[00:01] SPEAKER_01:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program today my colleagues Doug Fisher and Nancy Fry. Nancy and Doug are both both professors at San Diego State University and co-founders of Health Sciences High and Middle College, and the co-authors of numerous books, including many with John Hattie on visible learning. And we're here today to talk about their new book, PLC Plus, Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design.
[00:46] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:48] SPEAKER_01:
So Nancy and Doug, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[00:51] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much. We're really happy to be here today. Thanks for the opportunity.
[00:55] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, well, thank you for agreeing to speak with us today. I actually have the book in front of me. I have the playbook as well. And I'm excited about this work because I think you're tackling some problems within and some opportunities that remain within the PLC structures that so many schools have established. We all know that PLCs have been around for a very long time, and many of our colleagues, including Shirley Hoard, Daniel Venables, Bob Aker, Rick and Becky Dufour, and many others, have been promoting this idea of professional learning communities for a long time, decades now. Certainly, every school doing PLCs puts their own spin on it, but I wonder if you could share with us a little bit about what you saw as missing from the approaches that many schools were using, that many teams were taking to professional learning communities that you wanted to address in your new book, PLC+.
[01:50] SPEAKER_02:
One of the major places that we wanted to be able to locate the work in moving forward, and thank you so much for naming so many of the people that have been real thought leaders around professional learning communities, but we also recognize too that there are places as they have evolved where the conversation should continue. And one of those places is around a focus on equity.
[02:20] SPEAKER_00:
I think this is the first PLC framework or model that directly and specifically calls out equity. Rather than thinking about an individual kid's response to the instruction and then looking at interventions, we're encouraging teams to look at trend data that might reveal equity gaps in the learning of their students. Rather than saying, okay, this kid didn't learn, so what are we gonna do? What kind of interventions or reteaching or whatever? What are we looking at as the trends? In addition, I would say that the question two, where are we now in the PLC Plus framework, is really important because most PLC models do not recognize that kids already know some stuff.
[03:02]
They talk about where are we going? What do kids need to learn next? And the research that we review like Graham Nuthall and others, somewhere, depending on the kids and the classroom, somewhere between 40 and 60% of minutes are spent on stuff that the majority of students have already learned. And if we're doing that, we're spending that much time on stuff they've already learned. First of all, they're going to be bored. Second of all, we'll never get to high levels of outcome achievement because we're spending all of our minutes on stuff they already know.
[03:32]
So we want PLC teams to specifically and intentionally talk about where are we going, but where are we now? The lessons have to be in the gap between what students already know and what they need to know. The other big difference for us is we're encouraging teams to have some conversations on evidence-based instruction. And that is not a common conversation in most PLC frameworks. Most PLC frameworks focus on curriculum and assessment. They don't focus on the third leg of that stool, which is around instruction.
[04:05]
And the stool, I believe, falls over if it only has two legs. We need all three, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Now, when I say that, I think we have to be careful, a little cautious, because I don't want this to turn into, you know, random teacher share, like, hey, I have this random idea about, like, I'm going to make this little activity. I do think there should be some evidence that it is likely to move learning forward and that we should be thinking about whether it's our own evidence of impact or more published evidence of impact. What would move that learning forward? Part of our motivation for that was seeing so many professional learning community teams, these collaborative planning teams, design learning, and then go off into their various classrooms and deliver the best way they knew how, and getting different outcomes.
[04:57]
They all had the same goals, you know, what do we want kids to learn, how we'll know if they learned it. And they all had the same goals, but they taught in vastly different ways. that cause problems. And then they end up with saying, okay, now, based on all these different implementations, some of which were really strong, some of which weren't, now we have a whole bunch of kids in intervention. They didn't learn it, what are we gonna do about it? So I think teachers should share some really good ideas around instruction.
[05:27]
We're not saying everyone has to teach it the same way. There is both art and science to teaching. But we should be comfortable having some conversations about having evidence to move learning forward.
[05:40] SPEAKER_01:
And it's almost as if we have avoided that dimension of instruction or that dimension of teacher practice because it's about us, right? As individual educators, it's safer to look at the standards, to look at our objectives for a unit. and to look at student assessment results and student work because none of that is about us, right? But as you say in the book, the plus is you, right? The plus in PLC Plus is the educator who's doing the work and we can't leave that out, right?
[06:13] SPEAKER_02:
I think that's a vital part of this work, this evolution. One of the cross-cutting values in addition to equity that are baked into the entire process and to each component of those questions is this idea of efficacy, both individual efficacy as well as collective efficacy. How do we as individual members of a professional learning community build our own agency and identity within the group? And how do we harness that energy into a collective such that the PLC itself becomes a powerful lever for being able to affect student learning.
