on evidence of student learning.
• School administrative teams and data coaches would meet monthly to discuss the status of the work.
• Administrators would take steps to remediate a teacher or teachers who did not participate in the collaborative team or were disruptive to the team process.
The application articulated three specific goals the state hoped to achieve by providing educators with time to collaborate:
1. Creating cultural acceptance for sharing data among peers and leaders
2. Helping educators build the necessary technical skills to access and analyze achievement data from a variety of sources
3. Ultimately to improve the content knowledge and pedagogical skills of teachers so they could revise instructional strategies in response to evidence of student learning (DDOE, 2010)
When Delaware was named one of the first two states to receive the RTTT award, every district and charter school in the state, as well as their education associations, agreed to implement common weekly planning time for at least core content teachers. Furthermore, the department stipulated that the collaborative team meetings were to be considered sacred time that would never be pre-empted by other meetings or activities. State and district leaders were convinced, however, that providing teacher teams with coaching and building the capacity of school leaders to effectively coach were critical to the success of the initiative. So DDOE contracted with an education software and assessment company to provide twenty-nine data coaches to support schools throughout the state. These coaches not only modeled effective coaching language and strategies but also supported professional learning by facilitating nonthreatening data conversations with both teachers and administrators.
Between February and June of 2011, the state piloted the program with over five hundred teachers in twenty schools in seven LEAs and held focus groups with those involved to get feedback on ways to improve. With the beginning of the 2011–2012 school year, the program was implemented throughout the nearly two hundred schools in the state.
Although the DDOE stipulated the conditions listed earlier as prerequisites for participation, LEAs had considerable discretion regarding implementation. Some provided teachers with one ninety-minute block for collaboration while others used two forty-five-minute blocks. Some organized teachers into teams by content, others by grade level, and still others created interdisciplinary teams. Some districts assigned data coaches to work directly with their schools, while other districts used the coaches to train their own staff to facilitate team meetings. The DDOE used broad guidelines to clarify the focus and purpose of the meetings, but meetings were not scripted, nor were teachers asked to adhere to a single agenda template for meetings.
At the end of the first full year of implementation, the percentage of students in the state scoring proficient in reading increased from 61 percent to 68 percent and in mathematics from 62 percent to 69 percent. Every grade level and every subgroup experienced improvement, and the percentage of students scoring advanced proficient increased in both subject areas (DDOE, 2012b). As Donna Lee Mitchell of the DDOE’s Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Unit reports, “Everyone from the Governor Jack Markell, to our new Secretary of Education Mark Murphy, to administrators, and teachers throughout the state attribute much of our improvement to the collaborative PLC process. PLCs are becoming part of our culture. Now it’s just the way we do things here” (personal communication, March 15, 2013).
Delaware has kept the lines of communication open with teachers throughout the state during implementation. At the conclusion of the 2011–2012 school year, the department of education sent surveys to the state’s 8,800 educators in an effort to get feedback on the program. Almost 5,700 responded, with 95 percent of the responses coming from teachers. Eighty-seven percent of respondents indicated that the data-analysis process helped them to identify patterns of student need in their classroom and to differentiate their instruction. Seventy-seven percent reported that their team was characterized by a transparent, collaborative culture. The survey also included a section for open-ended responses that invited educators to present their impressions and recommendations for improvement of the process. Over 1,000 Delaware teachers offered their ideas. Once again, the department of education held focus groups of educators throughout the state to hear concerns, answer questions, and solicit ideas for improving the process (DDOE, 2012a).
The DDOE has continued to support LEAs and modeled the collaborative team process by scheduling monthly meetings with chief school officials. Superintendents agreed that they wanted these meetings to be devoted primarily to working in collaborative teams across LEAs. DDOE leadership or individual districts share their data with the group, identify concerns and challenges, and present their action steps for improvement. After the presentation, participants work in teams across LEAs to analyze the data and develop recommendations to support the presenting district or to consider how they might implement some of the ideas in their own districts. Superintendents have committed to learn together and help each other improve education throughout the state.
Delaware’s ultimate success will depend on quality implementation that focuses on changing the culture of the entire system—focused collaboration within schools, within districts, across districts, and between districts and the state. At the end of the day, systemic PLCs are just that—they fundamentally alter the entire culture of the system. Delaware has decidedly started down such a pathway to sustained improvement.
At the end of the day, systemic PLCs are just that—they fundamentally alter the entire culture of the system.
A Roadmap for Going Big
In this book, we present a roadmap for going big with PLCs. We begin with a focus on clarifying the meaning of the term professional learning community in chapter 1. We review the six characteristics, three big ideas, and four critical questions of a PLC. The main point of the chapter, however, and a point that we will reiterate throughout the book, is that the PLC process is specifically intended to impact the traditional culture of schooling in profound ways; it is an ongoing endeavor rather than a program to be implemented.
In chapter 2, we examine a critical challenge of any systemic reform: how do we achieve coherence and clarity? We address the elements of coherence, barriers to achieving coherence, strategies for achieving coherence, and the impact of strong coherence. We lay the foundation of systemic reform so that we can position PLCs as a crucial piece within whole-system reform.
In chapter 3, we examine the too-tight/too-loose dilemma. Should systemic change come from the top of the organization, or should it percolate from the bottom upward? We explore the rationale for both approaches and examine their impact, using real examples from the education landscape.
Chapter 4 provides leaders with guidelines for simultaneously loose and tight leadership. Our goal in this chapter is to help educators find and navigate in a loose and tight way using a real-world challenge facing educators in the United States today: how to effectively implement the Common Core State Standards within a systemic PLC.
Leaders often ask us how to sustain PLCs. This is the subject of chapter 5. We take what we have learned from experience and share the conditions for sustainability and how to recognize the warning signs that your PLC is faltering from day one onward.
In the afterword, we conclude with some key thoughts for taking action that will help you work on making PLCs systemic.
Making
