Singletons in a PLC at Work®: Navigating On-Ramps to Meaningful Collaboration

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program, Brig Lane. Brig is an education consultant and former principal of Fruita Middle School in Colorado, which under his leadership became a national model professional learning community. a veteran of the United States Coast Guard. He began his second career as an educator in 2000 and has served as a principal, assistant principal, and teacher at the middle and high school levels in inner city, suburban, and rural schools. He has also been an adjunct professor at Colorado Christian University, and his work has been published in Phi Delta Kappen, Principal Leadership, and elsewhere, and he's the author of the PLC Dashboard, Implementing, Leading, and Sustaining Your Professional Learning Community at Work, which we've talked about previously on Principal Center Radio, as well as Singletons in a PLC at Work. navigating on-ramps to meaningful collaboration, which we're here to talk about today.

[01:00] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:02] SPEAKER_01:

Brig, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Justin, I'm honored to be here with you and thankful to reach out to your listeners. Well, thanks for being here. I'm excited to talk about singletons and PLCs because as a principal, I have to admit this was something that kind of stumped me and was always one of those things that I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to approach in a more effective way, but I really did not know what to do. So for starters, how do you define a singleton? Who's included in that group?

[01:31] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Justin, you're not alone. So many principals struggle with the same issue. And I think, you know, when the PLC process began, we all saw it as, yeah, you got to have people together and they got to do some collaboration and they got to focus on what you want these kids to learn. And it's simple to know when you've got two or three first grade teachers that they should be on a team or you've got three or four algebra one teachers to know they should be on a team. But a singleton, those are the ones where they're the only teacher on a campus who teach that either subject, like oftentimes it might be a high school band teacher. But in a small rural school, it could also be the only third grade teacher.

[02:09]

So it doesn't just have to be one of those. specials or elective teachers. It could also be just, if you're the only one, you're a singleton. If you don't have somebody who teaches the same class as you do, it could be an AP teacher. It could be a physics teacher. It could be a chemistry teacher, could be a Spanish teacher, PE, art, lots of CTE subjects are also singletons as well.

[02:32]

So all those people are considered singletons. And too often, just like you mentioned earlier, the principal of the building doesn't know how to treat them when they're trying to go down this PLC road. They don't know how to handle the singletons and not just being perfectly transparent. I didn't know either when I was a principal leading this process. So that's what a singleton is.

[02:56] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And if we have in our heads, the PLC idea of you know, jointly deciding what we want our students to know and be able to do, and then giving an assessment and scoring that collaboratively. Like if you are the only person who teaches what you teach, whether that's algebra one or PE or AP physics or band, how do you do that? How do you approach that? And I guess probably the way I approach that as a principal was just from the perspective of fairness. Everybody else has to be in a PLC.

[03:25]

So you, the art teacher and the PE teacher and the librarian have to be in a PLC as well, even though your subjects have relatively little to do with one another. So help us think about that in a more constructive way, because I don't feel like my framing of it as a principal was very effective.

[03:41] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I absolutely understand your thinking. And what really it came down to for me was the problem with a singleton is that I think we get big idea one and two confused in the PLC process. Big idea one for PLCs is a shift from trying to teach everything to ensuring the learning of the essentials. Big idea two is that we want to collaborate with collective responsibility. And what I think happens is these big ideas are actually written in order. Big idea one is the first and the biggest of the three big ideas of a PLC.

[04:17]

Too often, we put big idea two first. In other words, we say, all right, let's find someone for you to collaborate with. And we maybe don't take... real strong focus on, no, no, let's figure out the learning first.

[04:31]

So, you know, if we have two or three algebra one teachers or two or three seventh grade social studies teachers, yeah, let's put them together and then let's decide what the kids should learn. However, if there isn't a meaningful collaborative partner on campus with us, I think we got to keep in mind that Dufour and his colleagues wrote Big Idea One first. And that's that that singleton better know what a kid ought to learn in their band class in the next, say, three to four weeks of school, or what a kid ought to learn in their third grade class if that's a singleton teacher in the next three to four weeks of school. So I find, like you said, that too often a principal might sweep all those singletons together into a dustpan and say, hey, go find some meaningful collaboration. And when you don't share the same class, most people want to collaborate around the classes they were hired to teach.

[05:26]

That's what they want to collaborate around. So that's really, I think you're absolutely right. I think we get big idea one and two.

