I previously wrote about the six questions that provide the skeleton for the Massachusetts Common Planning Time Self-Assessment Toolkit. The toolkit, as well as a number of other helpful documents on PLCs, data teams, and learning walks, can now be found here.
And here is the Table of Contents to give you a sense of what’s included:
A recent report by the New America Foundation lays out a powerful, succinct rationale for expanding access to quality pre-kindergarten education, raising the quality of instruction in K-3 education, and creating an integrated PreK-3rd system that, “ensures that all children have a solid foundation in literacy, math, and social-emotional skills by the end of third grade.” The report, “A Next Social Contract for the Primary Years of Education,” summarizes recent research on the importance of early education for children’s future success and cites the opportunities suggested by successful state and local initiatives. Here are a series of quotations from the report that illustrate the case it makes:
New research [shows] the importance of introducing children at very early ages to vocabulary-rich environments, early math and science concepts, and meaningful conversations about the world around them.
Fully one-third of 4th graders are scoring at “below basic” on national reading tests–in other words, they are reading at such low levels that they cannot complete their schoolwork–and the proportion of minority children in those straits is far higher. Studies have show that children who read poorly in third grade will continue to suffer from reading problems through high school.
The United States today has not one educational system, but three very separate systems–one for early childhood, one for elementary and secondary schooling, and one for postsecondary education.
The evidence of the effectiveness of high quality pre-K is among the strongest findings in education research. Rigorous studies of the HighScope Perry Preschool Project and the Chicago Child Parent Centers Program found that high-quality pre-K programs produced both short-term learning gains for participating students and long-term benefits, including reduced rates of grade retention, special education placement, and school dropout; higher educational attainment and adult earnings; and reduced likelihood of involvement with the criminal justice system.
More recently, studies of large-scale and high-quality state pre-K programs in Oklahoma and New Jersey have found evidence that these pre-K programs also produce significant learning gains for participating children—gains comparable to those found in the Chicago CPC study. From what we know so far, these gains last at least into the early elementary grades.
[W]hile research shows that quality pre-K can narrow achievement gaps, current arrangements often wind up exacerbating inequalities, rather than acting to counter them.
Many elementary school teachers have relatively little training in early childhood development, and the same credential typically allows teachers to work in any grade K-5, even though the skills required to successfully teach first graders to read are very different than those required to teach fifth graders science and social studies.
“A Next Social Contract” proposes the following PreK-3rd policy framework:
- Establish proficiency in reading, math, and social and emotional skills by the end of third grade as a clear and foremost goal of our education system.
- Move the starting point for public education from five years old to three years old.
- Integrate Pre-K into a reformed education finance system.
- Establish clearly articulated, aligned high quality national standards for what children should know and be able to do at the end of third grade and at each step in the PreK-3rd continuum leading up to that.
- Redefine the roles of early childhood and elementary teachers and principals.
- Diversify educational delivery and eliminate the exclusive franchise for school districts in public education.
The first time P.S. 33X organized a two-day lesson planning–peer observation process (see previous post), three groups of three teachers participated: three Kindergarten teachers, three second grade teachers, and three fourth grade teachers each met for two consecutive periods two days in a row. Each group developed one ELA lesson. We planned it together the first day, emphasizing that we all owned the lesson. One member of the group would teach it the following day. The other two teachers and I observed the lesson, which we immediately de-briefed the following period. Coverages were arranged in advance.
Each group began by discussing the value of peer observation, their goals, the norms they would follow, and our approach, which was to emphasize description and data collection. Here we were influenced by the helpful discussion of the role of description in classroom observation found in Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning by Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman, and Lee Teitel.
We then began planning the lessons one of the teachers would teach the next day, discussing what the lesson was about, the goals, how we would know whether students were learning, and the activities of the lesson. These small group planning sessions provided the opportunity to extend P.S. 33’s lesson planning collaboration to include detailed discussion of the pros and cons of the various possible steps that teachers implement in teaching a lesson. In some cases, the presenting teacher would actually practice a read-aloud, allowing us all to discuss where the teacher might want to stop and what questions he or she might ask. The presenting teacher of course had final say on all decisions, but thus far each presenting teacher has been eager to get suggestions from his or her colleagues.
The lesson that a Kindergarten teacher, Ms. B, developed with her colleagues serves as a good example both of the process and of the instructional themes that have characterized this lesson design work at P.S. 33.
Due to a need for extra space, P.S. 33’s six Kindergarten classes are located in a separate building, called “The Annex,” that is a few doors down the street from the main building in the North Bronx. The Annex is a large open space with a few alcoves around the perimeter. Spaces for the 6 classrooms are carved out of the space with half walls, book cases, milk crates, and the like. You are met with a view of all six classrooms–and a hubub of activity–when you walk into the building. From each class space you can hear constant activity from the other class spaces.
