Shifting from Me to We: How to Jumpstart Collaboration in a PLC at Work®

[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_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Michael Roberts. Michael is an author and consultant with over two decades of experience teaching and leading schools at all levels. A former principal and executive director, he's the author of several books, including Shifting From Me to We, How to Jumpstart Collaboration in a PLC at Work, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:36] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_00:

Michael, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Justin. I'm super excited to be here.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think every administrator, every teacher can recognize the reality that's implicit in the title of shifting from me to we, how we jumpstart collaboration. It's entirely possible to have collaborative meetings, to have PLCs, to have settings where people meet where perhaps very little actual collaboration takes place. And there's more that needs to be in place for true collaboration to occur. What did you see happening in the teams that you supported and the schools that you supported in terms of maybe that gap between simply meeting together, having the structures and actually working collaboratively that prompted you to write this book?

[01:24] SPEAKER_01:

The genesis of the book really comes from when I became principal at Desert View Elementary in Hermiston, Oregon in 2013. I met with my leadership team in July and sat down with a group of fantastic professionals that I'd never met before, essentially. And we were talking about the school and doing those kinds of things a new principal does with the leadership team. Tell me about the culture. What do we need to maintain? What do we need to get better at?

[01:51]

And one of the teachers on the leadership team, when collaboration came up, she said very frankly and very flatly, we've met for years, it's never changed my practice once. I said, oh, okay, well, we're going to change that, okay? Because there's no sense in meeting if it doesn't improve your practice, if it doesn't improve student results. And so that's giving some tools to help teacher leaders, district and building leaders to make that shift from we're together, we're in a room. Now, how do we make that time valuable? Because what I found is really effective schools work really well within the time limits they're given, right?

[02:32]

ineffective schools often use teachers' most finite resource, which is their time, and they treat it as it's infinite, right? So they sit down and they talk and they don't use the time effectively to really work on how to improve student learning and adult practices. So that's kind of the crux and everything kind of runs back to that idea of, okay, you've got this time where most of us do at this point in education, now how do we make it more effective?

[02:57] SPEAKER_00:

Michael, I appreciate that sense of modeling, you know, that principals need to do, that it's not enough to be a dictator about collaboration. We have to actually collaborate about, you know, meet teachers where they are and include them in those conversations about how PLCs work and what problems they're solving and how they're working together. One of the things that I know you tackle in the book that often is a big challenge for teams is really focusing on the essentials, focusing on things that really are big opportunities, that really are priorities that would make a difference for student learning and not getting sidetracked, not getting sucked into things that maybe could keep us busy forever. You know, we could continue to have meetings till we all retire talking about anything under the sun. How do teams focus on priorities? what truly is going to give them leverage and truly going to make a difference on practice.

[03:49]

You know, once they've decided, okay, what are we really here for? How do we set that focus and maintain that focus on what we actually do in those collaborative settings?

[03:59] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that may be one of the most important questions coming up for 2021, right? Because no matter how your school is going to operate through this upcoming year, we have to make sure that kids have the most essential that's in place, right? And have all those pieces ready to go. And so it's even more vital that that's the focus, that let's make sure they have what's most essential and then we can move on to the important to know or the nice to know type of standards. And so getting teams to get in the habit of meaningfully agenda-ing out their meetings. Let's sit down and let's say we're going to talk about this much for this long and then we're going to move on.

[04:37]

We've got 60 minutes. Great. Let's put it in three 20 minute blocks and we're going to talk about what's the most essential standard coming up in the next unit. Right. And I always ask staff when I'm working with teams, OK, if you could snap your fingers and give the students one thing from this next unit, what would that be? Well, we want them to be able to effectively ask and answer questions from a grade level text or we want them to understand the relationship between percentage and dust and fractions, whatever, then that's probably your most essential thing.

[05:10]

That's what you need to be talking about. That's what you need to be monitoring. That's where your formative assessments need to be based. And so your conversation just is focused on that essential piece, not necessarily everything that comes with it. It takes meaningful conversations to get down that piece because there should be some pushback, right? And one of the things that, that I did with this book that, um, I always had the vision for was talking with teachers who are part of really accountable professional learning communities and getting some of their input.

[05:39]

And some of those pieces are put in the book. And one of the teachers told me a story about a team that she worked with where they weren't in a place that they could disagree, that everybody just kind of sat quietly and nodded. And they didn't have a real effective year supporting student learning because there has to be a little bit of academic tension in terms of we have the freedom to disagree with one another in a professional, respectful way. Because that's what's going to get them down to what's most essential. So if I could give them one piece, it would be. agenda out your meetings and focus only on the most essential skill or the most essential standard that's coming up.

[06:23] SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate your raising that issue of maybe needing to have a little bit of a back and forth, a little bit of an argument about what is most essential, because it seems to me that one of the reasons that we end up with so much on the agenda and such a lack of focus is that Different people bring different things up, and we don't want to offend anybody. We don't want to have that hard conversation about what really matters. So we just say yes to everything. We just say, sure, we can put that on the agenda. Sure, we can talk about this. We can talk about that.

