Restructuring (not Remortgaging) to make Collaborative Time for Teachers

Early in my career as a high school Principal, I caught myself complaining that we needed “more money”, “more resources” and “more time” to implement new initiatives to improve student achievement. But four years ago, I had a revelation:  the money is the money, the resources are what we have, and there are 24 hours in the day.  In order to change student results, our school needed to investigate a high-yield strategy that utilized our existing resources.  For our school, developing a Professional Learning Community was that strategy.  The PLC journey that we have been on has been chaotic, tumultuous, and at times incredibly challenging, but it has become the most satisfying journey I have embarked upon in my career.

Four years ago, we began looking at a PLC model.  The ideas of creating time within the timetable for teachers to work interdependently to develop common emphasized curricula and assessments, to utilize the resultant data to modify instructional practice, and to create an intervention system that ensured the success of each student were very topical for our school.  Staff collectively determined that our student achievement data needed improvement. Teachers learned about the concepts of collaboration.  An exploratory team attended a PLC Conference, and we created a PLC pilot project for staff.  We ironed the logistics of embedded collaborative time and creating our academic intervention program.  And then we were off:  it seemed so straightforward!  I thought people would relish collaborating with their peers, we would react in a timely and effective manner to ‘promising learners’ who were not able to demonstrate learning outcomes, achievement would go up, and parents would be thrilled with our results.  How naïve was I! 

Many people didn’t want to collaborate. If they were collaborating, it often turned into sharing or complaining sessions. Our reaction to our ‘promising learners’ was inefficient and costly. The set of interventions had staff working harder than the students.  The local teacher’s association was complaining that we didn’t address the loss of preparation time created by altering our timetable for collaboration time.  It was chaos!

After these initial hiccups, we have found three things to be essential in developing our learning community:

• Consistent support on collaborative techniques for team leaders: As a result, teachers collaborate in their subject areas to determine emphasized learning outcomes, use data to find “stumble points” at each grade level, examine promising practices in to address these points, and modify their teaching methods as a result. 
• Confronting ineffective assessment strategies: Consequently, we have moved away from grading practices such as late marks, averaging of terms, and zeroes.
• Reorganizing existing time in the school day: We created a timetable with additional time for students to meet the learning outcomes in their courses AND to provide time for teachers to collaborate.



Our school timetable with the mandatory study block and teacher collaboration block



During the Collaborative Time, our students are able to access subject-specific tutorials so that they can receive one-to-one or small group instruction.  The libraries, gyms, and computer labs are open for those students who have completed their work and wish to have self-directed time.  Teachers can direct students to these tutorials if they feel that students are not meeting the learning outcomes for their course.  This time is to augment the mandatory study block for each student in the building.  Should teachers feel that students need even more additional time, students are directed to our after school Academic Intervention program (AI), which takes place Monday thru Thursday from 3:10-4:00.  To supervise this time after school, we replaced a portion of time that teachers were required to supervise our school bus areas with time to supervise AI.  It is very popular with our staff, and gives our teachers a means to enforce assignment deadlines without having to resort to using toxic grading practices such as taking off late marks.

By utilizing these structures, we have seen a continual drop in course failure rates each year since beginning our pilot PLC project!

Our overall failure rates for all courses has decreased consistently over the last four years--95.4% success!

Our school continues the journey to becoming a Professional Learning Community.  For those who wish to begin down this path, there are many challenges that will occur along the way.  However, through the development of an unwavering vision of collaboration, a commitment to adopting assessment strategies targeted at discovery of student knowledge, the development of a timetable that includes intervention structures for students who require additional time and support, and the creative thinking of an entire school community to do this at no cost, we have found the PLC journey to be a trip most worthwhile!

If you have other ways that you have created collaborative time for educators, please share your model and your ideas!

Introducing the PLN to Senior Administrators-A sample lesson plan

A couple of weeks ago, I posted "A Great Staff Meeting" (see below for an excerpt), where I felt I had a triumphant introduction to the use of Twitter and Social Media with our staff (we had about 70 teachers at the staff meeting that night--the rest were coaching).  The presentation created a huge buzz on our staff, and as a result, we have had a number of staff members that have taken the "Twitter Plunge". 