We met on a Monday in January. The lesson that Ms. B was planning for the next day involved having the students write a sentence for the first time. Ms. B and her colleagues knew that this task would be challenging for many of their students. As a result, Ms. B chose to build in a good deal of scaffolding into the lesson. Further, to address the needs of those students who struggled with writing activities, the Kindergarten teachers designed a modified activity for these students.
Ms. B and her colleagues developed a lesson that included a read-aloud from a Time for Kids magazine on George Washington, extensive use of a word bank, interactive writing, signficant whole group modeling and practice, a simple graphic organizer, and a plan for the struggling writers. These design elements, and the work the students would produced, provided the focus for the debriefing discussion of the lesson that would immediately follow the lesson.
Ms. B taught the components of the lesson as follows. She began with the students on the carpet in front of her with two easels within easy reach.
Review and Connection: Ms. B began by reminding her students of their discussion of George Washington the previous day. She reviewed a couple of sentences about George Washington she had elicited from her students and written on chart paper the previous day. She showed George Washington’s picture again and explained that they would be adding more facts about him today.
Read-Aloud: Ms. B showed the Time for Kids magazine on George Washington to the students and explained that they would all get a copy to take home. She read the magazine, stopping frequently to ask questions: “Where did he live?” “He liked math. How many of you like math?” “He became a soldier. What is a soldier?” She added words like “soldier” and “was” to the word bank as she went. “Many people thought he was a great leader. Who was another leader we’ve talked about? Yes, Martin Luther King.”
More Sentence Facts: “What are some facts about George Washington that we can add to the list (on the chart paper on the easel)?”
“He was a leader.”
“He liked math.”
“He was the father of our country.”
Ms. B continues to add words like “leader” and “father” to the word bank as she writes these sentences. She ends up with six sentence facts on the chart paper. Ms. B and the students recite the facts in unison.
Interactive Writing: Ms. B turns the easel so the students cannot see the sentences and explains they will practice writing sentences together. Students come up and with Ms. B write some sample sentences. “I like how Tatyanna used her word bank words.”
A Quick Final Review: Ms. B goes over the words in the word bank once again and reads the six sentences, again explaining what the word bank words mean in context.
Independent Work: Ms. B shows the graphic organizer to the students. It has a large outline of George Washington’s face on the top and a few well-spaced writing lines on the bottom. She explains to the students that they should try to write one fact about George Washington and then color the picture. The students move to their seats (the desks are clustered in sets of 4-6). Ms. B posts a couple of word bank sheets around the room–she had chosen the word bank words and prepared an extra copy in advance. Ms. B then gathers the struggling writers on the carpet and explains their activity to them using a modified graphic organizer. At the suggestion of one of P.S. 33’s staff developers, Ms. D, many of the teachers are experimenting with using Cloze activities with the struggling writers. The graphic organizer these students are using has some words of a sentence fact filled in and blank spaces for sight words. After working with these students, Ms. B circulates around the room, encourages use of the word bank, and continues to check in with the struggling writers. Stronger writers are encouraged to write two sentences, and one student even wrote three.
Whole-Class Sharing: Ms. B calls the students back to the carpet. She asks specific students to share sentences they wrote. “Raise your hand if you used a word bank.” “Everyone gets a clap.” Ms. B distributes the magazines for the students to take and gives them a chance to look over them.
Debrief
The three Kindergarten teachers, the staff developer Ms. D, and I meet the following period to debrief the lesson. (Ms. D has continued the process with the groups so that they can observe other members.)
We used this protocol for the debrief:
Review norms
Share descriptive evidence
– Observations without judgment
– Examine student work
Assess the structure of the lesson (i.e., the component parts)
– What worked well
– Even better if …
Observee requests regarding teacher moves, strategies, tips
Summarize lessons learned and issues to pursue
– Prepare to share with colleagues
Under descriptive evidence, we listed the amount of time each component of the lesson took:
| Prior knowledge review | 4 minutes |
| Read-aloud | 7 minutes |
| Adding sentences and interactive writing | 5 minutes |
| Independent work | 15 minutes |
| Whole-group share | 5 minutes |
We examined the students’ work, and were pleased to find that most students in fact wrote facts in sentences. Ms. B’s colleagues felt that the way the lesson connected to previous lessons worked well, as did eliciting the facts that were written on the easel from the students. We observed that the students were engaged and attentive during the read-aloud and eager to volunteer facts. The interactive writing of sentences as an intermediate step after the teacher modeling of elicited sentences and before the independent work worked well. And I thought that the way Ms. B quickly went over the word bank words one more time and explained their meaning in the context of the sentences right before the independent work was effective. P.S. 33 has a high proportion of English Language Learners, and it was clear from our interactions with the students during the independent work that many students were unfamiliar with some of these words and writing them was a significant step forward.