[05:33] SPEAKER_01:

So with that in mind, how should we think about people who legitimately do teach different things? I've got my first grade team squared away because they teach the same thing. I've got my fifth grade team squared away because they teach the same thing. But I do have other people who I do want them to do something meaningful. And I don't just want to say, well, forget the whole thing because you're a singleton. How do we set that up for people so that it does make sense and that it is worth their time?

[05:59] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, such a good question. I actually was working in Northeast Arkansas, and I was with a small school district in Harrisburg, Arkansas. And the entire school were singletons. And I was scheduled to be working with this school for three years. And I could quickly tell that the teaming aspect of PLCs was not going to be effective on this campus. And yet there really wasn't much out there to guide PLC practitioners in what they should do.

[06:30]

Well, it just so happened another colleague of mine was working in Buffalo Island, just north of where I was. And so he and I met unexpectedly. He happened to be at the same hotel in Jonesboro I was at. And I said, how's it going? And he said, okay, except the singleton issue's eating me alive. And I said, well, John, it's doing the same thing to me.

[06:53]

So he and I Got a piece of paper from the hotel clerk and started sketching out, well, how can we help all these singletons? And so we started putting some ideas together and we came up with some things that we thought would work and started implementing them in these smaller schools. And turns out some of our other colleagues wanted our info. And before long, we kind of were approached to write a book and put these ideas into a book. And we thought the title should be fitting a square peg into a round hole. But Solution Tree liked the title of Singletons and they won.

[07:26]

So we went with their title. And the thing I love about Singletons in the PLC that my co-author and I wrote is that there are two themes in the book. The first theme is that isolation is the enemy of improvement. If you want to get better as a professional in really any area, you can't be left totally on your own. And so we felt like you got to find collaboration to help you grow as a professional, to have a support network and to. ask you some challenging questions.

[07:59]

But the second theme of our book is that that collaboration must be meaningful to the teacher. And when you were talking earlier about getting swept into the dustpan with a group of other singletons, you know, the art teacher and the band teacher and the computers teacher told, hey, go collaborate. It often isn't very meaningful. And so at best out of those singletons, you might get some compliance. but you're really not going to get much commitment. And at worst, they could spend their collaboration time or co-blaboration time ruining the culture of the school and undermining the process of what's going on.

[08:34]

So we have to have a strategy for these singletons if we're going to be a PLC school. And so that's kind of the overall part of the book. The book then goes into what we call three on-ramps. And those are the different ways that a singleton can go from isolation to meaningful collaboration. And so those are outlined in the different chapters of the book and it's been an incredible journey to see singletons just light up when they feel like I actually can collaborate in a meaningful way, when, frankly, a lot of them have spent most of their careers in isolation.

[09:07] SPEAKER_01:

Thinking back on my experience as a middle school teacher, even if I had a department, even if I had other people who taught some of the same classes, I think it's often the case that there's one primary person who teaches a course, and then maybe one other person teaches a section, but then they mostly teach something else. And they may be the only person that teaches that, or there may be one other person that teaches one section of what they teach. So there's this kind of overlap that's not complete, it's partial. And it's definitely different than the traditional grade level team, where everybody is literally teaching the same curriculum all day long just to different students. What are some of the on-ramps that you talk about in the book to meaningful collaboration? Because I remember teachers asking, hey, I am the only art teacher in our building.

[09:51]

Can I spend time talking with our teachers from other buildings? Or what do you want me to do that would satisfy you as part of our PLC process, but also that would be meaningful to me? What do you see as some of those key on-ramps?

[10:05] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the first on-ramp that my co-author and I kind of put out there is called the course-alike on-ramp. And that's where you have someone who's teaching the same course you're teaching, but in a different building, in a different district. It's helpful if they're in the same state, but frankly, with technology the way it is, they don't even have to be that. But that's where two people are truly singletons and they collaborate over a medium such as Zoom or Google Meets or something like that. And I think in the days before the pandemic, a Zoom call was like Star Trek or like, whoa, how could we do this? But I think we all kind of got over that hump a little bit.

[10:50]

And whether you're in person or not, I think we can still have some pretty good conversations virtually. So that's what the first on-ramp is. It's called the course alike on-ramp. And, you know, at the same time, I would say to the point that you just brought up, let's only be on one team and let's be on one team well. So if that singleton has like, you know, AP physics, biology, they're teaching one section of geology and something else. To think that they're going to find a meaningful collaborative partner for every prep or every class they teach, it exceeds what most teachers are even able to do.

