solid core of trained STARS team members, while others (primarily our Title I and high poverty schools) experienced so much turnover that each year was starting over for them. This caused some difficulties in providing training that would simultaneously meet the needs of veteran and new STARS team members.
Last year, Instructional Improvement Officers and Curriculum and Organizational Development leaders worked cooperatively with the Fullan trainers to re-emphasize the core purpose of STARS teams to create a Professional Learning Community, which sometimes had become lost in the emphasis on training and implementing specific instructional strategies. With Formative Assessment staff, the Instructional Improvement Officers studied and worked with the Data Wise improvement process developed at Harvard with the Boston Public Schools, which provided a structured improvement process and “protocols” (structured planning and reflection processes) to assist teacher teams in collaborating to use data to improve instructional practices. Elizabeth City, one of the co-authors of Data Wise, trained all principals at the Summer Principals’ Leadership Institute in the Data Wise improvement process, and the Instructional Improvement Officers continue to use the Data Wise process in their ongoing leadership development of principals and assistant principals. Formative Assessment staff also refer to and utilize the Data Wise process in training teachers how to analyze and then use assessment results to address their students’ learning needs.
At the beginning of this year, we challenged the principals and their STARS teams to take the next step in developing a Professional Learning Community by “benchmarking” their own improvement strategies with other schools in our district. While schools were increasing teacher collaboration within their buildings, we wanted them to experience the importance of reaching outside their building to consider what other schools were doing to improve instruction and student learning. This concept of “benchmarking” against effective practices in other schools is a core component of Professional Learning Communities.
The Instructional Improvement Officers and Dr. Gongshu Zhang collaborated to pair schools together, sometimes building on existing partnerships, and at other times pairing schools with similar characteristics or with schools getting better results in some areas than the partner school. We provided funding for substitutes, and each school was asked to schedule an onsite visit with their partner school. The Instructional Improvement Officers also designed and trained principals in using a protocol for their visit, which assisted each school in developing a focus for what they hoped to observe. The attached document summarizes the pairings and STARS team visits that have “officially” occurred. However, in many cases principals have reported that this experience has encouraged them and their teachers to initiate visiting other schools in the district and state, to see what they are doing and better inform their own improvement efforts.
We have invited a principal and STARS team member from the following paired schools to share with you their experiences in visiting a sister school, and how they have used that experience to inform their own improvement efforts:
High School: Smith and Weaver
Middle School: Mendenhall and Southwest
Elementary School: Hunter and Peeler
Attachment #1 - Stars Teams Intital Visits - Elementary School Reporting
Attachment #2 -
Stars Teams Intital Visits - Middle School Reporting
Attachment #3 - Stars Teams Intital Visits - High School Reporting
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