Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary]. Gayle Gregory
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to program fidelity, because there is no such thing as a universally effective teaching strategy, methodology, or textbook series (DuFour & Mattos, 2013). In fact, any approach that assumes such universality fails to provide teachers with the professional autonomy inherent in the art of teaching. Furthermore, requiring teachers to implement a lockstep core instructional program often restricts their flexibility, making it extremely difficult to differentiate curriculum, instruction, and assessments to meet individual student needs in the classroom.
Yet, allowing the instructional pendulum to swing completely the opposite direction, by giving teachers complete autonomy over their instructional decisions, is an equally ineffective approach to improve core instruction. As Hattie (2009) notes, “Not all teachers are effective, not all teachers are experts, and not all teachers have powerful effects on students” (p. 34). There are instructional practices that are proven to be highly effective and many that are not. Any school dedicated to ensuring that all students learn at high levels cannot assume that each faculty member has the knowledge, skill, or inclination to consistently use these proven practices in his or her classroom.
Based on these facts, we know that effective instruction requires an expectation that all teachers use practices proven to have the greatest impact on student learning, while simultaneously infusing their own style and offering differentiated instruction for individual student needs. The key to achieving this outcome lies in identifying and leveraging the right practices—the best practices for the kind of instruction that all students must receive, regardless of what teachers they are assigned to for core instruction. To this end, the research is abundantly clear: good teaching requires a collaborative effort. Teachers must work in collaborative teams and take collective responsibility for their students’ learning. Lastly, teachers must work collaboratively with their students to engage everyone in the learning process.
Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Teams
Organizations get better results when people work collaboratively. This universal truth certainly applies to schools and the collaborative approach to good teaching. In his study of factors that most impact student learning, Hattie’s (2009) first recommendation for increasing student achievement is for teachers to work collaboratively instead of in isolation. Hattie’s recommendation recognizes—and experience and common sense confirm—that there is no way an individual teacher has all the time, all the skills, and all the knowledge necessary to meet every student’s individual needs. The only way a school staff can achieve the mission of enabling the highest level of learning for all students is by leveraging their combined skills (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010).
If improved student learning requires a collective effort, then collaborative teacher teams are the engines that drive effective core instruction. By team, we do not mean loosely connected groups that assemble for traditional grade-level, department, faculty, or parent-conference meetings. Instead, to be effective, educators in teaching teams must work collaboratively to achieve the common goal of shared essential student learning outcomes. Ronald Gallimore and his colleagues find that “to be successful, teams need to set and share goals to work on that are immediately applicable to their classrooms. Without such goals, teams will drift toward superficial discussions and truncated efforts” (Gallimore, Ermeling, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2009, p. 548). Subsequently, collaborative teams share essential student learning outcomes. Their structure could include grade-level, subject- or course-specific, vertical, or interdisciplinary teams. These common learning goals are what unite and focus the work of each teacher team.
While forming the right teacher teams is the first step in improving student achievement, just having teachers meet together does not create the collaborative effort necessary for improved teaching and learning. Teacher teams must focus their collective efforts on the instructional practices proven to best increase student achievement. This right work can be captured in the four critical questions of the PLC at Work process (DuFour et al., 2010).
1. What do we want our students to learn?
2. How will we know if our students are learning?
3. How will we respond when students don’t learn?
4. How will we respond when they do?
Let’s examine these critical questions and the role their answers play in efforts to promote the practices of good teaching.
What Do We Want Our Students to Learn?
Effective teaching begins with teacher teams collectively determining just what they want their students to learn. There is, perhaps, no greater obstacle to effective teaching than the overwhelmingly and inappropriately large number of standards that dictate what curriculum content students are to master in school. The elements of these mandatory curricula are so numerous, in fact, that teachers cannot even adequately cover them, let alone effectively teach them (Buffum et al., 2012).
The research supporting the need for teacher teams to collectively prioritize, analyze, and unpack the curriculum is conclusive. In their work on RTI, Buffum et al. (2012) refer to this process of analysis and prioritization as concentrated instruction: “a systematic process of identifying essential knowledge and skills that all students must master to learn at high levels, and determining the specific learning needs for each child to get there” (p. 10). Marzano (2003) describes this same process of instruction as offering a guaranteed, viable curriculum—one in which every student has access to the same essential learning targets and every student will receive instruction on those targets in a way that will enable him or her to master them within the allotted time.
Buffum et al. (2012) and Marzano (2003) aren’t alone in addressing the need for instructional processes that focus on an agreed-on set of essential learning standards. Douglas Reeves (2002) also describes the critical importance of teacher teams identifying essential learning outcomes in Making Standards Work, Larry Ainsworth (2003a, 2003b) details these efforts in Power Standards and “Unwrapping” the Standards, and Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) powerfully and comprehensively outline this essential work in Understanding by Design. Proponents don’t claim that these essential standards represent everything the curriculum will cover in the year. Instead, the standards merely identify the most essential learning outcomes that all students must master for a higher likelihood of success in the next unit, course, or grade level. (In chapter 4, page 81, we examine more deeply the process of setting and applying these standards.) Any school dedicated to creating an effective core instructional program and a targeted system of interventions must have absolute clarity on exactly what all students must learn in each subject, course, and grade level.
Beyond just identifying essential standards, teacher teams must also understand what it looks and sounds like when students demonstrate mastery of each standard and collaboratively sequence these standards to represent a guaranteed and viable curriculum (Marzano, 2003). Finally, teachers must explicitly, clearly, and consistently model mastery. When teacher teams determine a limited number of rigorous essential learning outcomes that all students must master, and agree to how students will demonstrate mastery of each, the impact rate is 0.56—a rate much higher than the baseline of 0.40 for highly effective teaching (Hattie, 2009).
How Will We Know If Our Students Are Learning?
While the strategies for teaching a specific learning target might vary from teacher to teacher, each teacher team must commit to collectively assessing student learning at predetermined times during core instruction. This method of gauging student mastery of essential outcomes, convergent assessment, is “an ongoing process of collectively analyzing targeted evidence to determine the specific learning needs of each child and the effectiveness of the instruction the child receives in meeting these needs” (Buffum et al., 2012, p. 10).
Convergent assessment leverages two extremely powerful instructional practices: common assessments and formative assessments. Common assessments are any assessment two or more instructors give with the intention of collaboratively examining the results to assess shared learning, to guide instructional planning for individual students, and to shape instructional