School Improvement for All
The processes we detail in this book harness the power within a school or district to achieve high levels of learning for all students. It does not require years of workshops and professional development before teachers can do the actual work. It requires learning through action—for a staff to roll up their sleeves and start the work immediately. If a patient comes into the emergency room with difficulty breathing, the nurses and doctors do not take the patient’s temperature; they perform immediate triage to save the patient’s life. Failing schools need a triage plan—an immediate course of action to put a halt to the continual-failure cycle.
First and most important, Professional Learning Communities at Work™ (PLC at Work) is the foundation for School Improvement for All. When a school operates as a PLC, real improvement becomes much more possible. Schools that embrace the three big ideas of a PLC as described by founders Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016) understand the following.
1. The school’s purpose is to ensure high levels of learning for all students. Therefore, there is a laser-sharp focus on student learning. In order to ensure high levels of learning, teachers must work together.
2. Only collaborative efforts will improve learning. No one person has all of the knowledge, skill, stamina, and patience to meet all student needs. Teachers have to hold hands and cross the street together because student needs are too great and the consequences of failure too dire to go it alone.
3. Schools must focus on results. Every teacher comes to school with good intentions, but if those good intentions do not materialize into greater learning for students, it doesn’t matter. In the end, the proof is in the tangible results.
The schools and districts featured on AllThingsPLCs (www.allthingsplc.info) are examples of the PLC continuous-improvement cycle in action. Although each of their stories is unique, these schools have demonstrated evidence of effectiveness of PLC implementation that has resulted in higher levels of learning for all students.
How does School Improvement for All address the focus of PLCs that want to create the necessary environment for success for all students? The most distinct way is to use school-improvement efforts to target specific needs—determining the triage plan. Within a PLC, teachers must drive their work with a collaborative audit or needs-assessment process that takes a 360-degree view of a school’s policies, practices, processes, and procedures in light of their effect on student achievement. The focus on data is relentless. The process is a true problem-solving model that leaves no stone unturned in the quest to ensure that all students learn at high levels. The true measure of success in schools that use School Improvement for All as a guide is that more students are learning at proficient or above-proficient levels on typical assessments from the school, district, state or province, or nation. This requires that teachers and administrators exert a focused, cohesive, and consistent effort over time; it demands a commitment from everyone to be all in for student success.
Although we recognize that all schools can and should improve, this book specifically supports schools and districts that are currently at risk or in danger of being designated in need of improvement by state or federal guidelines. It is also geared to support schools that have made few or no achievement gains over a number of years—in other words, schools with data that have flatlined. These schools are frustrated by their lack of progress and feel as if they have exhausted all of their options to improve, so triage is in order.
Achieve Improvement
It turns out that superhuman powers are not a requirement for school improvement. School improvement is possible no matter the school’s size; students’ demographics, poverty levels, and achievement levels; or the amount of resources the staff and students have.
Figure I.1 shows the key features of School Improvement for All. At the center are the students, focusing on their unique needs as 21st century learners. These students are growing up in a world that has changed drastically from the one that the majority of educators experienced as students. Students in the 21st century are poised to be active participants in their own learning. Teachers must focus on preparing them for the possibilities of their future, not our past.
Figure I.1: School Improvement for All features.
To prepare students for their future, we must consider the question, What is the work that matters most? Teacher teams must do that work to yield increased learning for students. We know very well how hard teachers work on behalf of their students. They very often give up personal time to prepare lessons and activities. We are not suggesting that teachers need to work harder or longer; teachers already work hard enough. But it is important to engage in the right work—the work that yields better results. This means deeply understanding the standards they expect students to know and do, developing an assessment system that supports learning, aligning instructional practices to the cognitive complexity of the learning expectations, and providing interventions and extensions based on the data teams collect as part of the ongoing improvement cycle.
The next ring in figure I.1 is leadership and accountability. All members of the school and district staff should share these responsibilities. Everyone serves in a leadership capacity and is accountable for ensuring that all students learn at high levels. Leadership includes creating and nurturing a culture of success. Culture is not the principal’s sole responsibility; everyone has a role in defining and shaping the school’s culture. Administrators engage their staff in charting the course that leads to student learning. This requires that everyone embrace accountability—not shy away from it. Students need to be accountable for their learning, teachers accountable to their students, and administrators accountable to teachers and students. Leadership for learning is not a solo act; it is shared and widely dispersed.
The outer ring in figure I.1 contains the foundation of school improvement: a continuous improvement cycle based in the big ideas that all students can succeed, staff must work in a collaborative culture, and they must focus on results. These big ideas form the basis for the PLC process (DuFour et al., 2016), and schools that reculture themselves to become PLCs have successfully improved student learning. For example, see Sanger Unified School District under the See the Evidence webpage on AllThingsPLC (www.allthingsplc.info/evidence). (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks to access live links to the websites mentioned in this book.)
In the PLC continuous-improvement model, SMART goals (goals that are strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound; Conzemius & O’Neill, 2013) and data drive the work of the entire organization. Schools work on sustaining their efforts from the beginning instead of waiting until they realize better results and only then asking how to sustain them. Sustainability begins with developing highly effective and efficient collaborative teams that engage in the right work, and schools can ensure they thrive by establishing the processes and protocols that represent the way the educators work together (DuFour et al., 2016). School improvement should never depend on who will do the work, but rather on how educators work together to achieve success for all students.
About This Book
We designed this book to further describe the elements of the PLC continuous-improvement cycle shown in
