additional questions or thoughts could you consider when approaching administrators about creating a schoolwide literacy program that can specifically assist in the ELA classroom?
Collaborative Meeting Logistics
Based on our experiences, there are four simple logistical action steps you can take that will help ensure fluid and timely collaboration.
1. Work creatively and collaboratively to carve out a common regular time and space for your team to meet: From our experiences, carving out common time is the first step to developing a high-functioning team in a PLC environment. While a progressive education model allows for consistent and regular professional collaboration during the school day, many schools do not have a schedule that reflects this due to the complex nature of the secondary school day. And while a regular weekly team block where students start school late or leave school early is often the ideal way to ensure teacher teams can meet in focused ways, we also recognize that many school districts are still working toward supporting structures that support PLC cultures. If your school has not yet set up a structured time for teacher teams to meet, we suggest planning ahead to ensure team meetings can be supported in ways that allow for collaboration around literacy. If you and your teacher colleagues are dedicated to literacy in your classrooms, you might need to work with an administrator who will help support the collaborative time necessary to innovate positive changes. Ask for the time you will need to collaborate and to innovate literacy strategies to use in your classrooms. For example, you might ask for release periods or release days throughout the year so you can accomplish your team’s goals.
2. Create a regular meeting schedule, and make sure everyone knows the plan: Collaborative teams must ensure they dedicate their meeting time to fostering the commitments of a continuously developing PLC. Early on, establishing norms that set focused, actionable goals helps teams achieve their purpose and helps to establish commitments. We suggest using SMART (specific and strategic, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound) goals as a good guiding tool (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). By setting up SMART goals, your team will be more likely to stay focused, learning, and driven to succeed. As literacy coaches, we know that time is precious, and when our teacher teams meet with us, we know that our collaboration needs to have purposeful, specific outcomes. In building SMART goals toward literacy, we encourage taking the time to create an action-driven schedule that is paced, practical, and respectful of everyone’s many different commitments. What is realistic depends on your structure and your team’s purpose. From our personal experiences, we think that meeting less than every other week often means that team members will be unable to prioritize making changes in literacy. Team meetings that are too infrequent mainly consist of recapping what happened at the last meeting and miss the mark on cultivating productive collaboration that leads to changes to literacy practices in the classroom. To ensure all team members are aware of upcoming meetings, create electronic calendar invites, send out a paper copy of dates and plans that members can post at their desks, and send reminders. Always attach your agenda to encourage thoughtful preparation before the meeting.
3. Identify and use a consistent meeting location: We also encourage finding a consistent space for your team to meet. It is counterproductive when people are always searching for a changing location. Ideally, this space will be free of other distractions, comfortable, and well equipped for the work you will be doing (for example, have access to a whiteboard, projector, and an internet-connected device, such as a tablet, laptop, or computer).
4. Create digital files that capture agendas and notes: In addition to ensuring equipment is available in your meeting space, from the beginning, create an ongoing digital hub for agendas and notes—use tools like Slack, Google Docs with Google Drive, or Microsoft OneNote with Microsoft OneDrive. Ideally, you want something that allows all members to contribute independently and ensures full online access to your materials outside of your collaboration time.
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Standards Analysis and Goal Setting
As we noted before, teams must build consensus about what they want all students to learn—the first critical question of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016). While your team may have a general overarching literacy goal right out of the gate, it must dedicate time to the specific development of discrete goals that identify what it wants students to learn. Often, it is necessary to do some research, a collective inquiry, to establish a goal. Before defining any sort of common goal for student learning, spend time examining your school’s ELA curriculum standards, and assess the current implementation of these standards with a productive and critical eye. Your team must unpack the ELA content standards and identify the literacy skills they require for mastery. Once you have unpacked them, you will need to set aside the complete content standards momentarily to focus purely on the skills, which serve as the vehicle to transport the learner from novice to skilled on the content-mastery continuum.
Investigating current practices and detailing desired outcomes requires your team of colleagues to have thoughtful conversations about the curriculum standards in your ELA department: what your team prioritizes, the skills your team will focus on, the expectations for student performance, and the criteria your team will use to evaluate and support student learning. This means you will need to unpack the wordy and lengthy verbiage of your ELA content standards and identify what matters most to your specific course or context. In other words, your team needs to prioritize your curriculum and identify what your team will emphasize.
It is helpful to detail your team’s understanding and the department’s approach to teaching the standard as well as the evidence of student learning you will be able to collect to demonstrate that students have achieved these skills. Use figure 1.1 to discuss with your team the content standards you are prioritizing and the evidence of student learning that you expect students to demonstrate. These are the first two critical questions teams should determine.
Figure 1.1: Content standard–analysis tool.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
We urge you not to overlook the steps in the content standard–analysis tool. While it is true that content standards may shift, it is also critical that we continue to evolve curriculum alongside changing standards. Also, although it is very tempting to jump to identifying power standards, make sure that you don’t skip the unpacking of these standards first. Curriculum teams that have gone in this direction often fall into the trap of simply overstating core curriculum components—essentially saying, “We do all of this already.” This is a misstep, as it will not lead toward additional growth or foster a team mentality that is focused on problem solving.
Another way to think of content standards is to frame them as desired student outcomes—the concepts that you want your students to have mastered at various checkpoints throughout the year. Conversely, process standards will help your students get to this point—they