[07:03]
And the teacher, the individual member, and how those members work together is a critical component of that professional learning community. I guess it's the C that's in PLC.
[07:18] SPEAKER_00:
So I'll comment on that if I can around the collective efficacy. You know, that's the hot topic in leadership right now. New number one on John Hattie's list, but it's 20-some years old, going way back to Albert Bandura and Wayne Hoy. There's a lot of people who have talked about it. Mastery experiences are super important in building the collective efficacy. So if your team comes together and has some good processes and you realize that impacted learning, that mastery experience feeds the collective and you are very likely to set increasingly challenging goals when you have more mastery experiences.
[07:57]
The opposite is also true. If you go to a PLC meeting, quote unquote PLC meeting, and you don't feel productive, you don't see an impact, that experience drives you away from the collective And it becomes a waste of time, another bother for teachers, and it reduces the collective efficacy and harms achievement. So we need to make sure that we put grownups together, that they're having great experiences, that feeds the power of the collective.
[08:28] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think that research on collective efficacy is a big deal for instructional leaders because I know the Wallace Foundation research on instructional leadership has shown for a long time now that that is our greatest opportunity as leaders to have a positive impact on student learning through teacher collective efficacy. When we build that capacity, when we build that sense that, yes, we actually can do this, That's where we have some of our biggest impact. I'm glad you're highlighting that. I wonder if we want to actually state the five questions now. In the book, you ask not four, but five PLC questions. For everyone who is joining us live for this recording, I've pasted those in the chat if you would like to take a look at those.
[09:19]
And the five questions you ask in the book are, where are we going? Where are we now? How do we move learning forward? What did we learn today? And who benefited and who did not benefit? And I love the equity angle of that last question, because as you said, when a student doesn't learn, when a student is not making progress, they're not just an individual student.
[09:40]
You know, we have... patterns and those patterns manifest themselves as either equity or a lack of equity. And I like the old management adage that your system is designed to produce the results that it's getting, right? Like if we have a system where consistently a whole subgroup of our students is not achieving, they are not benefiting from our instruction, that's a systematic equity issue that we have to look at.
[10:06]
and take responsibility for. And I love the example you gave in the book of a team that said, yeah, boy, you know, I think a lot of these kids would do better if they had more support at home. That would be really nice. So take us into that equity lens a little bit and how we can build that into our collective work as PLCs.
[10:24] SPEAKER_02:
This equity piece is something that we're really striving to make sure does not exist in a silo that is separate from the day-to-day work that all of us do in schools. The purpose of this especially is to bring equity into each phase of that cycle of investigation and not only to be bookends in looking at where students are and then deciding at the end who benefited and who did not. What we really want to have happen and the conversations that we have the suggested conversations that we have within the PLC Plus playbook, always come back and revisit during each part of that investigation cycle, how are we doing with our students?
[11:18]
Where are those inequitable barriers or practices that are hiding in plain sight. So inviting teams to also look at things like mobility, like attendance, as well as some of the more common ways that we look at equity, especially in looking at groups of students, including students with disabilities, SES, and those sorts of things.
[11:47] SPEAKER_00:
And equity starts also in that first question, where are we going? Some teams just don't have high expectations for some kids. And teachers' expectations, their perceptions of their students, are very powerful in terms of learning outcomes. And so if a team can sit together and say, where are we going? We need to get kids to this level. And if we talk about that and people are vulnerable and honest and say, I don't know that I can get those kids to that level.
[12:15]
We can have a conversation, a very honest conversation. That first question starts off the equity journey. Do we believe that all the students that we're teaching can reach that level? And we monitor that through the rest of the questions. Where are we now? Well, there might be some kids who don't have the prerequisite knowledge, skills, dispositions, attitudes, whatever it is.
[12:37]
So we have to figure out how to engage in some compensatory and adaptive experiences so that those kids are leveling up. How do we move learning forward? Well, part of it is our instruction, but part of it is also noticing how kids respond and what we learn from them each day. And that fourth question, What did we learn today? The we is super important. It's not what did I learn today.
[13:00]
It's what did we learn today? So it's the teacher, it's the students, and it's the other teachers on that grade level or that team. We have to think about our learning that we can then decide who benefited, who did not benefit, so that we can move learning forward even further.
