On one hand, the curriculum calls for moving forward with new important content, and the teacher hopes to ensure his or her students have access to that content (or an opportunity to learn). Most students in the class are ready to proceed. On the other hand, some students cannot demonstrate proficiency in essential prerequisite skills for the next unit. The school has charged the teacher with leaving no student behind, so what does the teacher do? Does the teacher provide most students with busywork for a few days so he or she can attend to those who are struggling? Or should the teacher move on and hope that students lacking prerequisite skills somehow pick them up on their own? Imagine this teacher has a daily class load of more than 150 high school students. Given this scenario, the teacher’s job is not difficult—it is impossible.
In a traditional school, the individual classroom teacher must resolve this problem. The disparity with which teachers address the question, What happens when students don’t learn? provides one of the best examples of the traditional school model’s inherent inequity. Some teachers allow students to retake assessments; others don’t. Some teachers provide feedback on student papers or projects before assigning grades; others simply grade the first attempt. Some teachers keep parents informed of students’ progress; others won’t. Some teachers come early and stay late to assist struggling students; others won’t or can’t. Some teachers accept late work without penalty; others accept the work but deduct points for tardiness. Still others won’t accept late work and assign a zero. Some teachers average scores to determine a final grade; others consider early efforts formative. Perhaps the best evidence of the variety in what teachers do when students struggle is that teachers often appeal for their own children to get assigned to certain teachers while avoiding others.
Educators in a PLC recognize the inherent inequity in the traditional system and work collectively to establish a systematic process for providing students with additional time and support for learning, regardless of students’ assigned teachers. The master schedule’s purposeful design provides time during the regular school day when students receive this support without missing new direct instruction. The system of interventions relies on frequent, timely monitoring of each student’s learning and provides additional time for learning as soon as a student struggles. Students continue to receive this support until they demonstrate proficiency.
Let’s apply this premise to the dilemma of the teacher who teaches a unit and then discovers that most students have achieved the intended standard, but a few have not. In a PLC, the teacher would teach the next curricular unit, ensuring that struggling students receive additional time and targeted support. Because the collaborative team has agreed on the unit’s essential or priority standard, pacing, and common assessment, the teachers providing intervention know what help students need. The team can say, “These students need help with subtracting two-digit integers,” as opposed to, “These students are not doing well in mathematics.” When the teachers working with these students have confidence in the students’ ability to demonstrate proficiency on the intended skill, they give the students a similar iteration (form B) of the original assessment, and their new scores replace their previous struggling scores.
Traditional schools have operated under the assumption that they have fixed time and support for student learning. Every student will receive sixty minutes of language arts instruction per day for 176 school days. Every student will receive essentially the same amount of the teacher’s attention and support. But if time and support for learning remain constants, that will always make learning the variable. Some students will learn given that amount of time and support, and others won’t.
In a PLC, because of the collective commitment to high levels of learning for every student, time and support are variables, and learning is the constant. Perhaps most students will master a skill in three weeks of sixty minutes of instruction a day. Others may need four weeks of ninety minutes a day to achieve mastery. Most mission statements do not say, “Our mission is to help all students learn fast and the first time we teach a skill”; they simply say, “Our mission is to help all students learn.” In order to stay true to that mission, faculty members must create a system that ensures students receive additional time and support when needed.
Some schools attempt a system of interventions that has teachers stop new direct instruction and create different groups in the classroom to meet different student needs during time set aside for intervention and extension. This strategy is certainly better than traditional practice, but it is not the preferred strategy in a PLC for three reasons. First, it perpetuates the idea that a single teacher must take responsibility for a designated student group, rather than share collective responsibility for each student’s learning with a teacher team. Second, it is a complex endeavor for a single teacher to simultaneously meet the needs of students requiring intervention, practice, and extension. Third, more of the same is not the best strategy for meeting student needs. A system of interventions that instead relies on the entire team or a team of intervention specialists gives students an opportunity to hear a new voice and perhaps a new strategy for learning a skill.
How Will We Extend Learning for Students Who Are Highly Proficient?
If a school focuses solely on helping students achieve their grade level or course’s standards, it places an artificial ceiling on students’ access to learning. For example, Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, is committed to “success for every student.” It interprets that commitment as ensuring every student will graduate with high levels of learning necessary for success in college or career training. At one point in its history, the school discouraged students from learning beyond the college preparatory curriculum by establishing limits and prerequisites to serve as barriers to the advanced placement (AP) program’s college-level work.
Over time, the faculty recognized that many students were capable of successfully completing college-level work while still in high school. So teachers now provide an extensive AP program and encourage all college-bound students to participate in that program while still in high school. The school also provides tutorial support for students who need assistance to succeed in the program. It has had remarkable results. Since the early 1980s, the percentage of graduating students who has successfully completed an AP course has increased from 7 percent to 90 percent, and the mode AP exam score for students is 5, the highest possible score (Adlai E. Stevenson High School, 2017).
Every department at Stevenson also fully commits to providing highly capable students with access to academic competitions that challenge them to go beyond the traditional high school curriculum. These competitions provide both students and teachers with external benchmarks to assess the impact of the school’s commitment to advancing high-performing students’ learning.
Mason Crest Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, is a nationally recognized Title I school that takes a different approach to extending student learning. In their planning for every unit, collaborative teams not only identify the essential standards and common formative assessments for that unit but also develop plans for extending high-performing students’ learning at the end of the unit. While some team members work with students who need intervention and others work with students who need additional practice, some team members work with students who are ready for deeper exploration of the topic.
The proficiency scale approach explained in chapter 5 (page 137) provides yet another approach to addressing the issue of extending proficient students’ learning. In short, a school committed to high levels of learning for all students will not establish an artificial ceiling on how much students can learn.
How Will We Increase Our Instructional Competence?
As mentioned earlier, Marzano and colleagues (2016) have added a fifth question for collaborative teams in high reliability schools to consider: How will we increase our instructional competence? This question makes sense because the high