[11:31]

And so when I coach teams in this process and singletons in this process, I say, let's just pick one class, one class that you want to make sure the kids learn the essentials there and And you get a chance to be a professional who's learning in community, a PLC. So that's the first on-ramp.

[11:51] SPEAKER_01:

So you said a course-alike on-ramp and meeting, in most cases, virtually, right? People who teach the same subject, same course, but probably in a different school and possibly even in a different district.

[12:02] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And that works well virtually, but I've also seen it work in some larger communities and districts where you've got a technology teacher in this building, but you have it in every middle school. In my school, we had a tech ed teacher that we used to call woodshop, but we called it tech ed. And this teacher had a fantastic network of of the eight other middle school tech ed teachers in the district. And they got to a point where they were working through the PLC process at a very high level. And it was fantastic collaboration.

[12:37]

Now, the challenge with this on-ramp is that often different principals have different expectations. And you also don't necessarily have the same time to collaborate as, you know, like this school has 9.40 to 10.30 to collaborate and the other school only has it every other week. So that's where I think you got to more as a principal think have the kind of the mindset of, yeah, there may be some give and take here. I may have to say during collab time, you get that as your own time, but you need to then work it out to where you spend the time with this colleague at a time that works for both of you.

[13:15]

And I think when people find that meaningful collaboration and they have a partner who's working with them, most educators are very amenable to that. And I just think it's very possible, but does require a little bit of flexibility.

[13:28] SPEAKER_01:

And certainly if the PE teacher or the art teacher said, hey, I have a colleague in another building that I'm going to meet with. It's a different time. And here's how we're going to do it. I would have been thrilled with that because they're getting something that's valuable to them and that is not just going through the motions, but really is going to make a difference for them. You also talked about an on-ramp called the common content entry point. How is common content different from course alike?

[13:52] SPEAKER_00:

Common content, that is when, for instance, say you had couple of social studies teachers maybe one of them teaches all the world history and they're the only world history teacher and one of them teaches all the US history classes and they're the only one well they're both social studies teachers and what they might share are some cross-cutting skills like perhaps both those teachers want their kids to be able to cite sources so they might be able to find a common formative assessment on citing sources but the world history teachers are assessment would be on a world history topic while the U.S. history teachers would be on the U.S. history topic. But they could have that cross-cutting skill of citing sources and really dig in deep to say, all right, what does citing sources look like at the proficient level?

[14:44]

What does mastery of this look like? What is below proficient? How can we intervene for kids? So in other words, they'd work through the four critical questions of learning, Dufour's four critical questions, What do we want these kids to know and be able to do? How do we know they've learned it? What we do if they don't learn it?

[14:59]

What we do if they've already gotten it? They would work through those four critical questions together on a cross-cutting skill that isn't germane just to their subject, but it cuts across. And I've seen this in not just academic content. I had a group of teachers that I worked with who wanted kids to be more respectful and And these two singletons nodded their head and said, yeah, I wish kids were more respectful too. But what was crazy is when I said, okay, if you want to work on that, that matters. That's an essential for kids.

[15:32]

I said, well, what's your definition of respect? And I kid you not, Justin, each of them had such a different definition of what respect was. One of them said, respect is when a kid looks you in the eyes. One of them said, respect is when a kid says, sir or ma'am, when they talk back to you. And one of them said, respect is how they dress. And I'll tell you, if you don't get organized, nothing will happen.

[15:58]

Respect won't change one bit. But when those three teachers started getting organized about what respect looked like and the two or three characteristics that defined respect and what proficient respect and those characteristics look like, change happened because they were able to hold the bar high on something that was a common content or cross-cutting essential. like respect. That's what that on-ramp's about. The other way that on-ramp works is with a vertical team. Let's say you've got a kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, three singletons.

[16:31]

There are academic skills that cut across those, like say, for instance, number sense, or place value, or shapes. And so while that singleton first grade teacher, they're not a course alike to their other colleague, they could certainly say, well, if this is your essential skill in place value and this is your way to assess it and this is your intervention plan that'll help me kind of say well maybe I could be a little bit you know just a notch further and they end up being fantastic collaboration partners and in fact the intervention can end up being a cross grade level where you get a second grader who let's say is so far below in place value they could be with the kindergarten teacher for that intervention time because that's where their area of need is.

[17:21]

So that's the common content on RAMP in a nutshell.