[06:50]

We can pack our agenda with things that, you know, if we were to really talk through it and come to a consensus, you know, what do we really need to be spending our time on, those things wouldn't make the cut. And the only reason they have remained on the agenda is because we haven't had the courage to make that tough decision collectively.

[07:08] SPEAKER_01:

The issue is oftentimes we're still stuck in that idea of what was a traditional meeting at a grade level or a department and what should a true collaborative meeting be. And the collaborative meeting is around adult practices and student results. I sat in with a kindergarten team not too long ago and they came in to the meeting. There was three of them and they said, well, are you going to lead the meeting? I said, no, I just want to watch and I'll help you as you go. And they said, okay.

[07:37]

okay, so the Turkey Trot is coming up this week. What color socks are we all wearing? And they literally coordinated their outfits for 15 minutes. And it's like, is that what this time is for? And they're like, again, honestly, we're not really sure what this time is for. Okay, well, let's talk about the adult practices and the student results you're expecting from your next unit with your kindergarten team.

[08:00]

It's those kinds of things that take up time so we don't have to have real conversations around I think this is essential and all students have to have this in place as opposed to a colleague who might say, I kind of disagree, you know? And so it's, really is getting rid of that fluff that makes all the difference in the world.

[08:21] SPEAKER_00:

Those are such tough calls because it does feel awkward, you know, to say actually this thing that we're all comfortable talking about, that we're all happy to spend our time on, is not the right thing. You know, it's actually off purpose and maybe needs to be either compressed down to, you know, maybe we can have a 30-second talk about sock color, but really we need to prioritize the time for the essentials of student learning.

[08:47] SPEAKER_01:

a tough one yeah because you only have in in in this in this building they only had 45 minutes a week together and they spent 20 a minute on on on coordinated outfits for the turkey trot as opposed to really dig it into let's talk about what's going on in our classrooms and how the students are being successful or not michael why do you think we're so tempted to be drawn into those peripheral issues like what's what's going on i don't know if we want to say psychologically or socially but

[09:12] SPEAKER_00:

You know, why as educators are we so drawn to those issues that we know, right? You know, immediately we know that those are not core issues that deserve our time. So why is there such a tendency among educators everywhere? I mean, we are all subject to this, right? Why do we do that?

[09:29] SPEAKER_01:

There's two reasons. One, it really does come down to, at a lot of places, just a simple lack of training of how to have the conversations, how to agenda out the meetings, and how to really be focused. A lot of times in a lot of districts, what happened often many years ago, because professional learning communities at work by DeFord Acres, 1998 is the copyright date. So this idea has been around for two decades plus. And so what happened in a lot of places was districts came in and said, a few of you have gone to a training or just the leaders have gone to a training and now we're going to do this. Go.

[10:07]

right and and there wasn't a meaningful training as to let's really think about how to effectively ask the four essential professional learning community questions and let's really think about how to have those conversations so one has been a simple lack of training the other part comes down to even after sometimes staffs get the training it's a lack of confidence of teachers in that i don't want to come off as being the teacher who doesn't know or the teacher whose students aren't performing at as high of a level as my colleagues. If I'm in a group of four and three teachers have students at 80% proficiency, 81%, 85, and my kids are at 68, I don't want to be that teacher. So it's safer to talk about things that don't really have meaning. And that's really where being an effective team comes in because effective teams understand that on this standard,

[11:06]

it may be 80, 80, 68, but on the next one, it may be inverted and you might be at 90 and everybody else be at 80. And so it really is that idea of confidence that we all have at some level that we're not good enough. That at some point, somebody's going to look at me and say, I don't think so. But when teams are really accountable and effective, that goes away because they understand that they can have difficult conversations and that The idea that the students didn't perform on a particular standard at the same level as colleagues on the team with shifting from me to we, it's also shifting the focus from the adult to the student.

[11:48] SPEAKER_00:

Michael, I appreciate your point about the importance of training and realizing that maybe a lot of the people who are currently meeting in PLCs never were actually personally trained. And I personally don't offer PLC training, but I'll hear from principals who think they have a different problem. Like they'll say, oh, my teachers are really resistant. I just really am struggling to get them to see the value of PLCs and to make the case that this matters. And I'll say, well, what kind of training have they been through? And they say, well, I went to this conference and it was really great and I learned a lot about PLCs, but I just can't get my staff on board.

[12:22]

And I'll think to myself, it's probably not an issue of persuasion. It's probably an issue of, as you said, training, that they need to have that modeling and that instruction on how to meet as PLCs. And perhaps we did some training, but it was too long ago and we just need to really get people back on track in terms of their understanding. So I'm thinking about one of the, the main threats to that ongoing work. When we've done the training, when we've gotten people on board, there's always the potential for other issues and other initiatives to kind of crowd out PLCs. I think one year in my district, we had data teams and people were saying, well, okay, are data teams replacing PLCs?

[13:05]

We're always having these new initiatives come in. and compete for that time and compete for that attention of our staff. When we do have other initiatives that come up, how do we need to think about sustaining our PLCs and involving them in whatever other work is going on?