[13:15] SPEAKER_01:
Doug and Nancy, I wanted to ask your thoughts on the role of standards and pacing guides, because if we are going to take very seriously our commitment to helping all students master the content and skills that we're trying to teach, obviously it's of great importance that we get clear on what exactly it is that we want students to master. And I don't know if you're seeing this trend or this tendency in your work. Maybe this is a problem that you guys have kind of decisively solved, but I'm seeing a lot of confusion lately between standards that can be mastered by all students that we can actually teach and hold ourselves accountable for helping all students reach versus a lot of the assessments that are being used now to measure progress. And the challenge that I'm seeing is that a lot of assessments that are out there are actually norm referenced rather than criterion referenced assessments.
[14:11]
And basically what educators are asking themselves to do and being held accountable for is helping all students to be above average And I think that, you know, the kind of Lake Wobegon approach to education where it's like if you are in a high poverty school, you are not going to have all of your students be above average in terms of standardized tests because there are a lot of things that are going to, you know, to affect that distribution on a norm reference test. But I'm a big believer that we absolutely can help all students achieve our learning targets and performance standard when we use a standard, excuse me, a criterion-referenced assessment. So talk to me about that a little bit. What do you see as the...
[14:57]
you know, the kind of way forward when it comes to using standards, using pacing guides, using those objectives and learning targets. So help us make sense of that.
[15:09] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I'll start with the first part is the analyzing of standards. I think we, as new standards came on board, you know, 10 years ago and different states changed their standards, we kind of dove into them and now we think we know them. And so we often see a drift away from what the actual standard says, because we have this romantic recall of what the standard actually says. So we encourage teams to actually analyze the standards. What are the skills and concepts required in that standard? Those standards tend to have lots of nouns, lots of verbs in one standard.
[15:44]
And do we actually understand what it means to accomplish that level of learning at the grade level for which that standard was written? Once we have that understanding, what's the progression of learning that's going to take? So where do we start based on what kids already know? What's the progression of learning? What's a good first thing to teach and a second thing and a third thing? There are probably multiple right answers to the progression of learning and some wrong answers.
[16:09]
That's what generates these general pacing guides is this idea that we have a progression of learning And I think we have to be careful on the pacing guides that it doesn't become a script that everyone has to follow. We should be a little bit more responsive to that and saying, okay, so this is where we need to get, but we have to have some wiggle room reteach extension days so that we can make sure we're getting kids to those levels. But if we don't start with analyzing the standards and know what skills and concepts are non-negotiable in that standard, we will never get there. We will say, oh, I'm teaching synonyms, but we don't know the depth that's required of how kids are going to be using those synonyms. We're seeing just too much general about what kids are supposed to learn.
[16:56] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and I think it's worth pointing out the learning progression idea, and this is on page 40 of the book, figure 2.4. I was pretty impressed with this. I haven't seen a document like this where we're taking a fairly ambitious skill, a challenging skill to teach, and in this case from the Common Core Standards for 9th and 10th grade language arts to determine the meaning of words and phrases as they're used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings, analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, how the language evokes a sense of time and place, how it sets a formal or informal tone. I mean, that's a lot of what a ninth and 10th grade English teacher is doing all year long. And seeing it broken down by the verbs and nouns into that learning progression was extremely helpful.
[17:43]
So I'd encourage anyone to, um, To check that out, look at that section of the book in Figure 2.4.
[17:51]
So where do learning progressions fit? So there are standards. Teachers are looking at those standards. They're breaking them down. Do they occur at the outset of unit planning? Or help us put those in a little bit of context, because I think that's a new idea to a lot of people.
[18:06] SPEAKER_02:
Learning progressions, I know, are being developed and becoming more common in conversations in many states around the country. And so I'll start by saying that if you're in one of those locations where learning progressions have been developed, perhaps by a state or district, that's a great place to be able to turn to. Having said that, many of us don't have access to developed learning progressions. And one of the challenges in moving from understanding the standards to boiling that down to what does this look like across units of study can be very challenging. That's where those learning progressions come into play. And learning progressions, Doug and I think of them as
[18:58]
the tent poles, if you will, that are around a unit of study. What are those major skills and concepts that students need to learn over the course of that unit of study? And what might be a sensible progression for how those concepts and skills roll out over a course of study. So for example, in a three week unit of study, there might be five learning progressions. And it's really important for a team to be able to come together if they're all teaching toward that particular unit of study to say, here's what we think is a logical progression across that unit of study. Those tent poles, those learning progressions also then provide teachers and students with ways of being able to monitor progress
[19:56]
real time no child no teacher should have to wait until the end of a unit of study to find out who learned it and who did not and so those learning progressions can serve in that case in other in other cases so for example Justin you talked about that an English and language arts standard that's a that is a standard that covers two years of of instruction ninth and tenth grade that's a huge standard to be able to cover and so once again being able to kind of break down what a progression of learning should look like over that two-year span is going to be really useful for teams hi there It's great to be here. My name is Heather and I, as Justin said, I'm a principal at a small K-5 school in St. Stephen, New Brunswick in Canada.
