Professional Learning Communities

Critical Success Factors of Professional Co-operative Learning Communities

Professional Learning Teams are on-the-job learning opportunities where teachers collaborate to improve instruction. These are not routine meetings, rather teachers focus on what learners are struggling to learn. The 5 critical factors below influence the extent to which focused learning opportunities are created that succeed in building teachers’ confidence that their efforts are paying off for their learners.

5 Critical success factors to achieve unprecedented teaching and learning results:

1. Job-alike teams of 3-5 teachers effectively collaborate: they
• Teach the same grade level, course or subject.
• Select a common learning problem that their learners share and jointly develop a solution
• Set the same instructional and achievement focus,
• Have common teaching responsibilities
• Have common teaching challenges
2. Protocol-guided approach. Following a prescribed structure teacher-teams focus on improving lessons and instructions. They
• Jointly identify goals for learners achievement
• Find or develop assessments of learner progress towards those goals
• Adopt promising teaching/learning approaches to address the goals
• Plan and deliver lessons everyone tries
• Use classroom performance data to evaluate the commonly planned and delivered lessons
• Reflect on learner gains to determine next steps
3. Trained peer-facilitators to guide their colleagues over time.
• Peer facilitators try out in their classrooms the same lessons as everyone else – making them uniquely and credibly positioned to model intellectual curiosity, frame the work as an investigation, explain protocol steps, encourage the group to stick with a problem until it is solved.
• Peer facilitators bring in coaches and content experts to act as knowledgeable colleagues
• As a group, facilitators, school administrators and instructional coaches function as a leadership team acting together to assist the work of each teacher team
• Shared leadership among peer facilitators, which can free up administrators to circulate and provide support and accountability for multiple teacher teams.
• The role of peer facilitator can be shared, and members can rotate from year to year as capacity grows.
4. Stable settings dedicated to improving instruction and learning.
• Both the teacher teams and leadership team need stable settings in which to work if they’re to improve achievement.
• Teacher teams need at least 3 hours each month dedicated to instructional inquiry and improvement
• Facilitators need about two hours each month to develop strategies and plan for the ongoing assistance and leadership of teacher teams.
• Establish, publish and protect a calendar for these meetings. This is critical to helping schools become vibrant places of continuous learning for adults as well as learners
5. Perseverance until there’s progress on key learner performance indicators.
• It’s critical that the team sticks with the goals they set until their learners make progress on key performance indicators.
• It might be a grade-level or department concern, such as understanding unlike fractions or writing coherent paragraphs, or it might be a district wide or school wide focus identified in assessments. Once they see tangible learner gains, teachers are less likely to assume “I planned and taught the lesson, but they didn’t get it,” and more like to adopt the more productive assumption that “you haven’t taught until they’ve learned.”

• Context of specific schools.
• Teachers in highly challenged schools can and do make a difference in learners’ learning and achievement.
• School-wide factors, such as organizational capacity and leadership that makes instructional goals a priority, are critical contributors to sustaining productive learning teams.
• When teachers’ collaborative efforts to learn and improve teaching are sustained and supported, learners show significant improvement in achievement results.

◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—–◊—– pg. top

What do teachers need?

How to achieve sustainable improvements in teaching and learning

Alyce Miller’s Presentation at the DA Education Summit, 26 February 2010

Current models of teacher development are ineffective

Most teacher development programmes are inadequate and fail to effect sustainable improvements in teaching practice and learning achievement. This is because

1. They do not focus on teachers’ deeply held beliefs and behaviours about teaching and learning, the key factors that determine what teachers do in the classroom
2. They give reams of information about learning-area content without providing sufficient time for teachers to grapple and actively engage with the content, pre-requisites for turning someone else’s information into one’s own deep understanding and knowledge.
3. They assume that teaching methodology will take care of itself once teachers get the content information. Many courses are directed to adult learners and so not focus on how to transform the content into effective strategies for classroom management, cohesive lesson design and productive pair and groupwork
4. They do not empower teachers to effectively use of textbooks and enable learners to learn from reading. Teachers need to recognize that all teachers are reading teachers. The habit of “teaching is telling” is promoted when teachers are focused on information delivery so that learners can pass the test. If the true goal is to develop lifelong learners, then teaching must be about empowering learners to be able to learn from reading textbooks themselves.
5. They expect teachers to transfer new learnings to classroom practice, particularly when there is no follow-up supervision or accountability to implement what they learned. In addition existing school structures and administration requirements often mitigate against it.
6. They disregard the culture of teacher isolation. Teachers continue to work behind closed doors in their private classrooms where they can readily fall back on familiar habits of teaching.