[17:26] SPEAKER_01:

And that aligns very well with a typical secondary department, as we've been talking about, where mostly people are teaching different things. There might be some overlap, but it's not like we have three people who are all teaching the exact same courses. They're teaching somewhat different courses. And often those courses go in a certain sequence. So I love what you said about this being kind of a vertical articulation or a vertical alignment where we're saying, okay, when kids are taking this class, this is how we're going to develop this skill. And then in this next class, here's how we're going to take the ball and run with it further.

[17:57]

And then we can actually have an aligned kind of scope and sequence for teaching and developing that skill so that students start where they start and end up where we want them to end up. And I'm thinking as a science teacher, If we had had that kind of vertical articulation around lab skills or using a lab notebook, that would be so much less to teach. If I'm teaching sixth grade at the beginning of middle school, I know I don't have to get kids all the way across the finish line. I know where I need to get them. And seventh grade knows that here's where kids are going to come in. They're not starting from zero and I can get them further down the road in developing those skills.

[18:35]

So that makes a lot of sense to me.

[18:36] SPEAKER_00:

When we think about the real key, that big idea, number one of a PLC, and that is learning. It starts by getting clarity. And you mentioned like lab skills. There's no reason lab skills could not be an essential skill in the first grade when a kid enters your building, your school. And when the science team goes, hang on, if you take lab skills and I take kids being able to take notes, and maybe a different subject says, I'll take kids using note cards to memorize information, and someone else says, I'll teach kids how to use a planner or a calendar. I mean, when we start identifying the fewer rather than more essentials, and we run each of those through the four critical questions, Kids win.

[19:24]

And so do we, because it ends up being where, you know, if you're just doing the teach, test, record the grades and move on mindset, it can feel really daunting in our profession. But there's such a sense of satisfaction when we say, no, let's determine a few essentials that we love these kids too much for them not to have learned. And then we really zero in on those. And especially when we find a collaborative partner, kids win. And I think our job is so much more fulfilling.

[19:54] SPEAKER_01:

Then the third on-ramp that you describe in the book is the critical friend. What is a critical friend and how can Singleton PLCs connect critical friends?

[20:04] SPEAKER_00:

Well, this is the one on-ramp that kind of is a little bit out there. What we found is that there were some singletons in some schools who, yeah, they'd love to have a Zoom partner, that course-alike on-ramp. They just couldn't. Maybe it's a band teacher in band season and they got marching band and they got six different sections. They're not even, they're just, they got too much going on. Or they don't, they can't find a cross-cutting skill.

[20:32]

The critical friend on-ramp is focused on Dufour's four critical questions and And any two educators who perhaps even have the same prep period could be a critical friend to one another. So a critical friend, basically we have a protocol that we use in the book to help be a critical friend to somebody else. And those just focus on questions like, well, what have you chosen as essential? What's the way you will formatively assess whether kids have learned this or not? And I'm just walking right through the four critical questions. What's your intervention plan for kids who don't, demonstrate proficiency?

[21:13]

And what's your extension plan? And then what are you learning? And maybe even offer some instructional strategies that might help. And what we found is that even if I don't teach band or I don't teach physics or I don't teach AP math, I could be a critical friend to a person in one of those as a fellow educator. And I could say, hey, Justin, you're teaching Third grade, I don't happen to teach third grade, but what's the essential skill right now? And you can articulate that to me.

[21:42]

And so with this protocol, it helps that teacher from being totally in isolation to get a focus on a class that they'd really like another set of eyes on. in a meaningful way. And so the critical friend on ramp, I'm really proud of this on ramp because, you know, it's kind of like an acknowledgement of the fact that, you know, I may not teach your subject, but we all went to enough schooling and we've all been teachers to some degree or another and can offer a lot to one another. So that's the third on ramp.

[22:14] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that addresses so much of the uncertainty about how can we be helpful to one another? What kinds of things should we focus on? And there's a figure in the book called the Critical Friend Template for PLC, Critical Questions 3 and 4, and just a lot of specificity about the questions that we can ask one another, even if we teach different subjects to different students, that can help us look at our essential learnings and look at where our students are and figure out how to get them to where they need to be. So I love the structure and the guidance, even for people who don't have anything that they teach in common, but have, for whatever reason, begun to work together.

[22:53] SPEAKER_00:

And I appreciate you pulling out that template. That is really just to keep the conversation focused on learning. And it could be the principal of the building who's the critical friend of that singleton. It could be an instructional coach who's a critical friend. It could be a colleague. So a lot of people could fill the role of a critical friend.