Overall, our conclusion was that the structure of the lesson had been effective: the extensive use of the word bank, the focus on six sentences, the interactive writing as practice and modeling before the independent work, and the share at the end.
Ms. B too was pleased with the lesson, but led with a number of ideas for how to improve it during the “even better if” part of the conversation. First, the distinction between past and present tense presented a problem in the lesson. Some of the posted sentences used “is” and some used “was.” “Was” was a word bank wall and was on a word wall as well as a sight word the students were working on. Yet, Ms. B thought she would consider keeping all the sentences in the same tense next time. Alternatively, she might do more work with the students on past tense and “was,” in advance of this lesson, perhaps in a mini-lesson the day before this lesson, and then use this lesson to further distinguish “is” and “was.”
Second, Ms. B realized that even though she extensively modeled the sentence, she could have extended her modeling by filling out the graphic organizer with a sample sentence and drawing (or showing) a picture that showed George Washington being a leader, doing math, and so on. Finally, while the Cloze activity was helpful for the struggling writers, it was clear that it was the first time the students had seen this format: lines with some words filled and some left blank for them to fill in. Ms. B thought it would be useful to use this technique more often, and therefore the students would become more familiar with it. And Ms. D suggested that even filling in the first letter of some missing words would be helpful for some students as they get used to the format and to writing words and sentences with spaces.
Broader Implications
Like most of the lesson planning–peer observations that have taken place at P.S. 33, this one spurred thinking about how to improve the curriculum and about work that would be good for the grade-level team–Kindergarten in this case–to do. One of Ms. B’s colleagues shared that she had been emphasizing sight words all year long and that it seemed to be paying off. This lesson suggested that coordinating the sequence in which sight words are introduced–when to introduce and emphasize “was” for instance–would be a good task for the Kindergarten team.
The Kindergarten group’s analysis of this lesson on writing a first sentence shared a number of themes that have surfaced in most of the lesson observations that have occurred at P.S. 33: designing independent work with the appropriate level of challenge, providing scaffolding for the struggling writers and extensions for the stronger writers, designing effective organizers and templates, the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction, and the value of carefully thinking through the specific steps of lessons.
It’s not just meeting as a team that makes the difference. Rather, it’s how the teams use the time that’s set aside to gradually and steadily improve lessons and instruction.
In a recent Education Week commentary, Ronald Gallimore and Bradley Ermeling describe the results of study that found that achievement rose 41%, and 54% for Hispanic students, in schools that developed teacher teams focused on improving teaching and learning. Based on their research, the authors suggest that there are five keys to cultivating effective teacher teams:
- Job-alike teams of three to seven teachers who teach the same grade level, course, or subject.
- Published protocols that guide—but do not prescribe—the teacher team’s improvement efforts.
- Trained peer facilitators—point people—to guide their colleagues over time.
- Stable settings dedicated to improving instruction and learning.
- Perseverance until there’s progress on key student performance indicators.
I summarize the study and the process the participating schools used to improve instruction here.
How can states and districts best support effective school-based teacher teams? Districts such as Montgomery County, MD, Richmond, VA, and Brookline, MA have done extensive work supporting PLCs through professional development and the deployment of skilled district personnel. Yet for many districts, where and how to start supporting schools around teacher collaboration is not entirely clear, especially in contexts in which resources are limited. This is the question the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education posed in an interesting project I worked on with the state.
The Department had already done a great deal of work with a number of urban districts developing a robust process of walk-throughs and a framework for supporting PLCs in Massachusetts. This framework is laid out in a document entitled, “Professional Learning Community Guidance Document: Instructional Team Guidelines and Responsibilities for Establishing and Maintaining Professional Learning Communities.” The Department chose at its next step to develop a self-assessment of the use of common planning time. This was the project I supported. The idea is that the data a common planning time assessment yields and the process of analyzing it will help a district develop a strategy for better supporting the use of common planning time by teacher teams.
We ended up developing a toolkit that includes a principal/school leader survey, a team member survey, an optional team member observation protocol, and a step-by-step guide for analyzing the data collected with these tools. I will post a link to the document in a month or so when the Department posts it on its website. The toolkit is customized to be consistent with the Massachusetts PLC framework for supporting PLCs, but districts in other states will find it useful nonetheless.