[20:49]
We have about 185 students K-5. So I'm always interested to hear how to implement or your suggestions for implementing PLC Plus in that smaller school context where we just have one teacher or maybe two teachers in split grades sharing a grade level. I'm so happy to hear you ask about that because I think that your school is a wonderful example and opportunity to be able to understand that a professional learning community encompasses the entire organization. and that smaller teams can be utilized in order to be able to bring together people who have a common challenge or a common mission. A PLC can be comprised of a single team.
[21:39]
At the school where Doug and I work, we also have many teachers who are singletons, if you will. They're the only one that is teaching that particular grade level and content area. And so the way that we look at it is, what are the common challenges as they come together, whether it is through content or whether it is through grade level perceptions to be able to come around. So for example, a very small PLC that represents the entire school organization may have some common challenges that they identify that they come together. In other words, the PLC team doesn't have to be devoted only to planning instruction. And I think that if we only limited it to that, that would be problematic.
[22:33]
However, for example, at an elementary school, a common challenge might be the implementation of social and emotional learning across the grade levels. That's a common challenge that they can pull together and that they can have conversations about.
[22:52] SPEAKER_00:
So when I was thinking about it, I think there's all kinds of ways of organizing and what you want to accomplish. So the teachers in your school still have to know what kids need to learn and what they already know. So we can certainly help each other. And if we have trends, so reading comprehension, what it looks like in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade. So if we're going to say our common challenge is we got to improve reading comprehension or in a high poverty schools, we've seen people choose vocabulary as their common challenge. How do we change the vocabulary knowledge of our students?
[23:25]
that we start to make connections with the standards to that common challenge. We still have to support each other in saying, okay, these are the expectations in this province. How do we get kids there? How do we analyze the expectations in this province? So we might have to say grades K-1, 2 to come together, and we're going to analyze the expectations, the curriculum in that province to say, here's what it's going to look like in kinder and first and second. Teachers still have to analyze the expectations.
[23:55]
But their challenge, as Nancy was saying, might be a bigger one. Our grade 9 and 10, there's one teacher who teaches world history, one who teaches US, one who teaches biology. They're all singletons. So the traditional PLC thing of a common assessment and planning, so you only do the curriculum and the assessment, it doesn't work for us. So we'd said, well, for 9th and 10th grade, one of the big things we want to work on are study skills. We have to teach our students how to study.
[24:24]
So our common challenge, we come together on study skills, but the teams help each other with analyzing the biology standards or the world history standards or the ninth and 10th grade English standards or algebra one standards. So it's a very similar process, but all of that gets pushed up to the common challenge in grade nine and 10 in our school around study skills.
[24:45] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, very well said. And I think there's an important insight there about vertical alignment that often we ignore when we have people work in grade level teams. But that vertical alignment question is so critical. You have a quote on page 34 of the book, an amazing lesson for fifth graders that focuses on third grade standards will produce sixth graders who are ready for fourth grade. Right. And I think that's often where we end up is we're working really hard to help students master the wrong grade level standards.
[25:14]
So even if we do have singletons, there's huge value in getting teachers talking about those five questions and kind of where we're going, where we are now, and so on. And I wanted to pitch it over next to Kelly. So Kelly, would this be a good time for you to ask your question? We can go ahead and unmute you here.
[25:35] SPEAKER_02:
So my question basically is, if a school has been very involved in the original four questions of the PLC, what do you suggest as a transition to deepen those discussions through the PLC plus five questions? I think one of the places to begin, especially for professional learning communities of any kind that are already established, is to go back and take advantage of some of those early modules as an opportunity and an invitation to look at the characteristics of what are high functioning professional learning communities. Shirley Hoard's six characteristics can be a useful way of being able to restart conversations and revisit ideas about what it is that
[26:30]
the professional learning community has been able to accomplish and where might be some areas of growth. So rather than say like, oh, we used to do things this way and now we're gonna switch everything over and we're going to do things this way. Instead, that becomes, as I said, a way for a team, an existing team to be able to say, where is it that we want to go next? And to have that be a much more organic process.
