Professional Learning Communities

This week, our school improvement team (SIT) started studying PLC's and what they will look like at Van Meter Schools for the 2010-2011 school year for our entire district's professional learning model. In our discussion, one of our SIT members really hit the nail on the head. "Isolation leads to frustration." Our team went on to discuss that by ourselves there is a sense of anxiety and stress in trying to be what every learner needs. By ourselves, finding every kid's passion and helping them succeed seems an impossible task.

I got thinking about how as a director of teaching and learning, I feel the same way. I feel an enormous amount of responsibility for making our district the place we envision it. It was through the SIT retreat this week that I felt that stress turn into excitement (just as the research on PLC's says happens for members of a learning community). My learning community, the school improvement team, helped energize me for the work ahead of us. Our team encouraged me that the vision of Van Meter Schools is no one person; it is all of us working and learning together. We are a learning community.

After two exhausting, very full days of learning, collaborating, and planning, I am so excited for next year! And the 09-10 school year only officially ended on Monday. I love having a job that I feel so passionate about!

What looks different?: Lessons from Walk-throughs

One of our data components for assessing teaching and learning comes from conducting walk-throughs. These 3 minute snapshots help provide a photo album of data describing teaching and learning. As an administrative team this year, we spent a lot of time creating a template that would embody the vision for Van Meter schools. The 1:1 initiative and the Iowa Core are two big pieces that make a standard template less useful for us. For example, we don't really care about the posters on the wall supporting the curriculum.

Our template went through many transformations. A final draft of the template was loaded onto our iTouches so we could collect and email the data immediately. Teachers have helped create the template and join us on walk-throughs to share ideas. This helps create consistent meaning across our district. This conversation is a great professional development experience in and of itself.

Two examples changed my thinking about walk-throughs and the longevity of this type of tool for collecting useful data about the change in teaching and learning. First, a teacher was behind her desk and students were all on their computers (some talking to others and some working alone). It was an example of a student-centered classroom where the teacher was updating her wiki to help facilitate the individual learning projects that students were creating. This teachers wasn't disengaged, she was facilitating learning from behind the scenes.

After periodic walk-throughs into a science classroom, I noticed how some students seemed to engaged with the teacher's explanation of a problem and others weren't. It seemed like some students were even blatantly ignoring the instruction. I asked about it and learned that the "lecture" was actually recorded, posted online, and assigned for homework. A quick quiz afterward showed that a few students had problems in different areas, so class time was when the kids actually practiced the skill or did the traditional "homework." The teacher could explain things to a few students who needed it while the rest worked on what they needed in class. They were ignoring the instruction! And it's ok! The lecture was homework and class time became lab time, practice time, application, time to ask questions.

How does this translate to the longevity of walk-through data? As we progress, teaching and learning will be so individualized that there will never be a "predominate pattern" for data collection (We also use the work from Jerry Valentine, Instructional Practices Inventory). We will see all levels of engagement with levels of thinking. Our elementary teachers who implement the Daily Five are just another example of this. Some kids are reading to themselves, some working with others to make new words, some listening to their peer reading and asking them comprehension questions. How do we quantify that?

I will know that Van Meter Schools has totally transformed education when the only reliable way to collect data on teaching and learning is through products, reflections, and portfolios. Maybe our earlier assessment plan was setting the bar too low?

Role of Data

Last week, I was sharing the student achievement summaries with the school improvement team, and then let them loose to explore the data on their own. The professionals in the room, for whom I have great respect, were overwhelmed. It made me realize that we have not empowered our teachers to use the data to answer their own questions. Much like our traditional classrooms, we have in the past told our teachers what the data say and have given them the questions that they should hunt and find the answers to (and we know the answers already, so really we are seeing if they can come back with the correct answers). In a student-centered classroom, we want kids to make their own meaning from the information and make connections to their prior knowledge. This is no different than what we want for our teachers.

I don't believe that data say the same thing to everyone. Sure the overview or summary of percent proficient is a place to start, but based on my experiences, the kids I have in my room, what I saw happening during testing that day, and a variety of other factors, I will want to go into the data differently than another teacher. That's when data really becomes powerful. When teachers can look at data and generate more questions than answers, that's when I believe the data is impacting and informing instruction. I love it when teachers ask me to get them more data. I love it when teachers say, "If this data were correlated to that data, then I could see if..."

