• Attainable—The goal is realistic enough that team members believe they can achieve it through their collective efforts.
• Results oriented—The goal focuses on results rather than activities or intentions. In order to achieve a SMART goal, a team must typically help more students learn at higher levels than in the past.
• Time bound—The goal specifies when the team expects to achieve its goal.
Teams can and should create SMART goals for the entire school year and for every unit they teach during the year.
We cannot overemphasize the importance of collective inquiry and open dialogue about the three big ideas for successful implementation of the PLC process. More rigorous standards and more informative assessments cannot, by themselves, improve a school. If educators convince themselves that they fulfill their responsibility simply when they present content, that they work best in isolation, and that they need to use evidence of student learning only to assign grades—rather than to inform professional practice to better meet student needs—even well-designed structures and processes have little impact on student learning. School transformation requires significant changes in the culture of schooling, which, in turn, requires educators to engage in meaningful and informed dialogue about the assumptions, beliefs, and expectations that should drive their work.
Critical Questions for Team and School Consideration
It stands to reason that any school that claims it is committed to helping all students learn must engage collaborative teams in collectively considering certain critical questions. The four critical questions of learning in the PLC process include (DuFour et al., 2016):
1. What is it we want students to learn?—What knowledge, skills, and dispositions do we expect each student to acquire at the end of this instructional unit, course, or grade level?
2. How will we know if students are learning?—How will we monitor each student’s learning during daily instruction and during the unit?
3. How will we respond when students don’t learn?—What systems do we have in place to provide students who struggle with additional time and support for acquiring essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions?
4. How will we extend learning for students who are highly proficient?—What systems do we have in place to extend learning for students who have already learned the essential standards?
In Collaborative Teams That Transform Schools, Robert Marzano, Tammy Heflebower, Jan K. Hoegh, Phil Warrick, and Gavin Grift (2016) recommend two additional questions that educators in a high reliability school should consider.
5. How will we increase our instructional competence?—What systems are in place to help teachers improve their pedagogical skills?
6. How will we coordinate our efforts as a school?—How will we ensure that all initiatives in the school are operating in a cohesive and coherent manner?
Let’s compare and contrast how a traditional school and a PLC would attempt to address these six questions.
What Is It We Want Students to Learn?
Marzano’s (2003) research in What Works in Schools has made the term guaranteed and viable curriculum part of the educational lexicon. Thanks to his work, two general understandings persist: (1) effective schools provide students with access to the same curriculum content in a specific course and at a specific grade level, regardless of their assigned teacher; and (2) teachers can teach this curriculum in the amount of instructional time provided. (Chapter 4, page 107, elaborates on the importance of a guaranteed and viable curriculum.)
Traditionally, districts have addressed this key element of effective schooling by creating district curriculum and pacing guides and distributing the appropriate guide to each teacher based on his or her grade level or course. This practice often creates the illusion of a guaranteed and viable curriculum because, theoretically, teachers of the same content work from the same document. Too often, however, the mere distribution of documents has little impact on what actually happens in the classroom. We cannot assume that individual teachers will read the documents, interpret them consistently, apply the same priorities to each curricular standard, devote similar amounts of time to the various standards, and have the ability to teach each standard well. Furthermore, simply distributing documents to teachers does not result in either the teacher clarity or the teacher commitment essential to provide students with a guaranteed and viable curriculum.
As we state in Leaders of Learning (DuFour & Marzano, 2011):
The only way the curriculum in a school can truly be guaranteed is if the teachers themselves, those who are called upon to deliver the curriculum, have worked collaboratively to do the following:
• Study the intended curriculum.
• Agree on priorities within the curriculum.
• Clarify how the curriculum translates into student knowledge and skills.
• Establish general pacing guidelines for delivering the curriculum.
• Commit to one another that they will, in fact, teach the agreed-upon curriculum. (p. 91)
States and districts can prescribe an intended curriculum, but the implemented curriculum—what gets taught when the teacher closes the classroom door—has a bigger impact on the attained curriculum—what students actually learn. High reliability schools require the PLC process to establish a rigorous, guaranteed, and viable curriculum that reflects a commitment to both excellence and equity.
How Will We Know If Students Are Learning?
Once again, it stands to reason that a school committed to ensuring high levels of learning for all students would have a process in place to continually monitor and support each student’s learning. That process would include strategies that check for student understanding during classroom instruction each day. Team members could work together to enhance each other’s strategies for making these ongoing checks. For example, teachers could ask students directed questions focused on content that is critical to students’ academic success, have students write short responses or solve problems during observation, and gather signals from students as to their level of understanding using whiteboards, clickers, or exit slips. This daily formative assessment is intended to help teachers assess student understanding and make instructional adjustments. It also alerts students to areas of confusion or misunderstanding so they can seek the appropriate help.
But the cornerstone of the PLC assessment process is team-developed common formative assessments administered at least once during a unit. A team assesses students who are expected to acquire the same knowledge and skills, using the same method and instrument, according to the team’s agreed-on criteria for judging the quality of student work.
Extensive research supports the effectiveness of common assessments (Ainsworth, 2014; Battelle for Kids, 2015; Chenoweth, 2009; Christman et al., 2009; Odden & Archibald, 2009; Reeves, 2004). But the research in support of formative assessments is even more compelling. As Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson (2007) conclude, effective use of formative assessments, developed through teacher learning communities, promises not only the largest potential gains in student achievement but also a process for affordable teacher professional development. Marzano (2006) describes formative assessment as “one of the most powerful weapons in a teacher’s arsenal. An effective standards-based, formative assessment program can help to dramatically enhance student achievement throughout the K–12 system” (back cover). Also, W. James Popham (2013) writes, “Ample research evidence is now at hand to indicate emphatically that when the formative-assessment process is used, students learn better—lots better” (p. 29).
Unquestionably,