[26:59] SPEAKER_00:
One of the schools we worked with a couple hours away from here, in their transition, we simply said to them, so they did the Shirley Horne Six Factors, and then we said to them, you have permission to talk about evidence-based instruction. And they had not talked about that in the past. They really focused on what are kids supposed to learn, how do you know if you learned it, those kinds of things. They were so excited to bring impact of teaching. As the quote is, there's no automatic link between teaching and learning. Sometimes we teach stuff and they don't learn it.
[27:35]
So there's not an automatic link here. So we said to them, in your next conversation on your grade levels, you're allowed to talk about evidence-based instruction. Evidence can be from your classroom. It can be published. They were so excited. So we said to them, let's add this question.
[27:49]
How do you move learning forward? So keep what you're doing, but always add this question, how do you move learning forward? They loved it. And as that question became more of a norm for this elementary school, then we pushed on the fifth question, who benefited and who did not? And we asked them to stop talking about automatic intervention for kids who didn't learn it, but maybe talk about barrier removal. Maybe talk about trend data.
[28:18]
When you visualize your data, when you graph your data of who learned it and who didn't learn it, we like to look at progress versus achievement on a four quadrant model. And there's a little tool you can download that you can put your pre-post data in and it will create a visual of who learned how much growth versus achievement. And we ask them to look at the trend data in the lower left quadrant, the kids who did not achieve and who did not make progress. And were there any common characteristics of the students who did not make progress and who did not achieve? And they noticed some things. Almost every kid in that quadrant was an English learner.
[28:55]
And it never, it wasn't a big English learner school, but they said, wow, we're not having the impact we thought we had on English learners. And in the past, they would have said, this kid needs to have supplemental, this kid needs to have supplemental, this kid might need intensive. And they realized they had to do some things different. They had to change things for English learners. Now what they're working on now sentence frames, academic language, being clear on the language kids are supposed to be practicing, increasing the amount of time that students talk in class using academic language. So they have a common challenge that was generated by an equity gap on question five.
[29:34]
Now I think they're ready to take on all five of the more transition to the next generation. As we've said earlier, people have been asking PLC type questions since the 70s. The questions keep revising as we learn more as a profession. So for them, that's the pathway to revise their experiences.
[29:57] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and it strikes me that the, you know, I think you were alluding earlier to the tendency of that question, how will we respond when students don't learn, to reply or respond with intervention. And I think what a lot of schools experience when they get serious about that is that their tier one approaches are, aren't serving enough students, and too many students are getting kicked up to tier two or tier three, as you said, and we're treating what should be a core instructional issue as an intervention issue, and we just can't serve students at the scale that we need to when we approach things that way, and we hand off too much of what should be classroom instruction to specialists, to interventionists, to teachers who are trying to close gaps, rather than try to close those gaps by design in the classroom, in the core instruction.
[30:44] SPEAKER_02:
And Justin, I wanted to respond to a related question that I think links up with your comments that you just offered. One participant said, for an established PLC that tends to focus a lot on planning instruction, what parts of the playbook might be a way to be able to begin to kind of deepen their knowledge. And I think a potential shortcoming of a team that comes together to regularly plan is that there may not be an existing way for that team to actually look at whether their plans impacted student learning. And so places in particular that I would take a closer look at within the playbook for those teams include doing things such as assignment analysis.
[31:40]
Not student work analysis, but actually analyzing assignments to be able to see if in fact those assignments are aligned with the expectations and the standards. Another tool that's in the playbook is around micro-teaching. Micro-teaching has a large evidence, body of evidence as well as influence on learning, but it's not commonly done. I think sometimes it's because people aren't quite sure how it's done. Within the playbook there are some protocols for how it is that micro-teaching can be enacted within the PLC Plus model. I'm Keith Fickle.
[32:24]
I'm the principal at a fairly large middle school in the suburban Houston area in Sugar Land. And our district and our school has been engaged quite some time with the work of Paul Bloomberg and Bart Pitchford with impact teams. We've spent a lot of time learning ourselves about learning intentions, success criteria, developing learning progressions and our campus is even engaged in to some degree of standards-based grading. So early on you guys were talking about evidence-based instruction and one of the structures that we've been using is the evidence analysis and action protocol that Paul Bloomberg and Barb Pitchford have in their book called Impact Teams or Developing Impact Teams. So my question kind of becomes what additional tools or what tweaks does your PLC Plus sort of add to what maybe their work has already established?
[33:20]
I'm presuming in the question that you're familiar with Paul and Barb's work.
