Your Tour Guides
We will be your tour guides on this PLC journey. Casey is a former urban high school principal and city assistant superintendent who utilized the PLC process to drive a dramatic turnaround in each of the schools he worked with. In addition, he has served virtual PLCs, consulting with online schools who use the PLC process. He met Craig several years ago as a consultant while he was working with SCSD2 during its ongoing journey toward improvement. Craig is the long-standing superintendent of SCSD2. He spent four years as an assistant superintendent and has served as the superintendent since 2000.
The districts we have served as practitioners are quite different from each other: urban areas in Toledo, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, versus the western landscape of northern Wyoming. Our multiple and diverse experiences in education have shaped our vision for this book, and the differing experiences we bring to the table will help to inform your experience as a reader.
Despite our differing experiences, both of us have a relentless passion for the education profession—for results and for students and the educators who serve them—and have bullish opinions on the profession’s future. We both passionately pursue best practices and believe schools that want to achieve better results than ever before should use the PLC process as articulated by Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour as the foundation for getting things done. And finally, we are both relentlessly dedicated to telling it like it is. While we hope our writing inspires you, we likewise aim for clarity about what you need to strive for to make the PLC process come alive, starting today. We will be straightforward, writing both straight to and straight from the heart.
The Setting
The setting for this rich case study is Sheridan, Wyoming, a picturesque town of twenty thousand people at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The community has easy access to badlands, national forests, and any number of outdoor activities. It also has a long-running affinity for the cowboy culture. Even if you’ve never gone fly fishing, eaten buffalo, or attended a rodeo, you could find all three with relative ease in this eleven-square-mile town.
Cowboys and charm notwithstanding, SCSD2 is an altogether common school district. Historically, it has faced huge internal challenges in trying to meet the needs of economically diverse students with extraordinarily different and often difficult learning needs. Principals and teachers in the district had developed extremely low expectations of students who live in poverty, as well as students who struggled academically. With ten schools (six receiving Title I funding), roughly 3,500 students, and three hundred teachers, there was indeed a great deal of work needed to overcome these and other internal challenges. SCSD2 responded to these challenges in nothing short of an amazing way—and its responsiveness to these challenges lies at the heart of this book.
The Hunger
In 2005, educators in SCSD2 got hungry. Proficiency levels as low as 25 percent in some schools suggested that the district’s staff weren’t necessarily helping students reach their potential, and the data gave staff an overarching sense that they could do so much more. Perhaps even more important, and key to the ascent of a PLC culture, SCSD2 staff were willing to challenge their assumptions and to do things differently. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and had never heard of PLCs. But they knew that moderate, vanilla changes around the edges would probably not satisfy their hunger for real student improvement.
While this book spends quite a bit of time on technical elements of the PLC process, one shouldn’t overlook the impact of personal commitment. Ensuring leaders and teachers are coming to the table hungry, ready to change and innovate, is essential. This foundational element of creative innovation represents a formidable introduction to any reform process. And in this case, the hungry hearts at SCSD2 had no idea about the feast ahead; they just knew that it was time for a change.
The Solution
To satisfy this hunger for change and innovation, SCSD2 pursued with interest two very different innovative possibilities: (1) merit pay and (2) PLC implementation. These two approaches to school reform couldn’t have been more different. Suffice it to say, the PLC approach was more effective and more popular among staff. As we briefly explore both options, we do not necessarily intend to debate them. We simply hope to illustrate that a school’s approach to improvement will most certainly impact that school’s eventual outcomes.
SCSD2 had two schools, Meadowlark Elementary and Highland Park Elementary, that wanted to serve as pilot settings for districtwide school reform. This decision to start small with just two schools speaks to the district’s commitment to careful consideration before jumping into a districtwide solution.
Merit Pay
The first choice focused on installing a merit-pay system that offered a financial reward for individual teachers who could show growth in their students’ achievement. The merit-pay system, known as the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), was fairly simple. TAP provided a performance metric that was measured before and after student learning data and then calculated compensation based on a merit-pay formula.
This system had a rather interesting impact. Indeed, motivated and innovative teachers outperformed some of their colleagues. However, this approach unintentionally established a new level of secrecy about innovative approaches. Instead of sharing creative ideas that worked for students, teachers actually had a financial incentive to keep those innovations cloistered, only to roll them out for their own students in hopes of attaining the merit pay. For example, a teacher who had developed a detailed and effective system for collecting and representing student learning data, and for using these data to drive daily instruction, felt pressure from the TAP model to keep the system to herself. (As a side note, we recognize that merit pay has many permutations that allow districts to roll it out differently. However, the outcome we describe here is the real impact that merit pay had in this case.)
SCSD2’s merit-pay system rewarded individual teachers, encouraged more isolated professional practice, and offered a systemic disincentive to work together. With each translation of the data points, educators drifted further away from the essence of their work—the students and the observable results.
PLC Implementation
Spoiler alert: SCSD2’s successful piloting of the PLC process forever shifted the focus of the district’s work. It started, however, with a handful of educators leading one pilot school. These educators studied the PLC concept DuFour, Eaker, and DuFour outline (see DuFour et al., 2016); attended PLC events; and truly invested in learning about what it meant to be a high-functioning PLC. For the purpose of this discussion, we want to reflect on the relative differences between the two reform choices the district considered.
PLC implementation meant using structures designed to operationalize teaching and learning in a very different way. The PLC process itself establishes mandatory sharing of professional practice (DuFour et al., 2016). It largely supplants individual rewards in favor of team rewards. Rather than bifurcating students into groups and carefully evaluating which teacher served which group, the district sees all students as the responsibility of every adult in the building. Without really knowing it, SCSD2 picked two very different approaches to school reform. PLC was more impactful for student results. Implementing the PLC process set the district on the journey that brought out its students’ outstanding districtwide performance levels. Consider the following data.
• From 2002 to 2015, Sheridan elementary schools increased fourth-grade proficiency from 48 percent to 84 percent in reading and fourth-grade mathematics proficiency from 59 percent to 85 percent.
• Meadowlark Elementary School, the first PLC adopter, increased mathematics proficiency among fourth graders by 264 percent between 2001 and
