Achieve Improvement
It turns out that superhuman powers are not a requirement for school improvement. School improvement is possible no matter the school’s size; students’ demographics, poverty levels, and achievement levels; or the amount of resources the staff and students have.
Figure I.1 shows the key features of School Improvement for All. At the center are the students, focusing on their unique needs as 21st century learners. These students are growing up in a world that has changed drastically from the one that the majority of educators experienced as students. Students in the 21st century are poised to be active participants in their own learning. Teachers must focus on preparing them for the possibilities of their future, not our past.
Figure I.1: School Improvement for All features.
To prepare students for their future, we must consider the question, What is the work that matters most? Teacher teams must do that work to yield increased learning for students. We know very well how hard teachers work on behalf of their students. They very often give up personal time to prepare lessons and activities. We are not suggesting that teachers need to work harder or longer; teachers already work hard enough. But it is important to engage in the right work—the work that yields better results. This means deeply understanding the standards they expect students to know and do, developing an assessment system that supports learning, aligning instructional practices to the cognitive complexity of the learning expectations, and providing interventions and extensions based on the data teams collect as part of the ongoing improvement cycle.
The next ring in figure I.1 is leadership and accountability. All members of the school and district staff should share these responsibilities. Everyone serves in a leadership capacity and is accountable for ensuring that all students learn at high levels. Leadership includes creating and nurturing a culture of success. Culture is not the principal’s sole responsibility; everyone has a role in defining and shaping the school’s culture. Administrators engage their staff in charting the course that leads to student learning. This requires that everyone embrace accountability—not shy away from it. Students need to be accountable for their learning, teachers accountable to their students, and administrators accountable to teachers and students. Leadership for learning is not a solo act; it is shared and widely dispersed.
The outer ring in figure I.1 contains the foundation of school improvement: a continuous improvement cycle based in the big ideas that all students can succeed, staff must work in a collaborative culture, and they must focus on results. These big ideas form the basis for the PLC process (DuFour et al., 2016), and schools that reculture themselves to become PLCs have successfully improved student learning. For example, see Sanger Unified School District under the See the Evidence webpage on AllThingsPLC (www.allthingsplc.info/evidence). (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks to access live links to the websites mentioned in this book.)
In the PLC continuous-improvement model, SMART goals (goals that are strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound; Conzemius & O’Neill, 2013) and data drive the work of the entire organization. Schools work on sustaining their efforts from the beginning instead of waiting until they realize better results and only then asking how to sustain them. Sustainability begins with developing highly effective and efficient collaborative teams that engage in the right work, and schools can ensure they thrive by establishing the processes and protocols that represent the way the educators work together (DuFour et al., 2016). School improvement should never depend on who will do the work, but rather on how educators work together to achieve success for all students.
About This Book
We designed this book to further describe the elements of the PLC continuous-improvement cycle shown in figure I.1. The chapters answer the how-to questions of implementation by providing templates and protocols that any school or district can use to improve student learning.
Each chapter culminates with an opportunity for schools and teams to reflect on their current reality and determine actions that will increase student learning. A rubric guides the reflection process. Finally, questions to consider when doing the work in each chapter allow for collaborative team discussions to further target improvement efforts.
Chapter 1: Charting a Course Focused on Learning
This chapter outlines the actions necessary to chart a course focused on improved student learning. It demonstrates a model of leadership that is shared and widely dispersed to engage all stakeholders in the school-improvement process. The chapter also includes a collaborative audit, called a needs assessment, that helps teachers get at the root causes of stalled improvement and plan how to improve.
Chapter 2: Transforming Culture and Structures
In our experience, creating a culture of success is the number one challenge in underperforming schools. This chapter details specific and targeted ways to move schools from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and outlines the differences between toxic and healthy cultures. It shows how staff within schools can envision the desired culture and determine a plan to get there.
Chapter 3: Focusing on 21st Century Learners
Students in 21st century classrooms face higher expectations for learning than ever before. To improve, schools and teachers must first answer the question, Who are our learners and what are their needs? To ensure high levels of learning for all students, teachers must focus on what each student needs. This chapter describes how to shift the focus to the individual needs of 21st century learners.
Chapter 4: Establishing a Common Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
All improvement efforts begin by asking, “What is it that students need to know and be able to do?” the first of four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016). The answer to this question cannot be up to each individual teacher. Collaborative teams of teachers work together to determine priority standards, unpack them into learning targets, and develop a common curriculum map that paces student learning. This chapter walks teachers through the rationale and process for developing a guaranteed and viable curriculum.
Chapter 5: Creating and Using Common Assessments
Common formative and summative assessments are the lynchpin around which student learning revolves. Using timely and specific data on student learning drives instruction on a daily basis and helps students reflect on their learning. This chapter lays out the steps to developing common assessments. These are a crucial part of a system that ensures more learning and aligns with the requirements of the state and national assessments. When done well, this aligned system has predictive value for the high-stakes assessments.
Chapter 6: Planning Meaningful and Effective Instruction
This chapter demonstrates how to plan effective instruction using the proficiency and curriculum maps that we establish in the two previous chapters. It describes the necessary shifts in instruction to meet the demands of increased rigor. We discuss the process of responding to student learning within core instruction (first-best instruction), as a collaborative team and as a school. We also outline the process of analyzing data and student work in a PLC that results in a targeted, effective response to student learning.