[33:26] SPEAKER_00:
And I think they do a phenomenal job in helping us think about the impact cycle and how we make decisions based on the evidence from our students. I think for us, that is an important part of an overall way that a professional learning community operates. We don't tend to see people talking enough about evidence-based instruction, although there are opportunities there. And we don't see people having deep conversations about the equity gaps and opportunity to learn gaps that occur as a result of our teaching and learning processes. We also have worked very hard to provide teams tools to have conversations, to make ourselves vulnerable, to look at what the data are also telling us. We have taken the position that it's not enough to call it a facilitator and facilitate those conversations.
[34:20]
It's an activator, because we want the activator to be a member of the team, whereas a true facilitator stands back and lets the group process. And like in some of the small school conversations earlier, you don't have extra people. And it's not the administrator who shows up and manages the work of those teachers. We need people who can be the activators of this work. We also think about the idea of expectations and efficacy and how teams have those conversations. And as Nancy said earlier, adding in things like learning walks and micro teaching and assignment analysis and video analysis.
[35:03]
The idea is to give teams a bunch of tools to continue the learning journey of their students. we also pay attention to the learning needs of the adults. So in each of the questions, there's a time for the adults to say, here's what I still need to learn to be more effective with my students. And that learning might be individual or it might be collective. So they can have vicarious experiences or mastery experiences that start to build their skill sets to better deliver learning for students.
[35:35] SPEAKER_02:
We're very intentional about choosing the word playbook as a companion to this anchor book. And as any athletic coach knows, he or she always has a set of plays that can be put into action depending on what's happening in the game. And we see the playbook, the PLC Plus playbook, as being a collection of plays. No athletic coach would say, we're going to start with the very first play that's in the binder and then move straight through it during the game, no matter what it is that's happening. In the same regard, we want especially existing professional learning communities to be able to be selective and to utilize those plays and put those plays into action as needed in order to be able to forward and deepen their own learning.
[36:32]
So I guess as a follow-up question, then, we also do some micro-teaching protocols with our teachers. We've invested in buying several of the swivel cameras that people can record themselves with for analysis within the PLC. So what I've kind of found is that our teams that are engaged heavily in this work, we're having a disparity, even a problem with equity within the support that teams that are engaging in this work are getting. And then the teams that are not as heavily invested are maybe not coming along with them. And I haven't quite found that sweet spot of getting the teams that are doing this work and starting to make some significant changes to then impact other teams around them to kind of grow them one team at a time, kind of eating the health of one bite at a time. What suggestions do you guys have for me as a principal to help the existing teams that are getting strong and using these protocols to then bring people on board in other content areas and get their peers to the level of where they're at now?
[37:33] SPEAKER_00:
So one recommendation. So very soon, Dave Nagel will release, I think within the next two months, the Activator's Guide. It's not yet available, but it will be soon. And the Activator's Guide is designed to help people with a skill set to activate their professional learning community. There have been some tools out there for facilitation, you know, norm setting and those kinds of things. But we really haven't talked about the skill set to be an active member to get other people moving in the same direction.
[38:05]
And things like if someone is, you know, dismissing things or if someone's showing off, we call it peacocking. If they do these things, how does the activator know how to respond to that? Because any of those little actions, the naysayer comes in, the person who takes us off track and says, we have to talk about which books we're going to buy, whatever. The activator needs a skill set to keep the team focused. So I think that's going to be, when that comes out, that's going to be super helpful for helping the people who are charged with activating the learning of others to continue to engage in that process. In addition, I think we have to give the team the tools to build their honest reflections, their recognition
[38:58]
of what's working and what's not working, and what do we wanna do? So when we look at the collective efficacy research, there has to be a shared goal. We call it a common challenge, and we see a lot of teams that do not have a shared goal or a common challenge. you will i mean it destroys the collective when people don't agree on what we want to accomplish with our time together and and i think that's part of the problem is people show up to the meeting sometimes they have notes that are due to the principle sometimes they don't but if they don't have a we're in this together and this is what we're going to accomplish it starts to tear tear apart that collective and it just becomes a another meeting we have to go to We wrote an article about this a decade ago, having visited a school that it was just another meeting.
[39:51]
It was their, quote, PLC was simply just another meeting they had to endure. And they all talked about it. And they did not impact students' learning. They despised going to the meetings. They saw no value in them. And their achievement showed it.
[40:07]
As Justin recognized earlier, The system is perfectly designed to get the outcomes it's getting. And when we watched that school, it was all blame to other people, blaming kids, blaming parents, and their meetings were nothing. It was just, it was dreadful. So we wanted to build the skill sets of the teams and give them tools and resources to have more productive conversations. That was our goal in creating this PLC Plus framework.
[40:33] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and I think that activator role is so important because it gives responsibility for making this a valuable process over to the people who should have it, who is the teachers on the team. And I think a lot of people have had that experience of being mandated to do PLCs, maybe having some training, some support, but it's mostly a mandate. It's something we have to do. It It is not necessarily the same set of goals we would have for our regular meeting. We do need to talk about which books to buy, so we're kind of irritated that we have this other stuff to do in this PLC structure. But all of that starts to shift when the activator is someone on the team, when the team takes responsibility collectively and has leadership within itself to say, hey, how can we actually make this one of the most valuable things that we do for our students?
[41:22]
It's not just an administrative mandate. It's, you know, it's the way that we get results as a team. I love that, that redefinition of that facilitator role into activator. Hand it over to Kathy Jo here to ask a question.
[41:34] SPEAKER_02:
Okay. So I'm an assistant principal in Texas and we are very deep in the PLC process. And basically we've grown a lot and the teams that we're working with are invested. They are positive. They are at a place where their equity needs to be looked at. They're building assessments, they're looking at data, they're looking at standards, but I feel that it's false data because they're teaching things that may have already been taught.
[42:09]
So their successes are not showing up later on. So we're at a place coming into the new year, um, where we are looking at the social emotional piece of going on. We're looking at the whole child. We're going to be taking, they have a really good handle on what they need to do, but they don't have the steps to move forward. So my interest in helping them move forward are the walks, letting them, um, trust each other enough to go into their classrooms without us there. talk about instruction, be ready to talk about what's happening in the PLC.
[42:45]
What makes me a little nervous is having, I guess, the support for me, my vocabulary, my guidance through that process. And I noticed in the playbook that there are some things in there. I just don't what models would you say, modules would be the best going into question five? Or just give me some clarity on that, on how to support the teachers. As you noted, there are a number of different learning walks that can take place. And of course, this is always and should always be based on the needs of the team and what they believe will help them to be able to learn together as an organization.
[43:36]
One of the places that we often start is with those ghost walks that are in there. And ghost walks are times when a PLC Plus team comes together, they have identified what their common challenge is, and they simply go as a team in and out of each other's empty classrooms. There are no kids that are present. Nobody is teaching to examine what the environment looks like as it relates to whatever it is that they have identified as being the common challenge. So for example, If the common challenge has to do with an SEL focus, let's go and just look at each other's rooms and we can talk about what are things that are present within the room, the physical environment that helped to forward all of that.
[44:28]
Another kind of learning walk that we have in there is, again, focus first and foremost on what your common challenge is. And among the team, and these are of course arranged in advance, this never comes as a surprise, but within the team that's doing the walk, team members have one of three jobs that they rotate through a series of classrooms. There are members on the team as they go in and out of the classrooms, seven, eight, or nine minutes in length for each visit. There are members of the team that focus on what is going on in the physical environment. There's another group within the team that is focused on what the teacher is doing, and a third portion of the team that are talking with students.
[45:21]
And again, this is always related to the common challenge. This isn't meant to be a cafeteria approach where we look at everything and therefore nothing. After three classrooms, the team stops in the hallway and has a quick conversation about what they saw in the physical environment, what the teacher was doing, and what the student was doing to support all of that. And then they all change roles and they go through another three classrooms, have a short conversation. And then they all change roles a third time, go through another couple of classrooms, and then meet together. The idea of this is, first of all, that it's focused on a common challenge.
[46:01]
We know what it is that we are interested in finding out more about. And that each of the team members has the opportunity to spend time looking at different dimensions of the learning that's happening in real time in the classroom.
[46:18] SPEAKER_00:
I'll add that I want to emphasize we don't have teachers talk after they visit a single classroom. The trend data becomes really important. So we recommend every third classroom. Years ago, we went through the principal center with Justin's for leaders around visiting classrooms. That's how we first met Justin. But when we started doing this with teachers, they started focusing on the individual teacher they were observing.
[46:44]
So we move to trends when we take teachers on walks. So if you go to three classrooms and nobody can talk till after the third classroom, they will tend to focus on things that are common across. So that's something I want to emphasize on Nancy's about a common. The other thing I was thinking about as you were asking our question is, it seems to me that your teams need to talk about question two, where are we now? That a lot of teachers take credit. I mean, I did this.
[47:10]
take credit for kids learning because we have no initial assessment data to say what they already knew. We just take credit that they learned it from us and they might've learned it from their parents or a previous year or who knows the internet, whatever. So without some initial assessment data, knowing where kids are and there are fast ways to do it and more slow ways to do it, but without some initial data that the team talks about, you're not gonna push the learning that much forward if you spend 40 or 50% of your minutes teaching stuff they already know. And we have good solid evidence that the majority of classrooms, half of what's going on, the kids have already mastered.
