The School Leader's Guide to Professional Learning Communities at Work TM. Richard DuFour

       Creating the Structures for Collaboration

      Now that you and your guiding coalition have worked with the staff to articulate the shared foundation of a PLC at Work^™, how do you bring those words to life? How do you change the traditional assumptions, habits, expectations, and beliefs that constitute the very culture of the school? An important step in transforming school culture is replacing traditional structures with those more aligned to the school you are trying to create, and then supporting the staff members as they begin to operate within those new structures. This chapter will focus on some of the structural issues principals must address to help move a staff from working in isolation or working in groups to working as members of high-performing collaborative teams. Meeting this challenge will require principals to do the following:

      1. Organize people into meaningful teams focused on learning.

      2. Provide teams with time to collaborate.

      3. Ensure campus layout supports ongoing collaboration and shared responsibility for student learning.

      When done well, these structural changes sow the seeds that allow a new culture to take root, grow, and flourish.

Organize People Into Meaningful Teams Focused on Learning

      If the collaborative team is the fundamental building block of the PLC—the engine that drives the cycle of continuous improvement—then organizing staff into meaningful teams is a critical step on the PLC journey. Note that the PLC process requires teams, not merely groups. As we clarified in the introduction, a team is a group of people working interdependently to achieve a common goal for which each member is mutually accountable. As DuFour and Marzano (2011) stress, “In the absence of interdependence, one or more common goals, and mutual accountability, a group cannot be a team” (p. 70).

      See “Why Should We Use Teams as Our Basic Structure?” for a sampling of the research on team structure. Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks to download this reproducible.

      Remember that the work of collaborative teams in a PLC must revolve around the four critical questions:

      1. What is it we want our students to learn?

      2. How will we know if they are learning?

      3. How will we respond when individual students do not learn?

      4. How will we enrich and extend the learning for students who are proficient?

      An effective team structure will enable each member to contribute to the collective inquiry into these questions and to the shared goal of improving student achievement. Therefore, the question principals must consider when establishing teams is, Do the people on each team have a shared responsibility for investigating and responding to the four critical questions in ways that enhance their students’ learning?

      If the answer is yes, the principal has created a structure to support an effective collaborative team. If the answer is no, the members are almost certain to function as a group rather than a team. The following are examples of meaningful team structures.

      • Grade-level teams: All of the teachers who teach the same subjects in the same grade level are on the same team. For example, the five kindergarten teachers make up the Kindergarten Team.

      • Same-course teams: All of the teachers who teach the same course are on the same team. For example, the three seventh-grade math teachers become the Seventh-Grade Math Team.

      • Vertical teams: Teachers are linked with those who teach the same content above or below their grade level or course. For example, in a small K–5 elementary school with only one teacher per grade level, the school could be structured into three vertical teams: K–1, 2–3, and 4–5. In a middle school, the vertical structure might be math teachers from grades 6, 7, and 8 on a math team. The vertical structure is often used in schools where students are grouped into multigrade or combination classrooms. For example, the grade 2/3 teacher collaborates with the other second- and third-grade teachers on the grades 2 and 3 vertical team.

      • Electronic teams: Although vertical structures may provide a collaborative team for the singletons within a school (the sole teacher of a grade level or course), they do not provide grade-level or same-course collaboration. Electronic teams can address that void. Educators seeking teammates beyond their school campuses can turn to their district office, regional service center, or professional organizations to find job-alike partners. Members of electronic teams use the available technology to support their collaborative process, such as: