Tami Williams, EdD, is an assistant professor in the educational leadership department at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Tami has been a teacher, behavior interventionist, assistant principal, and district administrator. She is former director of assessment, research, and evaluation at Millard Public Schools in Nebraska, where she supervised buildings and led assessment innovations, program evaluations, data storage and reporting, and data professional development.
Tami is a member of Phi Delta Kappa. She was selected for the PDK Emerging Leaders class in 2012 and received the 2010 Linda Gehrig Educational Leadership Award from the Metropolitan Reading Council. Tami has presented on social justice, program evaluation, and school improvement at several local and national conferences.
Tami received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a teacher endorsement in secondary education from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She earned a master’s degree in educational leadership, a principal certificate, a doctorate in education, and a superintendent certificate from the University of Nebraska Omaha.
To learn more about Tami’s work, follow @tamijwilliams on Twitter.
To book Mark Weichel, Blane McCann, or Tami Williams for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
What would schools look like if educators invested energy and time into thinking about what they do for students who already know the material and content when they walk in the door? Concurrently, what would it look like if educators’ ideas of who these students are were flexible and evolving? What if teachers deliberately and intentionally thought about lessons, units, and activities that could make learning experiences personal for the students who would benefit from extension and challenge by staying engaged and continuing to learn more? We authors believe that teams in such schools would be privileged to work in a culture that valued supporting the needs and talents of every student, where the norm was highly engaging and effective learning. In this book, we aim to offer a framework and resources toward creating such a culture, consistently addressing the needs of students who are of high ability and high potential, thinking flexibly when determining which students fit these criteria, and encouraging collaborative teamwork to meet these goals.
The results of this type of system would be a sight to behold. Imagine walking through various classrooms in a school district where students, particularly those who already know the material, are engaged, enthusiastic, and energetic as they work together with their teachers. A first-grade team develops centers with student choice, writing workshops, and performance assessments based on the achievement levels of the students. Another first-grade teacher uses gradual release of responsibility as students work in strategy groups based on their understanding of the content from the previous day. A third-grade teacher uses digital tools to help students work at their own pace in mathematics. Another elementary teacher works with students to choose their own learning pathways and assessments in mathematics based on their understanding on a pretest. Two sixth-grade teachers have their dividing wall torn down so they can team teach, continually pretest, and then set up stations where students have choices in their learning paths, based on where they are in the learning process. A middle school English teacher who knows her students well uses data to push students further in extending their learning. A middle school team uses student pretest results for student placement in stations that ultimately determine whether they earn entrance tickets to an upcoming assessment. A freshman English teacher employs a system in which students have ten goals to complete in ten days. Each goal requires different cognitive and collaborative skills, and students choose to work on the ten goals in the order of their preference, based on their ability. A high school social studies teacher uses a game where high-achieving students have forty-eight to seventy-two hours to complete a mission, which allows them to learn more about the Roman Empire. A high school science team develops an assignment where students choose their own final assessment tool while the teacher checks their work against certain benchmarks along the way. Teachers in this district are using a great variety of ways to lead students toward clear objectives while allowing already-proficient students to learn in a more personalized manner.
We’ve seen such classrooms and can attest that, if you walked into each of these classrooms and talked to the teachers leading these activities like we have, you would also feel the passion of both the students and the teachers that comes from this type of learning environment. If you talked to the students, you would learn that this type of learning makes time in class go quickly and doesn’t feel like learning. You would also learn that in these environments, learners perform just as well as—if not better than—in traditional classrooms such as those we described previously. Not only that, but students are being challenged, feel a great deal of efficacy, and are highly engaged. Perhaps not surprisingly, these students also stretch themselves further than their teachers might have been able to stretch them. Such a learning culture encourages a mindset that students can grow their intelligence and stretches the limits of what might be traditionally expected of students. And, the beauty of it is that the stretching and growth are internal; students are achieving because they want to. All of these classroom examples we describe are based on real examples we have seen or learned about through our conversations with educators from all over the United States. We describe all of them as examples of personalized learning.
Personalized Learning
A theme that runs through each of the ideas, instructional strategies, and stories in this book is that of personalized learning. Throughout this book, we will seek to define personalized learning and to examine the five elements we have identified that comprise it: (1) knowing your learners, (2) allowing voice and choice, (3) implementing flexibility, (4) using data, and (5) integrating technology. As we will discuss further in chapter 2, students today have grown accustomed to personalization in most aspects of their lives, as advances in technology increasingly adapt to our preferences and needs. It only makes sense that we would adjust our approaches to teaching to similarly reflect personalization of students’ learning to challenge and engage them. When working with students who are of high ability and high potential (and all students for that matter), a key piece to the planning process is the need to allow room for the student to determine his or her own learning plan. This type of thinking and release of responsibility are firmly aligned with the elements of personalized learning. To us, the best platform to incorporate this work and make this vision a reality in your classroom, school, or district is not to go about this work alone but rather to use the well-established Professional Learning Communities at Work™ model.
The PLC Model
As authors, we first learned about professional learning communities (PLCs) when education giants Rick DuFour and Robert Eaker’s book Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement (1998) was published. Thanks to this book and the calculated efforts of educators it has influenced to share best practices, many schools are regularly functioning as PLCs.
According to DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos (2016), PLC work is “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve” (p. 10). School leaders start this process by convening the staff and working through collaborative approaches to determine their mission, vision, values, and goals. Experts suggest thinking about the foundation of a PLC as resting on four pillars—the mission, vision, values, and goals (DuFour et al., 2016). When building leaders focus on why they exist, articulate a compelling and understandable sense of direction for the work, identify the specific actions the group will take to achieve the mission and vision, and determine how they will know whether or not students achieve success, the likelihood of success magnifies (DuFour et al., 2016). Following the development of these four key pillars, teams use the three big ideas and the four critical questions of a PLC to make their work come alive.
The Three Big Ideas of a PLC
According