For the moment I want to focus on 6 questions that in my view (and here I’m speaking only for myself) provide the skeletal structure for the common planning time surveys and data analysis guide. There are of course many other questions on the surveys, but these were fundamental in the design of the surveys and the guide. In rough form: Is there a vision? Is there time to meet? Do teams meet? Do they work on teaching and learning? Are they supported? And are they improving teaching and learning? These questions help a district to determine where a school is in its development of effective teacher learning communities, and thus develop a differentiated plan to support schools or groups of schools. Here are the questions written out in a table. I invite comments and questions regarding using these questions as a starting point for district and school action planning.
| False | True | |||
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Consider the following two descriptions of how teachers experience their work on teacher teams. The first is from an elementary school teacher:
Speaking only for myself, sometimes, . . . [with all the things that come down to our school from above] it feels very overwhelming because I’m the kind of person who needs to focus on one thing and work it through and know that I understand what’s going on. And when I am bombarded, [or] it feels like I am bombarded—this is very personal—then I lose my focus.
The second is from a focus group in the same school five years later:
Teacher: [We] formulate an objective. Assess for that objective. [Plan a lesson together and then we all teach it]. Look at the result. Did we meet the objective? No . . . let’s go ahead and, you know, do it again. We all know this process.
Teacher: Very focused.
Teacher: We all know what we’re doing at this meeting. We all know what we’re doing at next week’s meeting. We have an idea of what we will be doing, you know, 2 months from now.
Interviewer: Is that schoolwide? Is not just something at one grade level only?
Teacher: Schoolwide. (Teacher focus group)
Both of these quotations are from a relatively new, methodologically rigorous study that provides additional evidence that organizing teachers in teams leads to improved student achievement when teams use structured processes to guide collaborative inquiry, analysis, and lesson design.
This study (Saunders, Goldenberg, and Gallimore, 2009–see below) is consistent with previous reseach that suggests that PLCs lead to improved student achievement when teams focus on improving teaching and learning (Supovitz, 2002; Vescio, 2009; and Elmore, 2004). Previous research, however, makes it difficult to determine whether strong teams lead to group success with students or group success with students leads to strong teams. This new study addresses this issue by comparing two sets of schools from the same district, a “treatment group” that implemented PLCs and a comparison group that implemented other school improvement approaches. All were low-performing schools with large low-income, primarily Hispanic populations.
The treatment schools, which I’ll call the PLC schools, implemented a two-phase process. In the first phase, principals created instructional leadership teams with representatives from different grade-levels, representatives who in turn facilitated weekly grade-level meetings. Principals went to monthly trainings on how to support their ILTs. Schools implemented Phase 1 for two years, at which point the study found virtually no impact–little implementation, no student gains. Given competing demands, principals found it difficult to provide adequate guidance to the members of the ILT and the teacher teams.
In Phase 2, the intervention became more intense. In addition to monthly meetings, advisors met with ILTs monthly, held institutes for principals and team facilitators, and sometimes met with grade-level teams. Participants received training on the use of a number of protocols (structured processes for conducting collaborative work), including a process for addressing learning challenges:
1. Identify and clarify specific and common student needs to work on together.
2. Formulate a clear objective for each common need and analyze related student work.
3. Identify and adopt a promising instructional focus to address each common need.
4. Plan and complete necessary preparation to try the instructional focus in the classroom.
5. Try the team’s instructional focus in the classroom.
6. Analyze student work to see if the objective is being met and evaluate the instruction.
7. Reassess: Continue and repeat cycle or move on to another area of need. (p. 1016)
An evaluation found that in the PLC schools teacher teams met more often, focused on academics more, and “spent more time discussing the relations between instruction and student outcomes and worked more on instructional improvements.” The teacher quotations I cited at the beginning of this post are from one of the PLC schools.
The Phase 2 implementation had a large impact on student achievement in the PLC schools: As measured by the Stanford 9 achievement test and the state academic performance index, the PLC schools significantly outperformed the comparison schools, moved from well below the district average to surpassing it, and improved at a rate faster than the state average growth rate.
In a companion study (Gallimore et al., 2009), the authors suggest that an important underlying factor in the success of the PLC schools was that teachers were able to stick with the structured inquiry process long enough to experience the cause and effect connection between the changes they were working on in their classroom practice and student outcomes.
For those interested in learning more about what the Common Priorities approach is all about, check out my recent article in Kappan magazine: “Coherent Instructional Improvement and PLCs: Is It Possible To Do Both?”
