(DuFour et al., p 11). However, if educators do not push these students, they, too, will become at risk of not being successful because they have not been forced to develop the kind of perseverance required later in life (Lens & Rand, 2000).
A lack of perseverance leads to what Carol Dweck (2016) refers to as a fixed mindset—when a student believes his or her “qualities are carved in stone” (Dweck, 2016, p. 10). So, a proficient student with a fixed mindset—one who has not been challenged, pushed, or given the opportunity to rebound from failure—believes that he or she is only proficient because he or she was born that way, which makes one’s intelligence finite. If this mindset is not changed when a question 4 student is severely challenged by a concept or skill, he or she will believe this is the apex of their intelligence.
Dweck (as cited in Craig, 2014) contrasts this fixed mindset with a growth mindset “or embracing the power of yet.” According to Dweck (2016), in a growth mindset, the “hand you’re dealt is a starting point” (p. 7). A growth-minded person believes their basic qualities can grow and improve through their own work and through coaching from others, and they persevere to achieve this growth. Question 4 students, like all people, will not develop perseverance without being provided specific and well-thought-out extensions to their learning (Dweck, 2016).
James W. Stigler and James Hiebert (2004) state simply, “If we want to improve student learning, we must find a way to improve teaching” (p. 12). That includes teaching the students who are already proficient, not simply acknowledging they have a broad conceptual understanding and then allowing them to do a preferred activity or other work to simply occupy them while the teacher supports students who have not yet acquired the essential standard or skill. However, if collaborative teams do not answer question 4 effectively—or do not even ask it—this is often what happens. As the principal of an elementary school that grew to perform at a high level of student achievement, I had several conversations with individual staff members and collaborative teams at the beginning of the year about their year-long SMART (strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, time bound) goals for student learning (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). Collaborative teams would often set the goals for students who were not yet reading at grade level or who were well behind in mathematics—their lowest-performing students. The teams recognized that to get minimally successful students to grade level, the students would need to pack in more than a year’s worth of growth in a year’s time. (For example, if the average third grader’s reading level could be expected to move from a 3.0 to a 4.0 during a typical year, a third grader reading at a 1.5 at the start of the year would need to grow more than the typical 1.0 during a year or they would be perpetually behind. So, teams would set goals for these students to grow from 1.5 to 2.8, or 1.3 years’ worth of growth during the year. Although this would not bring the student up to grade level completely in one year, it does begin to close the gap. And if teams throughout the PLC work cohesively over time to continue achieving similar growth, the student would be on grade level at the end of the seventh-grade year.) To accomplish these goals, the teams would discuss a series of intervention ideas.
However, these same teams expected their highest-performing students to grow a year or less over the same period. The argument team members would inevitably make for setting such low expectations for the highest-performing students was that they are already performing at a high level—so much so that the team didn’t know how much higher it could keep pushing them. As principal, I always responded, “These students have grown exponentially their entire academic career, and this is the year they will top out?”
What goes unspoken in this conversation is teachers or teams saying they will put a whole lot of effort and time into supporting the lowest-performing students (as they rightly should), but not worry too much about the students already at the top academic end of their class. Students who “already know it” become an afterthought. Yet, going back to the first big idea of a PLC, a focus on high levels of learning for all, we must ensure all includes students who are already proficient. By not advancing and discussing these students, teams do not ensure this cohort learns at high levels. In fact, these students may learn nothing at all if the standard at the center of instruction is already part of their knowledge base. Yet, when teams meet to discuss formative data, these students are often sorted into an “already proficient” pile and then summarily ignored—or, worse, given more of the same work, usually in the form of a worksheet containing content they have already mastered. Or, instead of using a worksheet, teams may place these students at a computer for self-paced work to keep them busy and allow teachers to concentrate on students who are not yet proficient on a given standard. This occurs because the focus of the school, district, or state is often to lower the number of nonproficient students, not to push those already exceeding to deeper levels of learning (Ballou & Springer, 2011).
To meet these outside expectations, even well-meaning teachers who strive to ensure all students are learning at their highest levels often feel they have little choice but to hyperfocus on students who are below grade level. This leaves little time for extensions that would keep the high-performing students engaged and active. However, the work of a grade-level collaborative team is not complete, or really has not even begun, until the team members address question 4. After all, how can students who are already proficient remain engaged and excited to come to school every day if they are routinely ignored? It does not take very long for these bright students to realize that if they are scoring in the already proficient range, they will be ignored or assigned busywork. That, in their minds, frees them for the off-task behavior they may already have a predilection for (Galbraith & Delisle, 2015) or feeds a fixed mindset that they are already smart enough and do not need to continue learning (Dweck, 2016).
This flies in the face of the second big idea of a PLC: “Educators must work collectively and take collective responsibility for the success of each student” (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 11). DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, and Karhanek (2010) explain, “One of the consistent messages student convey in surveys of their schooling experience is that their schools fail to challenge them” (p. 212). If students become unengaged with school because teachers do not push or challenge them, they will not succeed to their highest potential academically and interpersonally, so it is vital that collaborative teams accept the responsibility of the second big idea. Educators need to work as a team to find what John Hattie and Klaus Zierer (2018) refer to as the Goldilocks Principle, instruction that is “just right” in providing enough challenge to keep proficient students engaged without the work being so difficult that it leads to frustration.
Success for already proficient students ties directly into the third big idea of a PLC: a results orientation, which is largely dependent on establishing SMART goals (DuFour et al., 2016). Appropriate learning goals for question 4 students might include being able to connect concepts related to an essential standard’s learning to new information they learn while working on an extension standard, or being able to apply their learning on the extension standard to a real-life situation not addressed in class. Whatever the extension is, teams need to gather data from assessments. This will allow teachers to monitor students’ success and ensure that they are not misapplying the concepts they already understand, which happens on occasion. This intentional analysis of extension data will also allow teachers to measure the effectiveness of a given extension.
What Must We Do to Ensure Collaborative Work That Creates Meaningful Extensions?
Central to the philosophy of PLCs is working collaboratively. To ensure question 4 receives the attention it deserves and teachers create the highest-quality extensions, educators must look honestly at some current practices that subtly and not so subtly push teachers away from working as a team to build extensions for students. For example, Teacher of the Year awards and parents’ requests for their children to be assigned to specific teachers are just two ways the education business has raised a few teachers above others. Although teachers are not directly competing against each other for these honors,
