Possible Solution 2
Planning Examples
Summary
Collaborative Team Reflection
Interest Extensions
Possible Solution 1
Possible Solution 2
Planning Examples
Summary
Collaborative Team Reflection
Helping Students Connect Through Social Extensions
Social Extensions
Possible Solution 1
Possible Solution 2
Planning Examples
Summary
Collaborative Team Reflection
Creating Extensions as Singletons
Possible Solution 1
Possible Solution 2
Planning Examples
Summary
Collaborative Team Reflection
About the Author
Michael Roberts is an author and consultant with more than two decades of experience in education. Michael has been an administrator at the district level and has served as an on-site administrator at the high school, middle school, and elementary levels.
Prior to moving to becoming the director of elementary curriculum and instruction in Scottsdale, Arizona, Michael was the principal of Desert View Elementary School (DVES) in Hermiston, Oregon. Under his leadership, DVES produced evidence of increased learning each year from 2013–2017 for all students and met the challenges of 40 percent growth over four years, a rising population of English learners, and a dramatic increase in the number of trauma-affected students.
Michael attributes the success of DVES to the total commitment of staff to the three big ideas and the four critical questions of a professional learning community. This commitment has led to a schoolwide transition from “me” to “we”—a fundamental shift in thinking that has made all the difference.
Previously, Michael served as an assistant principal in Prosser, Washington, where he was named the 2010–2011 Three Rivers Principal Association Assistant Principal of the Year. In 2011–2012, Michael was a finalist for Washington Assistant Principal of the Year.
Michael earned his bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Washington State University and his master’s degree in educational leadership from Azusa Pacific University.
To learn more about Michael’s work, visit https://everykidnow.com, or follow him @everykidnow on Twitter or @everykidnow on Instagram.
To book Michael Roberts for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
In September 2013, I was the principal of Desert View Elementary School (DVES) in Hermiston, Oregon. As a school, we were making the often-difficult shift to a meaningful, accountable professional learning community (PLC) from what Richard DuFour and Douglas Reeves (2016) call PLC Lite:
Educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings, engage in book studies that result in no action, or devote collaborative time to topics that have no effect on student achievement—all in the name of the PLC process. These activities fail to embrace the central tenets of the PLC process and won’t lead to higher levels of learning for students or adults. (p. 69)
During this transition, grade-level teams worked hard to create common formative assessments. Using those assessments to reflect on and adjust teacher behaviors and instructional practices proved harder than previous efforts, but sorting students across each grade level into groups by proficiency level proved an easier task. Identifying, agreeing on, and building interventions around essential concepts and skills for student success took DVES staff the better part of a year.
After reaching these agreements, we were confronted with reams of data. We found that, like oil, student data is abundant if you know where to look, but useless in its raw form. Only when refined is it useful. So, we focused on student data specifically to support adult learning because as Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos (2016) state, “the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators” (p. 10). We refined our data into specific, useful parts to tell us not only which students were succeeding and which were struggling on essential standards but also which standards students had mastered, which were giving them the most difficulty, and which adult behaviors were most successful in teaching these standards. The refined data would eventually allow us to emphasize professional practices that yielded the highest number of students achieving beyond the proficient level. These data would also tell us which ineffective practices we needed to abandon to free up invaluable teaching time. But this was a journey; it did not happen overnight.
To drive our quest for high levels of learning for all students, we sought to answer the four critical questions of PLCs at Work®:
1. What is it we want our students to know and be able to do?
2. How will we know if each student has learned it?
3. How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
4. How will we extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency? (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 59)
At all points along the journey, we could access any number of resources to support the learning of DVES teachers and administrators. We could overcome almost any roadblock by sharing an article or chapter from any number of books about effectively answering PLC critical question 1, 2, or 3. However, we struggled to find support in building effective extensions for students who demonstrated proficiency. Answering critical question 4 in a meaningful, systematic way proved difficult because the staff had few resources to learn from. In addition, administrators and teachers often saw students who were already proficient as successful in school—and thus not in dire need of help to learn