To book Laura or Bruce for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
It is 3:15 p.m., and several members of the fourth-grade team at Gardenview Elementary are late, as usual, for the scheduled 3:00 p.m. meeting. They eventually straggle in, some with the materials for exploration, some without. Those without their class rubrics need to go back to their classrooms to retrieve them. After a few greetings and a few grumbles, the conversation gets started.
This week’s facilitator suggests the members look at the student results for word choice based on the rubric they constructed for expository writing.
“My class was all over the place in this skill set, how about yours?”
“My kids didn’t do very well. I think we should create word walls in every classroom to build vocabulary.”
“Before we do that, I think we should create some common vocabulary lesson plans.”
“Yeah, but we should include word walls in them.”
“And then we could give another assignment to see if the results are the same.”
“Why do we need to teach exactly the same way? I’d like to do more integrated vocabulary building, and we’re not all teaching the same social studies or science units.”
The facilitator struggles for the group’s attention and says, “Wait, before we start fixing, we should look at all the rubrics.”
But at that point, the clock strikes 4:00, and the meeting adjourns.
This group, like many struggling groups, is limited by its lack of structure, shared goals, and skill with collaborative analysis of data. Such teams flounder because they try to operate without protocols and because they lack the communication skills for managing sensitive conversations about student learning and current teaching practices. Often they are trapped by a narrow definition of data as test, state, or provincial scores, and as a result, the types of data they examine constrain rich, collaborative conversations and important discoveries about student growth. These data are too far from the local classroom and individual learners to stimulate powerful conversations about practice. Unfortunately, the pressure to produce growth—growth as measured by these scores in particular—drives the team to limit its collaborative conversations to these high-stakes data sources. Pressured groups then focus on targeted interventions and test-taking skills to move a few students from one level of proficiency to the next, not on developing deep changes that produce rich learning for all.
The Promises and Problems of Collaborative Cultures
As in the opening scenario, school teams confront three common dilemmas in their work with data. These dilemmas present technical, personal, and social challenges for individual group members and for the group as a whole: (1) committee without community, (2) time without tools, and (3) data without deliberation.
Committee Without Community
Being in the room doesn’t mean individuals necessarily identify as members of the group or think of themselves as interlocking parts of the whole. Professional identity as a solo practitioner conflicts with a sense of collective responsibility for student learning and a commitment to collaborative exploration of data, options, and actions. Student results as a shared responsibility and instructional repertoire as a common toolkit are radical notions for teachers who view their primary workplace as the classroom and not the school.
Group members avoid tough-to-talk-about topics when they lack the relational skills to manage the mental and emotional demands of improving student learning. Moving from my students and my work to our students and our work requires clear purpose, safe structures, and compelling data that present vivid images of the effects of teachers’ work. This shift from individual perspective to collective perspective is the heart of collaborative inquiry as teacher teams search for the patterns and practices that produce learning success for all students.
Moving from my students and my work to our students and our work requires clear purpose, safe structures, and compelling data that present vivid images of the effects of teachers’ work.
Time Without Tools
Structural change is not cultural change. Simply altering the schedule to provide time to meet does not create conditions for learning or increase enthusiasm for the demands of collaborative engagement. Protected time without productive use builds resentment when group members feel that they are being kept from their real work back in the classroom.
Front-loaded training is a necessary but insufficient resource for developing fluency and confidence with the skills of collaborative inquiry. To institutionalize patterns of thoughtful practice requires the group’s ongoing attention to goal setting, self-assessment, collective assessment, reflection, and redirection.
Data Without Deliberation
Data-rich environments in and of themselves do not produce robust improvements in instructional practice and student learning. Milbrey McLaughlin (2011) suggests:
A significant obstacle to the collaborative, ongoing, and frank discussions about data and student progress found in strong teacher learning communities lies in teachers’ general lack of knowledge about how to understand the data available to them, how to develop assessments of student progress specific to their classrooms, and how to link data to action. (p. 67)
Collaborative inquiry is complex and often stretches the capacities of many groups. When group members do not embrace a spirit of inquiry, habits of judgment and critique constrain both group growth and effective problem solving. As a result of these limitations, groups tend to simplify problems and apply narrow solutions, rather than embrace the messiness of tenacious issues.
Collaborative inquiry is a value as much as it is a skill set. Its true value emerges from the daily disciplines of practice, persistence, and attention to process. Skilled data use influences group development, and simultaneously, group development influences skilled data use. Patient and thoughtful groups learn to trust the process, their data, and one another.
High-performing teams systematically collect and use data to drive cycles of problem solving, planning, action, and reflection to both improve their own collaborative practices and improve instruction that makes a difference in student learning. Conversely, when teachers work in isolation without the grounding that data or collegial perspectives provide, they tend to rely on habit and make decisions based on anecdotal evidence and intuition. Some of the literature in the field of group development (see, for example, DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010) makes distinctions between the terms groups and teams and collegial and collaborative. In this book, we use these terms interchangeably to refer to professional communities that share common goals and view each other as resources for exploring practice and improving learning, using data to inform their conversations and decisions.
Although the power of data-driven collaboration is well researched (see for example, Louis & Marks, 1998; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001) it is often difficult to establish as a norm in schools. As DuFour et al. (2010) remind us, “A collaborative culture does not simply emerge in a school or district: leaders cultivate collaborative cultures when they develop the capacity of their staffs to work as members of high-performing teams” (p. 153).
What You’ll Find in This Book
Got Data? Now What? Creating and Leading Cultures of Inquiry is a practical and accessible resource for confronting these dilemmas. It provides the strategies and tools for deep and deliberate work with data that turn struggling committees into powerful communities of learners. It is intended for group leaders—including instructional