However, I realized that as much as I needed to do this with my own staff, I really needed to bring a similar presentation to our District Administrator's Meeting to help spread the word to my fellow school based adminstrators and our senior administration.  I wanted to demonstrate that:

- I am not an expert with using Twitter, but I am learning quickly, and they could too

- Twitter is one of many social media tools that are available out there, and to encourage them to play around with some of these to see which one worked for them

- through Twitter and some contacts that I had met on Twitter, I created a screencast using a tool (Screenr) that I had never heard of (and would not have heard of) prior to developing a PLN.

-        I am busy, have two children under the age of three, and still can find the time to connect with my PLN, and it makes my job easier and can make their job easier too

-        If they want their teachers and staffs to be more connected to social media, they needed to model it themselves, and here was their chance!

One of the things I had to be very careful of was not to be “TOO TECHIE”.  My audience would have an extreme variation in technological skills and interests, so I felt I had to keep it high interest and relatively low tech. So…..

Here is the “lesson plan” that I used for our administrator’s meeting.  While not the best I am sure, it is a template that people could use with their staff and senior administration.

Activities:

1.     Personal story of what I thought Twitter was / story of Will Richardson polling the large audience at the 21^st Century Learning Conference in Chicago, and my shock at how many people indicated (through their raised hands) that Twitter was “the best educational professional development they had ever gotten”.

2.     Demonstration of the power of developing a Personal Learning Network (using @gcouros screencast using Screenr (@gcouros: The Process of Online Collaboration (Video) http://bit.ly/aoFiVh ) 

3.     Demonstration of how I used Screenr to develop something for the British Columbia Principals and Vice Principals Association (I AM NOT AN EXPERT, so don’t laugh-- http://screenr.com/4YZ ) to show that I went from never using any sort of technology like this to using it to teach others.

4.     A video to show that there is a change in education coming, and we need to be aware and a part of it (Sir Ken Robinson’s Educational Reform on YouTube http://bit.ly/biQd5q )

5.     An invitation to join Twitter!

This whole presentation took just over 20 minutes, and accomplished the intention of wowing people on what was available through social media and whetting their appetites on how they can be involved (judging by the very positive response and the number of people that joined Twitter)!

I hope that this format might give you ideas on how you can introduce social media and the importance of developing a PLN to your colleagues!

A Great Staff Meeting

Tonight, I just had a terrific staff meeting.  We have a relatively large staff, and with some of our coaches absent, we had about 65 people in attendance along with our administrative team.  At our staff meetings, we have done our best to eliminate "administrivia", and tonight, I even asked our staff to indulge me by eliminating any announcements from the meeting that can be done through email. The staff wholeheartedly agreed.  As a result, our staff meetings have become focussed on the right thing--student learning.

We began our staff meeting with "Good News" as we always do--one of our staff members, an outstanding teacher with an infectious and effervescent personality solicits staff members for good news from around our school and presents this at the start of faculty meetings.  Today, one of the main points was all of the food that our students brought in through donations as part of the "Halloween for Hunger" campaign--truly amazing and inspirational.

I then took them through my own personal journey in expanding my personal learning network.  Recently, I took three people from our school to the 21st Century Learning Conference in Chicago.  I had the other members of the team talk about what they felt were the most important things to them from the conference--this was powerful coming from teachers to teachers.  I then talked about how at the conference, Will Richardson asked the group of 600 or so teachers and administrators who was on Twitter.  I was shocked when about 400 people had their hands up.  He then asked "How many of you think Twitter is the best source of Professional Development that you have?".  When every person kept their hands up, I told our staff that I had to try this technology.

I then showed them briefly (and I do mean in 30 seconds or so) how I got on to Twitter and how I use Tweetdeck (thanks to Chris Kennedy in West Van!).  However, I wanted the staff to see something that was truly revolutionary for me:  how tools such as Twitter and Google Docs illustrated the peripheral and collaborative learning that can and does take place all around us.  I showed the tweet that George Courous put out on Hallowe'en Night (@gcouros: The Process of Online Collaboration (Video) http://bit.ly/aoFiVh #cpchat #erlcsm), and I think you could have heard a pin drop in our meeting.  It is truly amazing when you see people have an "a ha" moment about technology.  I told them that I have never been more energized about learning, and suggested to them that regardless of the means that you do it, it is vital to create a widespread PLN.  There were some staff members that rightfully said that they were concerned about students "losing the ability to talk".  This may be a concern, but I truly believe that we are communicating in different ways--I spoke to someone in Sweden this week that I never would have if I hadn't tried Twitter.  It was an incredibly lively discussion with facets from authenticity of websites to teachers having their students use Blackberries in class to access information.  We had a suggestion about having some inservicing about social media tools, which we will investigate for the next professional day.

