Leading a High Reliability School. Richard DuFour
principle applies to schools. Maintaining a safe and orderly environment is important, but it is not nearly enough. Every school leader must ensure a safe and orderly environment for both student and adult learning. But if school leaders seek to create excellent schools, they must move beyond running a tight ship.
Given the significance of a safe and orderly environment, I find it striking how frequently staff members lack knowledge of specific indicators that could provide insight into how to enhance this important aspect of their school. I ask faculty:
• “How many of you know the number of discipline referrals that were written in your school last year?”
• “How many of you know the number-one cause of discipline referrals in your school?”
• “How many of you know the number of student suspensions that occurred in your school last year?”
• “Is there a time of day, day of the week, or place in the school that discipline problems are most likely to arise?”
• “Do students report feeling safe in your school?”
• “Do students report either being bullied or witnessing bullying in your school?”
In most instances, faculty members cannot answer these questions. If they don’t have a clue about their current reality, they find it difficult to improve on that reality in any coordinated way. Therefore, school leaders should keep information about the school’s environment at the forefront and frequently engage the staff in analyzing the information and identifying potential areas of need and strategies for improvement. One strategy is embracing the three big ideas driving the PLC process.
Assumptions Driving the PLC Process
Three big ideas drive the PLC process (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016). The extent to which educators consider and embrace these ideas has a significant impact on that process’s outcomes in a district or school. These three big ideas include (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture, and (3) a results orientation.
A Focus on Learning
The first and biggest of the big ideas states that a school’s fundamental purpose is to ensure all students acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that will enable them to continue learning beyond the K–12 system. This represents a radical departure from the traditional premise that school’s purpose is merely to give students the opportunity to learn. The mantra of “The teacher’s job is to teach, and the student’s job is to learn” supports this traditional premise. The relevant question for this premise asks, Was the content taught, or was the curriculum covered? If, however, a school’s fundamental purpose is to ensure that teachers do not merely teach students but expect them to learn, the relevant question becomes, Did the student learn? Did the student acquire the intended knowledge, skills, and dispositions of this course, unit, or lesson?
In our work with schools in implementing the PLC process, my colleagues and I have found that we can shift thinking on the purpose of school by addressing the four pillars that serve as the foundation of the PLC process: (1) mission, (2) vision, (3) collective commitments, and (4) goals (DuFour et al., 2016).
1. Mission: Why does the school exist? What is the fundamental purpose of our school? What have we come together to accomplish?
2. Vision: What must we become as a school in order to better fulfill our fundamental purpose? Can we describe the school we hope to become in the next five years? What policies, practices, procedures, and culture align best with a mission of learning for all?
3. Collective commitments: How must we behave? What commitments must we make and honor in order to become the school in our vision so we can better fulfill our fundamental purpose? Do our commitments describe in specific terms the behaviors we should demonstrate today to help move our school forward?
4. Goals: Which steps will we take and when? What targets and timelines will we establish to mark our progress in becoming the school we have described in our vision? How will we know if our collective efforts are making a difference?
Schools often prefer to avoid these foundational questions and get right to the nuts and bolts of the PLC process. Doing so is a mistake. A school will struggle in its PLC implementation efforts if a faculty persists in believing that its job is to teach rather than to help all students learn, and if staff members have no idea where the school wants to go in its improvement efforts. It will struggle if educators refuse to articulate the commitments they hope will characterize their school and if they have no benchmarks to monitor progress. Therefore, we highly recommend that leaders engage the staff in considering the questions posed in the PLC foundation.
Marcus Buckingham (2005), a global researcher and thought leader, contends that, above all else, leaders of any effective organization must know the importance of clarity. Having clarity means communicating consistently in words and actions the organization’s purpose, the future the organization will attempt to create, the specific actions members can immediately take to achieve its goals, and the progress indicators it will track. Engaging the staff in considering the four pillars of the PLC foundation is the key to establishing that clarity.
However, leaders must do more than simply invite people to share opinions. A fundamental prerequisite in decision making in a PLC is building shared knowledge about the most promising practices. In other words, staff members must learn together about the research base and evidence that can help them intelligently answer the PLC foundation questions. Uninformed people make uninformed decisions. Therefore, in building consensus in a PLC, leaders must take responsibility for providing staff with the information they need to make good decisions at all points in the process.
A Collaborative Culture
The second big idea driving the PLC process is that for a school to help all students learn, it must build a collaborative culture in which members take collective responsibility for all students. The traditional mantra of “These are my students” gives way to “These are our students, and we share the responsibility to ensure their learning.” Here again, the issue of equity comes to the fore. What to teach, content sequencing, appropriate pacing, assessment, intervention, extension, and instructional strategies have traditionally come under the individual classroom teacher’s purview, which, as previously mentioned, makes equity virtually impossible.
The PLC process calls on collaborative team members to make these decisions collectively rather than in isolation. The entire team decides what students must know and be able to do for the entire course and for each unit within the course. It establishes the content’s sequencing and the appropriate pacing for each unit. The team develops common formative assessments for each unit and agrees on the criteria it will use in judging the quality of student work. The team identifies students who need intervention or extension, and the school creates the systems to ensure students receive this additional support in a timely manner. It analyzes transparent evidence of student learning in order to inform and improve its practice. None of this will occur without effective leadership that ensures it puts structures and supports in place to foster effective collaboration. We will address the elements of that leadership later in this introduction.
A Results Orientation
The third big idea that drives the PLC process states that educators must assess their effectiveness on the basis of results rather than intentions. Project-based goals such as “We will integrate technology into our language arts program” and “We will develop six new common assessments” give way to SMART goals that ask educators to focus on how their projects and efforts will impact student achievement. The SMART goal acronym helps educators focus on evidence of student learning (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). A SMART goal is:
• Strategic—The goal aligns with a school or district goal. A team that achieves its SMART goal contributes to the school or district goal.
• Measurable—The goal provides a basis of comparison