[23:16]

And I've worked with lots of groups of singletons who, you know, they're nothing like, they're not teaching anything like their colleagues. I was working, I can remember one group in particular was an ag teacher, a band teacher, and a PE teacher. And I mean, they are all over the map in terms of content, but the sharing of instructional strategies and the, um, even the recognition of one of the colleagues saying to another, I'm not really sure I can follow what you're talking about, forced the singleton teachers to get much more precise in what it was they wanted these kids to learn and how that assessment they decided on was going to measure whether they did or not. And it's been an eye-opening on-ramp for educators, for singletons to really figure out

[24:09]

my colleagues got a lot to offer here. And Justin, if I could mention one more thing, the way the books laid out, the chapters each represent one of the on-ramps, but going back to our earlier conversation about big idea two, often getting in place of big idea one, before any of the on-ramp discussion in the book is a chapter that I'm so proud of called preparation to be a meaningful collaborator down the road. And that is when someone might hear these on-ramps and here it is, you know, the middle of a school year and you got this singleton who's just feeling swamped. And they're like, oh, this sounds great, but I can't do that until next year. Well, you know what you can do right now? You can say, what is an essential skill for me in the next three to four weeks?

[25:00]

And how can I make that clear to kids? And what's one way I can formatively assess where they've learned it or not? And that's something you can do so that let's say next school year, you will have found maybe a good meaningful collaborator using one of the on-ramps. Until that time, it's not that there's nothing for you to do during the collaboration time. It's for you really to make a shift from trying to just teach everything to ensuring the learning of the essentials, even if you have to start by doing that in isolation. So that's a really important point because sometimes I think people think they got to be all in, but they don't.

[25:37]

There's work they can do right now.

[25:39] SPEAKER_01:

Talk to us a little bit about some of the tools that you have in the book that readers find helpful.

[25:45] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for asking that. One of the tools that I love in the book is towards the end, it's the teacher planning checklist. And it's a checklist of about 10 items. to kind of say, am I as a singleton, do I have the right things going on? And then there's also a leader planning checklist that makes sure a leader isn't steering the singletons on their campus in the wrong way. And I really appreciate that those are there to kind of walk you through what you need to do next.

[26:10]

But there's a couple of things I love about the book. One thing I love about the book is that we have several vignettes in it that are written by singletons. And they're just a singleton who took one of these on ramps and then reflected about it. And we call it perspectives from the field. And my favorite one is from a singleton orchestra middle school teacher who said, when I first heard the term PLC, I wanted to gag. And he goes on to explain that, and he ends up using the critical friend protocol, and he ends up being a changed educator at the end.

[26:46]

And it's just fun to have that. We've got several of those in the book. And I also have something in the book that I like, and that's after each of the on-ramps, my co-author and I wrote reasons not to do the work that we suggest. And we hear a lot of reasons as we've worked in so many schools about reasons that this won't work. And so we decided, let's put those in there. And I think it's really an acknowledgement that there's many perspectives on things.

[27:13]

And so I've only seen somebody say why not to do what we just wrote about in one other book. And that's Ken O'Connor's book on how to grade for learning. And it so impacted me. That book was, call it vulnerable or transparent enough to acknowledge the counter arguments. that I decided this would be great for our book too. So I'm proud of those things in it.

[27:34]

And I'm proud that singletons get a little bit of sunshine. They get a little bit of light and they get a little bit of love because too often there are kids who, you know, the only reason they want to come to school is because of what that singleton teacher teaches. Maybe it's a ag class or maybe it's a music teacher and that's the only reason they want to come and if those singleton teachers don't think this plc process applies to them what a waste for some of the teachers who are again like i said the only teaching the only classes that some kids want to come to school for so i'm honored to have this book and resource for them it's a quick read but it packs a powerful punch for a group that are so critical to a great campus indeed

[28:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I feel like this is just miles beyond the kind of default that I described at the beginning and kind of my experience as a principal. Trying to keep these people busy, trying to make it fair, trying to find something meaningful. I think you have answered that brilliantly in this book, and I'm sure this has already proven helpful to many, many schools. Brig, if people want to learn more about this book or your other book, or maybe get in touch with you about doing some work together, where's the best place for them to go online?

[28:46] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the best website to get in touch with me is my website at briglane.com. And my last name is not spelled common. It's L E A N E briglane.com. And then the book's available on Amazon.

[29:00]

It's also available on Solution Tree's website.

[29:04] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Singletons in a PLC at Work, Navigating on Ramps to Meaningful Collaboration. Brig Lane, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Justin, love being with you. Thanks for the invitation.

[29:17] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.