We then used Google Docs to do a staff survey on the effectiveness of our Study Block for kids.  Login, do the survey, and presto, we have instant data that we can now use in conjunction with student data to make a good decision about what Study Block will look like in the future.

An Educator's Worst Nightmare: The Knowing-Doing Gap

I am sure this doesn't happen to anyone but me, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep.  Perhaps it is a thought rattling around in my head about something I should have said that I didn't, or worse yet something that I shouldn't have said that I did.  Perhaps it is one of my little girls who can't get settled to bed.  But more often than not, I find that I am thinking about the Educator's Nightmare, the Knowing-Doing Gap.

The Knowing-Doing Gap (or kdg, as I will refer to it from this point forward in this post) comes from a concept originally penned by Pfeffer and Sutton, who describe it thusly:

"the challenge of turning knowledge about how to enhance organizational performance into
actions consistent with that knowledge. Improving organizational performance depends
largely on implementing what is already known, rather than from adopting new or
previously unknown ways of doing things."

Wow.  What a concept--actually DOING what we know to be effective, to be promising practices, to be THE RIGHT THING TO DO.  But yet for some reason, we don't do it. This is what keeps me awake at night.

We say that we need to treat people equally, or equitably if we are really paying attention.  But does our education system do this?  Judging from the achievement gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal learners in British Columbia, one might infer that we don't.

We say that we need to differentiate to meet the needs of every one of our learners.  However, the very chronological nature of schools and the grouping of students by age rather than ability seems to be almost diametrically opposed to this concept.

We say that the 7 Cs are not new, that they have been around for centuries, and that we know what they are and do a pretty good job of it, but if that is the case, it seems odd that nearly every article, youtube video, blog, and tweet is crying out for us to change, to do something differently. 

We have to constantly remind ourselves to make the learnings our classrooms and our schools "student-centered". Yet isn't it odd that someone outside of the world of education would turn to us and ask us something like "If schools aren't student-centered, what are they centered on?".

We KNOW what to do.  But it is time for us to DO it.  Not just talk about it.  Not just wax poetic about theoretical models, but to actually take those models and TRY them.  To model the action research that we want our students to do.  And we need to COLLABORATE with eachother so that we can find out which strategies are the highest-yield strategies, and WHICH ARE NOT.  It's ok to say "That one didn't work", but it is NOT ok to keep that information from our well-meaning and hard working colleagues.  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; cruelty is watching someone go through that insanity when you can help them avoid it. We need to help eachother.

The thing that keeps me awake at night is the kdg.  The thing that lets me get back to sleep is knowing that in the morning, we are going to do something about it.  We are going to close that achievement gap, strive for equity and equality, and make our classes meaningful for our learners through differentiation, and keep teaching the skills that prepare our students for any century.  We are going to do it together, as collaborators.  We will do it, even if it's just a little at a time.

So let's get on with it, and get turn what we KNOW into what we DO.  And then, please, let's get some sleep.

Docking student paychecks

In all of your years in the field of education, have you ever been late (in no particular order)
- for a meeting?
- to the start of a class?
- handing in course outlines?
- getting marking back to your students?
- for bus duty?
- calling a parent?
- handing in a report to for a supervisor?
- sending in a posting for a position at your school?
- filing monthly safety reports?
- to watch the start of a game or performance?
- writing a letter of reference for a student (and then worked like heck to get it out)?
- for various other things far too embarrassing to admit?

Of course, this is not even remotely close to being an exhaustive list (and I encourage you to keep adding to this list).  Without trying to make anyone feel guilty, I might guess that ALL of these might have happened in our schools in the past week!  But I am going to guess that even if we were late for all of these and more this week, that we all still received our paychecks in full. 