Here's my ultimate goal, teachers will be the driving force behind our data collection, analyzation, and communication, not some lady in the curriculum office. AND the students will be right there with their teachers making sense of the information and using it to inform their learning.


Some of my favorite data phrases:
- If we can't use it, don't collect it.
- Kids can't take a test seriously if teachers don't take the information from the test seriously.
- Shouldn't kids understand their scores? Whose data is it anyway?

1:1 Conference Presentation

Presenting in front of peers is such a learning experience. Thank you to participants who helped me learn today. Here are the resources I used in the presentation.
I changed my keynote to a movie file, pause it as necessary.

Please keep in mind that our template is a working draft. I am happy to share, so please help us make it better if you have ideas. Our walk-through template: http://bit.ly/9Vtnh6


Wes Fryer's Blog on the presentation: http://bit.ly/ajLCcn

How can we tell if they've learned it?

Learning is an ongoing process that needs multiple and varied opportunities to demonstrate. At Van Meter Schools, we believe in a caldron of assessment measures that show learning. We show learning through self-assessments, products, performances, and standardized assessments. Any one assessment by itself doesn't show the full picture of learning. This may be a difficult concept to grasp sometimes, but think of the parent who states the low state test score isn't an accurate reflection of what their child can do. Aren't they right? Does ITBS/ITED for example, show a child's passion for comic books? Does it show the creativity and writing process that a child may go through to create their latest story? Does it show the growth in a child's ability to design and speak about their solution to a problem?

The greatest change in learning today is that information is not a secret held by the few who paid for it (through serious school loans). Have our assessments changed to reflect this? Information is abundant. Adults, educators and parents are not the "know it all's" we could once pretend to be. And even though we are admitting that we don't know everything, we are needed just as much to guide learners through the information abundance! Our system needs to change to show what real learning is. It isn't trivial pursuit. It isn't a multiple choice test.

Learning is creative, collaborative, full of problem solving, sharing ideas with diverse audiences. It's evaluating all the information that's out there. It's questioning "truths" and serving the people of this planet in a way that goes beyond Van Meter, Iowa. How do we assess that with a test?

Collaboration IS Professional Development

Often professional development is thought of as a speaker coming in and talking for 90 minutes and then the mass of teachers leave with a sigh and maybe one good idea. How many teachers have rolled their eyes at the thought of in-service day or early releases?

Our district is making a significant addition to the amount of professional development time that our staff has for next year. We know that the research clearly supports the efficacy of the teacher as the biggest impact to student learning. We are not adding more in-service days though. We aren't adding more lecture time. We aren't adding more one-time presentations. This stereotypical view of professional development doesn't make an impact. We are moving to weekly collaboration times using a process centered on the professional learning communities (PLC's) research.

PLC's focus on student learning by talking about these questions:
What do we want kids to know and be able to do?
How will we know if they learned it?
What are we going to do if they haven't learned it? have learned it?

Some teachers think they are getting more PD time with no collaboration time. PLC's are just the opposite of that. We expect student discourse and collaboration to happen in a student-centered classroom. We expect the same for professional development. It will be driven by teachers. PLC's differentiate based on the needs of the learners. Learning takes discussion and collaboration. Teachers are perfect pictures of life-long learners. It's finally time for the professional development to meet the needs of the all the learners.

Questions are not barriers

Change is difficult. It's also filled with questions, and rightfully so. Questions are not bad things. Questions help us sharpen our focus, defend our positions, consider things we might not have, and look at a topic from another angle. They also help us communicate better by sharpening our message. Don't we encourage questions from our students? Why are we often afraid of questions when they are raised by our peers?

One of my favorite quick reads is the leadership fable, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Notice how one of the 5 dysfunctions is fear of conflict. Fear is paralyzing. Questions only become paralyzing when we take them as a sign of personal attack. Van Meter Schools is a progressive district where lots of things are changing. Teachers and community members have lots of questions. This is a good thing. This means we are all involved in the process of transforming education.

We are embarking on uncharted territory and I don't expect we will have all the answers. Even if we do not, questions are not barriers. They make us think. Questions do not hold us back; we do that to ourselves... if we choose.