[47:48] SPEAKER_01:
I just wanted to mention, if you go on the Corwin website, the different learning walk models, Ghost Walk, Capacity Building Learning Walks, Faculty Learning Walks, and so forth, are actually available as a handout. So you can go to the Corwin website, just Google Corwin PLC Plus, and you'll find that handout. And if you're joining us live, I put a link in the chat there. And Doug, thank you for mentioning that. I should give you credit more often for actually getting my book out into the world because we did have the Instructional Leadership Challenge as a challenge long before it was a book. And all of a sudden, publishers started calling me and saying, hey, you should turn this challenge thing into a book.
[48:28]
And I eventually discovered that that was due to Doug Fisher putting in a good word. So I appreciate that very much. And the rest is history, as they say. So very much appreciate that.
[48:39] SPEAKER_02:
Hi. My name's Helen. I'm from the Houston suburbs. And my question was, it sounds like the activator should be a teacher and not an administrator, as it is on our campus. So how can I shift that thinking, though, on our campus? And I'm not an administrator.
[48:59]
I'm an aspiring administrator. But as a teacher and a teacher leader, I would say, you know, what is the best way to do it without being too aggressive or seeing? I don't want to shut people down because sometimes, you know, it seems if you have some ideas, sometimes they're shut down. Like, where are you getting this information? Because we're real heavy on solution trees. and that kind of thing.
[49:21]
So I just, that was my question. So again, thank you for having me, Justin. I appreciate it.
[49:26] SPEAKER_00:
So I think in most professional learning community models, there's no real guidelines for who facilitates or in our language activates. And so it's kind of left up to the group. And what's happened over time is it's migrated to an administrative function. And I don't think there's anything wrong with a principal, vice principal being an activator of a group. The challenge is there aren't enough of them to activate all the appropriate groups. And the role, I think, is a teacher leadership role.
[49:57]
And I do know, I mean, I like to go to some professional learning groups. I like to hang out with the English group. I think they're fascinating to talk about. But I'm not the one activating the group. But I do attend them on a regular basis. Nancy sometimes goes to our career group.
[50:12]
Sometimes she goes to the history group. But the idea is there's a skill set in some teachers. And the activator could change every few months. I mean, it's whether or not the person has the skills to activate his or her colleagues. We're thinking a lot right now about teacher credibility. and the highly credible teachers.
[50:33]
So if you read the research on credibility, it's around, do you have trust with your students? Are you seen as competent by your students? Do they see you as dynamic and accessible or immediacy? And so when you look at those things, people who have high teacher credibility are highly desirable for teams. Teams of teachers want members on them with high credibility with their students. We all know who the highly credible teachers are.
[51:01]
Those are our first draft for the activators because they have street cred with their students and they can get the rest of us doing really good work. And sometimes administrators have less credibility. There are administrators, no fault of their own, who've never taught the current standards that are Teachers are teaching and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a different job to be the school leader or a leader at a school site. But the credibility of a highly credible teacher leading that group is powerful. So I would like to encourage people who are in the admin role, join the groups, participate, but you're not the boss of the group.
[51:48]
You're the boss in other things, but let the groups get their work done. Let the groups of the people who actually have to deliver this experience for kids really deeply taught. We have to get to the point where we're vulnerable. And we don't tend to be vulnerable with people who are going to evaluate our performance. It's harder to be vulnerable with the person who writes my evaluation. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
[52:14]
It's just harder. It is easier for me to be vulnerable with this teacher named Marisol because she's super credible in the English department. The students adore her. They say they learn a ton from her. She's super accessible to them. She's off the chart with credibility.
[52:31]
I want to be part of her team because I know that the kids value her. And I think we get more work done when she's leading the group versus when one of the administrators is leading the group. And I don't mean to be offensive to administrators at all. You're super busy.
[52:46] SPEAKER_02:
I agree with what Doug had to offer and would just add to that, that in terms of formal school leaders who are involved with those professional learning communities, that those are great opportunities to learn from the um to learn from the plc you know peter senge decades ago was writing about the idea that schools can learn and the presence and the the involvement of administrators to be that person who is gathering the learning on behalf of the school organization can be invaluable they don't need to lead the meeting they need to be able to learn from the meeting and to help figure out what needs to happen next at the school level.
[53:36] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is PLC Plus, Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design. Doug Fisher and Nancy Fry, thanks so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.
[53:45] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much for the opportunity and it was wonderful meeting all of you. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, team.
[53:51] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
