Your past experiences with using immediate strategies to address students’ most critical literacy needs provide an opportunity to approach your administrators and create a long-term plan for schoolwide literacy. The following chapters provide information and examples of how to begin this process, but here are some starting points to consider when communicating with administration and when engaging with the following chapters in this book.
▶ Identify the immediate problem and show the evidence of the problem with data.
▶ Identify your ultimate goal for the students in your classroom. Know what you want to change.
▶ Provide a list of strategies you have tried in your classroom. Identify the ways you and your team have worked to build change.
▶ Provide suggestions for resources or ideas that can help you and your team accomplish your goals and get your students to a more successful place. Collaborate with your administrators over how these goals can be accomplished with the right action steps and the right supports in place.
Teachers must be committed to the challenging work of moving students’ literacy competencies in the right direction, and leadership must support and respect this collaboration. Responding to your school’s literacy needs cannot occur through an occasional meeting or a purchased program—everyone must be in on the collaboration and be open to their own education and professional growth.
Having said that, we want to offer a few tips for literacy leaders engaged in this work. If you are the literacy leader in your school, consider yourself a host to other teaching teams. You want this team collaboration with you to be as positive as possible so everyone can be an effective participant. Often as a leader in literacy, you will need to serve as the glue that holds the pieces together. You will need to develop the agendas and send out the invites and reminders. Your personal goal is to keep this team moving forward and committed to literacy-based strategies. Be authentic: you are not the person with all the answers, and it is important that the tone is collaborative in nature and not hierarchical. The credit for the good work that comes from the focused collaborative team goes to the committee as a whole and not the literacy leader.
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What additional questions or thoughts could you consider when approaching administrators about creating a schoolwide literacy program that can specifically assist in the ELA classroom?
Collaborative Meeting Logistics
Based on our experiences, there are four simple logistical action steps you can take that will help ensure fluid and timely collaboration.
1. Work creatively and collaboratively to carve out a common regular time and space for your team to meet: From our experiences, carving out common time is the first step to developing a high-functioning team in a PLC environment. While a progressive education model allows for consistent and regular professional collaboration during the school day, many schools do not have a schedule that reflects this due to the complex nature of the secondary school day. And while a regular weekly team block where students start school late or leave school early is often the ideal way to ensure teacher teams can meet in focused ways, we also recognize that many school districts are still working toward supporting structures that support PLC cultures. If your school has not yet set up a structured time for teacher teams to meet, we suggest planning ahead to ensure team meetings can be supported in ways that allow for collaboration around literacy. If you and your teacher colleagues are dedicated to literacy in your classrooms, you might need to work with an administrator who will help support the collaborative time necessary to innovate positive changes. Ask for the time you will need to collaborate and to innovate literacy strategies to use in your classrooms. For example, you might ask for release periods or release days throughout the year so you can accomplish your team’s goals.
2. Create a regular meeting schedule, and make sure everyone knows the plan: Collaborative teams must ensure they dedicate their meeting time to fostering the commitments of a continuously developing PLC. Early on, establishing norms that set focused, actionable goals helps teams achieve their purpose and helps to establish commitments. We suggest using SMART (specific and strategic, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound) goals as a good guiding tool (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). By setting up SMART goals, your team will be more likely to stay focused, learning, and driven to succeed. As literacy coaches, we know that time is precious, and when our teacher teams meet with us, we know that our collaboration needs to have purposeful, specific outcomes. In building SMART goals toward literacy, we encourage taking the time to create an action-driven schedule that is paced, practical, and respectful of everyone’s many different commitments. What is realistic depends on your structure and your team’s purpose. From our personal experiences, we think that meeting less than every other week often means that team members will be unable to prioritize making changes in literacy. Team meetings that are too infrequent mainly consist of recapping what happened at the last meeting and miss the mark on cultivating productive collaboration that leads to changes to literacy practices in the classroom. To ensure all team members are aware of upcoming meetings, create electronic calendar invites, send out a paper copy of dates and plans that members can post at their desks, and send reminders. Always attach your agenda to encourage thoughtful preparation before the meeting.
3. Identify and use a consistent meeting location: We also encourage finding a consistent space for your team to meet. It is counterproductive when people are always searching for a changing location. Ideally, this space will be free of other distractions, comfortable, and well equipped for the work you will be doing (for example, have access to a whiteboard, projector, and an internet-connected device, such as a tablet, laptop, or computer).
4. Create digital files that capture agendas and notes: In addition to ensuring equipment is available in your meeting space, from the beginning, create an ongoing digital hub for agendas and notes—use tools like Slack, Google Docs with Google Drive, or Microsoft OneNote with Microsoft OneDrive. Ideally, you want something that allows all members to contribute independently and ensures full online access to your materials outside of your collaboration time.
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Standards Analysis and Goal Setting
As we noted before, teams must build consensus about what they want all students to learn—the first critical question of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016). While your team may have a general overarching literacy goal right out of the gate, it must dedicate time to the specific development of discrete goals that identify what it wants students to learn. Often, it is necessary to do some research, a collective inquiry, to establish a goal. Before defining any sort of common goal for student learning, spend time examining your school’s ELA curriculum standards, and assess the current implementation of these standards with a productive and critical eye. Your team must unpack the ELA content standards and identify the literacy skills they require for mastery. Once you have unpacked them, you will need to set aside the complete content standards momentarily to focus purely on the skills, which serve as the vehicle to transport the learner from novice to skilled on the content-mastery continuum.
Investigating current practices and detailing desired outcomes requires your team of colleagues to have thoughtful conversations about the curriculum