• 2018 AP exam pass rate: 72.7 percent (Wyoming, 55.5 percent; global, 61.3 percent) (College Board, 2018)
SCSD2 has had nothing short of outstanding outcomes due to its educators’ passion for student learning, continuous improvement of its utilization of the PLC process, and a mindset that drives it to engage in ongoing cycles of reflection and improvement in the classroom.
With this book, we wish to do two things. First, we highlight the elements that make the PLC process work. This information offers you either an important review or an introduction, depending on your stage of PLC implementation. Second, we take you under the hood of SCSD2’s high-functioning PLC and share its real-life applications of the PLC process so you can see how a typical public school district has successfully articulated and implemented this process. We want you to come away from this book feeling like you are a member of the SCSD2 family. And we want you to feel prepared to build your school or district’s living history of excellence with your own PLC journey.
As you learn about SCSD2, we hope you see your own school’s potential as a PLC. However, if your school is in a dramatically different place, or you find your story radically different than SCSD2’s, don’t lose faith! While the example we provide takes you inside a PLC, the true emergence of any PLC comes from one place—the heart. Schools of all kinds are using the PLC process, and when educators make that mental and emotional shift—a change of heart—everything else, including improved student results, will follow. So no matter what kind of school you work in, the examples, strategies, and approaches we provide in this book will serve to ignite your imagination, fill your heart, and nourish your mind.
Throughout this introduction, you will learn more about SCSD2 and how the PLC process helped dramatically reshape both the outcomes that the district achieves and the climate and culture that serve its students. If you’re already on the PLC journey, this book will help illuminate your path. If you are considering the PLC process or are just beginning your journey, you’ve picked the perfect place to start. Either way, we look forward to taking this tour with you!
The Tour
As the book’s title suggests, we intend to take you on a tour inside a real district’s PLC transformation. When implementing the PLC process, you will see your school or district change at the cellular level—in its basic structure and function. Deeply embracing the PLC process means forever altering a school’s inner workings. Committing to the PLC process and implementing it with fidelity will positively impact every stakeholder. The intricate and difficult work of PLC transformation and implementation is well worth the effort; it will yield incredible outcomes in student learning. We also know that the more we work in the PLC framework, the more complex the work becomes. SCSD2 has truly embraced this reality for the sake of its students.
One of the most valuable elements within the PLC process is that it helps educators discover, or in some cases rediscover, their why. In every profession there is a tendency to get caught up in the internal machinations of daily work—the ever-present constraints and the pressures. However, by consistently executing the elements of the PLC process, educators are drawn back to the basics of what it means to be an educator.
Throughout this book, as we explore the various elements of the PLC process, we take you inside SCSD2’s successes, challenges, and celebrations during the PLC journey. We look at the three big ideas of a PLC and the four critical questions (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016), and we explore how SCSD2 schools embody the foundational elements of a PLC. We discuss how collaboration and intervention are different in PLCs and traditional schools, and we reveal what inquiry strategies have led to SCSD2’s success as a PLC, as well as what can go wrong along the way. We hope this book gives you a clear sense of the system and spirit of SCSD2.
Before this tour begins, we will introduce your tour guides and the setting of the tour. We will share the hunger that prompted SCSD2 to change, the solution the district found in the PLC process, its continuing PLC journey, and the sense of fulfillment that PLC implementation gives to its educators.
Your Tour Guides
We will be your tour guides on this PLC journey. Casey is a former urban high school principal and city assistant superintendent who utilized the PLC process to drive a dramatic turnaround in each of the schools he worked with. In addition, he has served virtual PLCs, consulting with online schools who use the PLC process. He met Craig several years ago as a consultant while he was working with SCSD2 during its ongoing journey toward improvement. Craig is the long-standing superintendent of SCSD2. He spent four years as an assistant superintendent and has served as the superintendent since 2000.
The districts we have served as practitioners are quite different from each other: urban areas in Toledo, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, versus the western landscape of northern Wyoming. Our multiple and diverse experiences in education have shaped our vision for this book, and the differing experiences we bring to the table will help to inform your experience as a reader.
Despite our differing experiences, both of us have a relentless passion for the education profession—for results and for students and the educators who serve them—and have bullish opinions on the profession’s future. We both passionately pursue best practices and believe schools that want to achieve better results than ever before should use the PLC process as articulated by Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour as the foundation for getting things done. And finally, we are both relentlessly dedicated to telling it like it is. While we hope our writing inspires you, we likewise aim for clarity about what you need to strive for to make the PLC process come alive, starting today. We will be straightforward, writing both straight to and straight from the heart.
The Setting
The setting for this rich case study is Sheridan, Wyoming, a picturesque town of twenty thousand people at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The community has easy access to badlands, national forests, and any number of outdoor activities. It also has a long-running affinity for the cowboy culture. Even if you’ve never gone fly fishing, eaten buffalo, or attended a rodeo, you could find all three with relative ease in this eleven-square-mile town.
Cowboys and charm notwithstanding, SCSD2 is an altogether common school district. Historically, it has faced huge internal challenges in trying to meet the needs of economically diverse students with extraordinarily different and often difficult learning needs. Principals and teachers in the district had developed extremely low expectations of students who live in poverty, as well as students who struggled academically. With ten schools (six receiving Title I funding), roughly 3,500 students, and three hundred teachers, there was indeed a great deal of work needed to overcome these and other internal challenges. SCSD2 responded to these challenges in nothing short of an amazing way—and its responsiveness to these challenges lies at the heart of this book.
The Hunger
In 2005, educators in SCSD2 got hungry. Proficiency levels as low as 25 percent in some schools suggested that the district’s staff weren’t necessarily helping students reach their potential, and the data gave staff an overarching sense that they could do so much more. Perhaps even more important, and key to the ascent of a PLC culture, SCSD2 staff were willing to challenge their assumptions and to do things differently. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and had never heard of PLCs. But they knew that moderate, vanilla changes around the edges would probably not satisfy their hunger for real student improvement.
While this book spends quite a bit of time on technical elements of the PLC process, one shouldn’t overlook the impact of personal commitment. Ensuring leaders and teachers are coming to the table hungry, ready to change and innovate, is essential. This foundational element of creative innovation represents a formidable introduction to any reform process. And in this case, the hungry hearts at SCSD2 had no idea about the feast ahead; they just knew that it was time for a change.
The Solution
To satisfy this hunger for change and innovation, SCSD2 pursued with interest two very different