Collaboration plays a crucial role in the success of any school dedicated to building effective teams in a PLC culture. When experts collaborate, innovative ideas emerge in ways that support student learning and generate positive results. When a team uses collaborative time wisely—when the action steps of a team are clearly designed, intentional, and focused—it is possible to make great progress in student learning. Across North America, schools are making a commitment to this core principle, they are tackling long-standing concerns in education by bringing together teacher teams to make stronger curricular and instructional choices, and they are getting better and better at making use of assessment practices that support the formative development of all students.
This chapter helps you identify how to initiate collaboration by applying PLC fundamentals and build teacher teams within your school to support meaningful collaboration that leads to student growth and reflective teaching practices. We offer guidance for leaders and examine how to approach meeting logistics before delving into the details of the work teams carry out in collaborative meetings, including analyzing standards and setting goals, identifying students’ existing literacy skills and needs, and finding connections between the ELA curriculum and imparted literacy skills.
Collaboration Within a PLC
PLCs are a pivotal force for progress in schools, as they are all focused on three big ideas: (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture, and (3) a results orientation (DuFour et al., 2016). Within our literacy work with disciplinary teachers, we kept these three big ideas at the core of our work, and we directed our commitment to literacy in all disciplines by continuously addressing the four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016).
1. What do we want students to learn?
2. How will we know when they have learned it?
3. What do we do if they haven’t learned it yet?
4. How do we extend learning for those who are already proficient?
We recognize that teams are configured in varying ways depending on the school. For instance, you might have curriculum teams, grade-level teams, content-focused teams, or teams that are singletons (teams of one). No matter how your teams are currently structured, when working toward integrating literacy-based strategies, we hope your teams will begin collaborating with a literacy expert in your building—an expert who can provide insight into varying and supportive literacy strategies that your teams can integrate into their instructional practices. But as we wrote in the introduction to this book, if your building does not have a dedicated literacy expert, we designed this book also to function as a thoughtful, collaborative substitute. As an ELA teacher who may have colleagues coming to you for literacy-related advice and guidance, you can also use this book to help you in providing those supports.
While the size and scope of work in a PLC can differ greatly from one PLC to the next, the initial focus of teams often starts with a specific, discrete task that later evolves into more layered tasks and discussion topics. By simple definition, a team is a group of professionals working interdependently to achieve a common goal. PLC architect Richard DuFour (2004) notes successful teams:
▶ Have common time for collaboration on a regular basis
▶ Build buy-in toward a discrete and overarching common goal
▶ Build a sense of community
▶ Engage in long-term work that continues from year to year
▶ Grow—but do not completely change—membership each year
In addition to these characteristics, in our experience, it is helpful to have a team leader or point person who creates agendas and monitors discussion (this can be a rotating role); it is also important to encourage open, honest, discussion-based dialogue in order to respect and include all ideas concerning student learning, and we recommend that the core membership find opportunities to reach out and include other colleagues. Remember, collaborative team meetings work better when they are focused on actionable items that will serve to extend the professional learning of the teachers. The following sections go into more detail on the configuration of teams, the role of leaders within a team, and the logistics for team meetings.
Team Configuration
At this point, we want to make a few explicit recommendations for configuring teams effectively when working on literacy-based strategies. There are a number of different approaches to establishing a team, and in many schools, resources vary—for instance, at many schools, there might not be dedicated literacy experts trained in the value and capacity of literacy strategies. Sometimes we need to think of teams differently if we are thinking about how to make changes happen. Here are four considerations when building teams focused on literacy.
1. Ideally, incorporate a literacy expert on a curriculum or a content-focused team to serve as an informed thought partner. An individual with literacy expertise can help support instructional changes with a greater variety of approaches and can also help in selecting strategies that are better aligned to the course outcomes. For purposes of the ELA classroom, the literacy expert can help to adapt strategies that are focused on decoding text, summarizing text, making inferences, and exploring text extensions and connections.
2. Some teams work horizontally, meaning they work within their specific grade level or within a particular content-based course with many sections and many teachers. Some teams work vertically, where they meet with teachers from different grade levels to ensure curricula are interconnected and working to build learning year to year. When considering literacy-based strategies, consider how your teams are constructed and the purposes of your teams’ goals for integrating literacy-based strategies. Why and how should the strategies be applied to support students throughout a particular grade level or within an ELA course that many teachers instruct? When and why should a team use a strategy? If working vertically, how and why might a team teach and reteach strategies year after year? How do these strategies become habits over the sequence of courses and throughout grade levels?
3. Some teams will not have a literacy expert. In these cases, consider what other resources can serve as a strong, literacy-informed, and reflective collaborative partner. Consider the expertise that might come from within your own ELA department. Is there a teacher with experience teaching reading coursework available to come to your team meetings? If not in your building, is there a literacy expert in a building within your district—an expert in an elementary, middle, or high school building who might be able to help? Is there expertise in the special education department with a background in the area of literacy? Seek to use the resources available to you.
4. Consider how your team might make collaborative use of this book in more directed ways. Or, if you are a singleton team (a team of one), how might this book be a resource to help you reflect on your current teaching practices and help you to grow in your own learning as you seek out collaborators perhaps outside of your department or school? To improve, teams often need to seek outside resources that do not currently exist within the schools they are working in. In these cases, widen your definition of a team and consider the larger community of educators who are willing and ready to help other teachers learn. Reach out to professional organizations or attend conferences that can help connect your team to discussions that will influence positive changes.
Leaders’ Roles
Collaboration is at the crux of literacy work and is truly an essential component of professional growth. While this may seem obvious, achieving authentic collaboration can be a challenge for several reasons. We commonly hear “there isn’t time” as a primary roadblock. Consequently, the first step in the