[13:23] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the important thing about it is understanding that this is going to take time. To become an accountable professional learning community is not something that's going to happen overnight. So understanding that professional learning communities do not grow overnight. So it takes time to build that real accountability that makes teams be effective. So when something comes in with, hey, you know what we should do this year? We should do data teams.

[13:51]

Well, data teams is largely looking at student data, which is a fundamental piece of professional learning communities. So. As an administrator, one things I always asked as the Superintendent or the state would say, here's what we need you guys to do. You need to do X. Would be my job is then to look at that and see where it fits in with what we're already doing as a professional learning community. How can we keep the professional learning community process How can we keep our teams working highly collaboratively but still work in that initiative so I'm doing what my boss is asking me to do?

[14:27]

The example we use in the book was they asked us to go back and look at what area is your school not performing well at, right? And so what we hit on was our ELD students, our students who are in English language learners were not performing where everyone else was. So we really focused on that as a professional learning community. We focused on the data that they were producing and then the adult practices which were producing the data. We focused on what are we doing for these students when they're not being proficient, specifically into strategies that help English language learners learn. And when our English language learners are being proficient, how are we extending them?

[15:11]

Those questions are still fundamental to a professional learning community. They fit with the initiative, but it also helps everybody else going along. So when we're trying to be an accountable professional learning community, you have to kind of see where those initiatives fit into the work that you're already doing. And my staff always appreciated that it continued to be a through line from one year to the next, that it may have a different shade, but still at the core of it, we're talking about our four essential questions. We're talking about our three big ideas of a professional learning community, and we're continuing that work. kind of looping back to the first part of your question with training, it's one of those things that often happens where a group of people, either administrators or teacher leaders will go to a PLC Institute or they'll go to the PLC Summit and they'll be there for three days and they'll hear amazing people like Tim Brown and Mike Matos and Anthony Muhammad and Luis Cruz and they'll leave and they'll be on fire and just be like, okay, we're doing this.

[16:14]

And then they get back to the building And they're now translating the message to people who never heard the message, who didn't hear Mike or Anthony or Luis. And so instead of coming back and saying, let's really intentionally plan how to build this out for people who weren't there, they just come back and say, we're going to do it. It's a great idea. It helps all kids learn. We're going to do it. And so I would strongly recommend that The conversation with the leadership team or the administrative team is let's meaningfully plan it out before we start rolling it out.

[16:51]

In education, it's so often that we build the airplane in the air rather than really sitting down and saying, okay, if we do X and that leads to Y and then that leads to Z, we can make this really effective. The first building I ever built a professional learning community at was a middle school in Prosser, Washington. And it was September before we took a team to see Rick and Becky do four for two days on a stage and came back and said, we need to do this. But instead of just rolling it out the next week, we sat down as an administrative team and really said, okay, if we're going to do this, what are the roadblocks we're going to have? How do we provide the training? What do we need to have on place?

[17:37]

And in this, this case, you know, Almost 15 years ago, it was we need to have these books on place to answer these questions. We need to have these resources lined out. And then we started exploring it with the staff before we ever really made any kind of substantive changes. So it's about plotting out how you can do it. effectively to your specific staff and with your specific building to provide that training and begin to build that expectation of this is something we can do and we're gonna do over an extended period of time rather than this is this year's big thing and then next year it'll be next year's big thing right and and people will say well what happened to PLC's well forget PLC's we're on data teams and then the following year we forget data teams now we're talking about social emotional learning right but when you really look at the fundamentals of what do we want all students to learn how do we know they've learned it what do we do for the students who haven't learned it what do we do for the students who are demonstrating proficiency those four questions fit with all those different initiatives and so sometimes it's just keeping the vocabulary but it's it's extending it through time and keep coming back to those ideas

[18:52] SPEAKER_00:

love the way that those questions can almost serve as as kind of a professional operating system you know whatever our our focus needs to be you know whatever gaps we're trying to close whatever problems we're trying to solve you know it's it's like you you might you know use different programs on your computer you might visit different websites depending on what you're working on but you know that that operating system of those four plc questions uh it's it's been incredible to see them operating over a period of decades now since this work has been in progress. If people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, perhaps about some training, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[19:30] SPEAKER_01:

So I have a website, which is everykidnow.com.

[19:36]

They can certainly go there. Also on Twitter and Instagram, it's at every kid now. Again, just one word. So that's probably the easiest place to get me. I'm available and happy to help with this work. It's super important.

[19:53]

I really, really believe this. I tell people all the time when I'm on the road, I have three kids that are amazing, but they're eight, 10 and 12. And I'm willing to give up my time with them to go help them to help their kids and students because it's that important. I really, really believe this. I've seen it happen across the country with all different populations that when they commit to being a professional learning community, When teachers and leaders commit to all students being successful, it changes the entire paradigm of what can happen in a site. And it's super exciting.

[20:29] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Shifting from Me to We, How to Jumpstart Collaboration in a PLC at Work. Michael Roberts, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[20:38] SPEAKER_01:

All right. Thanks, Justin. It was great to be here.

[20:40] Announcer:

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