To date, there is no systematic, meaningful structure to monitor and evaluate effectiveness of the current teaching model on learner achievement. We carry on with the roll-outs, pull-outs, academic courses and workshops without developing teachers’ capacity to monitor how their changes in teaching impact on learning results.

Professional Co-operative Learning Communities are the most effective way to improve teaching and learning

There is one form of teacher development that overcomes all the failings of our current teacher-development model. To date it is the most effective approach that improves teaching practice and has an almost immediate effect on learner achievement. This is born out by numerous research studies of highly effective schools (e.g. M. Fullan; Schmoker). In addition it enhances teacher morale and motivation to persevere in experimenting with new practices. It can be implemented immediately with reasonable amounts of time and resources.  The most effective teacher-development model is Professional Co-operative Learning Communities.

Professional Co-operative Learning Teams are not discussion groups; they are not casual conversations about professional matters. Rather, they are groups of teachers who meet regularly in teams for structured and focused collaboration. Together they

• Identify essential and valued learning outcomes they will focus on
• Develop common formative assessments to be used to improve teaching and learning
• Analyze current levels of achievement and set achievement goals
• Share and create lessons to improve those levels
• Present the same lessons in their respective classes, give the same formative assessment and compare results of learners’ work
• Continuously assess learners’ work and on the basis of their assessment results, teachers strategically change their instructional practice accordingly
• Have access to each other’s classrooms to observe how other adults teach and handle classroom interactions
• Give each other constructive feedback

It is a matter of urgency that teachers participate in meaningful ways to monitor and evaluate the impact of their instruction. They cannot do this alone or in isolation from other professionals. When teachers remain behind closed doors, mediocrity and poor teaching practice proliferates. We can no longer rationalize that if left to themselves teachers will automatically and consistently engage in effective practices. Even when teachers know what such practices are, there is often the know-do gap where teachers do not implement what they know. When they are isolated, they do not have any point of comparison; they do not have to confront the fact that the teacher next door may be far more effective and that their teaching may be inferior.  As in other fields, professionals work in teams to ensure continuous improvement. So too do teachers need to join together for continuous, structured teacher collaboration, opportunities to observe colleagues and be observed in the classroom, receive constructive feedback, and become reflective practitioners.

Outside experts coming into schools with ‘fix-up’ strategies will not work if schools and teachers themselves do not take ownership of the difficult task of improving classroom practice. I have been working with teachers in South Africa over the last 30 years and the most lasting and significant changes occur when training is school-based, receives visible support from the leadership and teachers collaborate. Small groups of teachers are able to change the culture of the whole school when the leadership allocates a lead teacher to support colleagues, structures time for teachers to collaborate and to visit one another in their classrooms, and provide demonstration lessons for staff members as well as for parents. In such settings, school-wide sustainable transformation is possible with improved learning results.

If we really want to ensure that every learner has the opportunity to realise his or her full potential, we have to do the same for teachers.  Teachers need to work with colleagues who are equally committed to continuous, structured teacher collaboration to achieve effective solutions for classroom challenges, increase teacher confidence and enhance learners’ achievement. Teachers need the time, commitment and structural support from the education system itself to become professionals who enable one another to realise their full potential as high quality and effective teachers.

References:

Glickman, Carl D (2002). Leadership for Learning: How to help teachers succeed. Alexandria, VA. USA:

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Fullen, Michael G. (1991). The Meaning of Educational Change, 2^nd edition. New York: Teachers College Press.

Marzano, Robert J. (2003). What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, VA. USA:

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Meier, Deborah (1995). The Power of Their Ideas. Boston, Mass. USA: Beacon Press

Reeves, Douglas B. (2008). Reframing Teacher Leadership to improve your school. Alexandria, VA. USA:

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Schmoker, Mike (2006). Results Now: How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and

 learning. Alexandria, VA, USA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.