Aggregated results for each question on a math final
An important question for teacher teams is where to start–which activities should teachers pursue first. Schools using the Common Priorities approach as a framework to guide teacher collaboration have to decide where to enter the cycle. Where they enter is largely determined by what work they have already done and what their most pressing needs are. The math department at Lehman High School in the North Bronx, NY provides a good example of a school that already had a streamlined curriculum and common mid-terms and finals in place, and thus they began by making better use of the data they were collecting through their common assessments.
The graph above shows an item analysis that one of the math teachers at Lehman (thanks, Bryan) compiled. Lehman is a large NYC school and has a math department of approximately 30 teachers, and the work I’m describing happened over a year ago under the previous math department head/asst. principal. About 10 teachers were teaching this algebra course at the time. This graph shows how students did on each problem on the first part of a two-part final exam–aggregated across all the sections of the course.
The teachers of this course gathered soon after the final was graded and analyzed these results. They could easily see which problems students struggled on the most. Further, for each question, the teachers had data that showed the percentage of students in each section that got the answer correct for that question. As a result, they could see whose students did well on each question.
This set-up led to what everyone agreed was a strikingly productive conversation. For each question that students struggled with, the teachers analyzed why students had difficulty and then asked those of their colleagues whose students had done well on that particular question which strategies they used. In some cases it was simply a matter of spending more time on that kind of problem, which probably meant that teacher spent less time on another type of problem. Yet in many cases teachers shared strategies for teaching specific concepts or skills that they thought had worked well, which led to a substantial list of recommended strategies for teachers to implement the next semester.
This and other data analysis then informed other collaborative work, including the design of differentiated lessons, streamlining of other courses, and a more deliberative process for developing common assessments.
Teachers and coaches at PS 33X
Much of the instructional work of PLCs focuses on analysis, planning, and exchange regarding best practices. The challenge for team members is to take these discussions–at least sometimes–to the nitty gritty of the many specific steps that make up a lesson. Further, collaboration on improving the quality of teaching and learning must at some point extend to how teachers phrase instructions and questions and conduct the subtle interactions with students that are part and parcel of good teaching and learning. Doing so requires that team members observe each other teach. P.S. 33X, a large school with a low-income, largely immigrant population in the North Bronx, NY, has recently implemented a lesson planning–peer observation process that is helping teachers push their collaborative work in English Language Arts to the details of thinking through and teaching lessons.
The staff at P.S. 33X had already determined its essential standards, embedded them in curriculum calendars, and developed a school-wide system of common assessments for its ELA curriculum. Once a month teachers use their weekly common planning time to examine one-page summaries that show the results of common assessments by grade-level and class. They use their other weekly grade-level meetings to examine student work and plan the upcoming month’s ELA unit in advance. Teachers have worked in small groups to prepare lessons, and these group met with other groups in their grade to give each other feedback on lesson plans.
These conversations, while useful, had thus far stayed at the relatively general level of the basic structure of the lessons: the texts to be read, the main activities of the lesson, and the materials teachers would use. Since P.S. 33 is a large NYC school with relatively large grade-level teams, facilitators were spread somewhat thinly, and conversations felt more “public” due to the size of the teams. The question was how to deepen this work.
Mr. K., a second grade teacher who is actually called “Mr. K.” since he has a hard-to-pronounce last name, was one of the teachers who suggested that teachers start observing each other as a next step for the school, an idea the principal had been excited about as well. Mr. K ended up being one of the first teachers to participate in the lesson planning–peer observation process that unfolded.
There are different ways to structure peer observations. Teachers (and administrators) can go on “instructional rounds” to observe the variety of teaching that takes place in a school. Teachers can observe master classes or lab classes and de-brief with the presenting teacher afterwards. In the past we have often had partners work together over an extended period of time to incorporate new strategies (e.g., technology integration) into a series of lessons. Following a protocol, these partners would then observe each other teaching a lesson and then meet to de-brief and examine student work. In the case of P.S. 33 we needed to come up with a variation of these approaches that would incorporate a lesson planning component and reinforce the ongoing collaborative work of the grade-level teams, but that could be carried out efficiently . We needed to demonstrate the value of detailed lesson planning and go after more collaborative “low-hanging fruit” before engaging in longer-term extended lesson planning.
We came up with a simple two-day process. Perhaps others have used a similar approach to peer observation? On the first day I met with groups of three teachers for two periods each. (Other staff covered these teachers classes.) Each group discussed goals and norms for the peer observations and planned a lesson that one of the teachers would teach the next day. The next day the groups would meet at the host teacher’s room; the host teacher would teach the lesson during the first of the two periods, and then we would debrief the lesson during the second of the two periods. The schedule we used is below. In a later post I will discuss how the process went the first time we implemented it.
Sample Lesson Planning--Peer Observation Schedule