We are all responsible adults.  We have graduated from high schools, have a few letters tacked on to the signature bar on our emails with advanced degrees, hold down good jobs, and have families (at least some of us).  And guess what--we are still late for things.  Not because we are lazy, irresponsible, or just want to thumb are noses at "the establishment".  We are late for things because we are HUMAN. 

So if this is the case, why is it that in education the debate still rages on about allowing teachers take marks off for students handing in work late?  In a recent post on Twitter, a link to Globe and Mail article called "Report Cards Get a Failing Grade" stated the following:

"And, after more than a decade, Ontario has reversed the guideline (implemented inconsistently by schools anyway) that late assignments should not be marked down – and teachers could not give zeroes. Manitoba is expected to make the same announcement in two weeks, and Saskatchewan is also reviewing the issue.

Not marking down for late assignments – a guideline that directly affects report cards – was an example, educators say, of a well-meaning approach that failed..."

Wow. What are people thinking when they believe that giving late marks motivates students to complete homework on time? The research is so clear (just email Rick Stiggins if you would like a sampling, or watch Douglas Reeves http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHZyrz0NcuE to see his piece on Toxic Grading Practices, or look up any of the work by Ken O'Connor, such as A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, or Guskey et. al, etc.) that this does not work. 

Imagine every day that you are told that you are a failure.  Of course, in education, you are not told that you are a failure; you are told that you are a "3 out of 10", a "42 out of 100", a "D", or even better "too late".  You don't really like school anyway, it's pretty boring and you don't really know why you have to learn logarithms anyhow.  Your teachers seem to always be mad at you and hounding you, and when you copied your friends work you were told that you cheated, and when you told the teacher that your friend just copied it out of the book and you just copied it from them they got even angrier at you.  But then the one time that you finally did that project you were most proud of, the project that you sweated over because you finally were interested in the topic that your teacher covered in class, and that you excitedly turned in, only to get it back with a huge 90/100 with a MINUS 50% FOR BEING LATE.  Wow, I'll bet you learned a really valuable lesson.  And I can only guess how motivated you will be to do another project.

If schools cannot come up with more creative ways to enforce deadlines for assignments and projects than deducting late marks (ie. if a student does not get something in on time, they have to spend extra TIME at school getting it done--what a concept) then the educational apocalypse truly is upon us. We want students to be creative, but we cannot be creative in solving this very basic issue?  The natural consequence for not doing work is (gasp!) TO DO THE WORK! Not to take marks away. An as a small aside, the last time I checked, students learn at different rates. So our answer to differentiate for their learning is to make hard and fast deadlines and enforce them with late marks? 

Here are some not-so-creative solutions:

- when a student doesn't do the work, MAKE THEM DO THE WORK, not take the zero.  That is the easy way out.

- reluctant workers are not as motivated by marks as they are by SOCIAL TIME.  If a student does not do work on time, lunch hours, breaks, and after school times are excellent motivators to get students to do work--try it.  They will not like it, and their parents will LOVE it!

- don't assign CRAP.  And we all know what crap (aka. busy work, stuff that you don't value) is--questions 1-5 at the end of the chapter when the answers are in the back of the book is a prime example of crap.  Copying out definitions from the glossary is another good piece of crap, and the list goes on.

- Have kids be a PART OF THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS including establishing deadlines!  If they don't meet the deadline, TALK TO THEM about it.  You will find out a lot of things about your students, and a lot of the reasons for them not meeting that deadline will suprise you, and not be about you.  It will also give you a chance to connect for kids, and show them that you care.

- When a student knows that you care about them, THEY WILL NOT WANT TO DISAPPOINT YOU.

I do want to be clear that I am not here to advocate for being irresponsible and not valuing deadlines.  Quite the contrary—deadlines are a huge part of all of our lives. But let’s make sure that we are using the right tools to teach responsibility (not late marks), and let’s make sure that we remember that 1) we were kids once, and perhaps not quite as responsible as we might selectively choose to remember, and 2) we are late every once in a while, not because we want to “stick it to the man”, but because we are human.

It's pretty rare in education that we get our paychecks docked for being late.  Let's not dock students' paychecks.