Leading a High Reliability School. Richard DuFour
because a teacher team, rather than an isolated teacher, establishes questions of assessment types, rigor, and criteria for success. It is important to emphasize, however, that these assessments also serve the purpose of excellence. When teachers have clarity on what they want their students to accomplish and they know how they will ask students to demonstrate their proficiency, they more effectively help students learn.
Furthermore, when teachers use the information from these common formative assessments to examine the impact of their individual and collective practice, they experience a powerful catalyst for instructional improvement. In a PLC, educators use a protocol for examining evidence of student learning. First, team members identify struggling students who need additional time and support for learning. Second, they identify students who demonstrate high proficiency and will benefit from an extended learning opportunity. Providing this intervention and extension is part of a schoolwide plan to better meet the needs of individual students.
The team then turns its attention to the performance of students taught by specific teachers. If a teacher’s students have performed particularly well, the team asks the teacher to share strategies, ideas, and materials that contributed to that success. If a teacher’s students have struggled, the team offers advice, assistance, and materials to help the teacher improve his or her instruction. The team uses evidence of student learning to promote its members’ learning.
As Kerry Patterson and his colleagues find in their study of what influences people to change, “Nothing changes the mind like the hard cold world hitting it in the face with actual real-life data” (Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, & Switzler, 2008, p. 51). Richard Elmore (2006) comes to a similar conclusion, writing, “Teachers have to feel that there is some compelling reason for them to practice differently, with the best direct evidence being that students learn better” (p. 38).
When a collaborative teacher team analyzes the transparent results of a common formative assessment, evidence of student learning speaks for itself. A teacher who genuinely believes his or her students lack the ability to produce quality work can be persuaded to re-examine that assumption when students taught by other team members consistently demonstrate quality. As Elmore (2010) writes, “Adult beliefs about what children can learn are changed by watching students do things that the adults didn’t believe that they—the students—could do” (p. 8). Concrete evidence of irrefutably better results acts as a powerful persuader.
Common formative assessments can also bring about change in instructional practice through the power of positive peer pressure. I have never known a teacher who feels indifferent to how peers perceive him or her when it comes to instructional competence. A teacher whose students consistently cannot demonstrate proficiency on common formative assessments will either look for ways to improve instruction or look for a school where a lack of transparency about student learning allows him or her to hide. Unfortunately, many such schools exist.
When a team administers a common formative assessment, another possible outcome may occur. What if no one on the team has the ability to help students demonstrate the intended knowledge or skill? If the team agrees that the skill or concept is indeed essential to student success, and it agrees that its common formative assessment reliably ascertains whether students have become proficient, it becomes incumbent on the team to look to its professional development for teaching the skill or concept more effectively. The team can look to other educators in the school or district, specialists from the central office, coaches, networks of educators, or workshops on the topic. In other words, student learning needs drive professional development.
How Will We Respond When Students Don’t Learn?
In even the greatest schools, some students will likely not meet an instructional unit’s intended outcomes by the time the unit ends, despite teachers’ best efforts and intentions. In a traditional school, in which a single isolated classroom teacher takes sole responsibility for each student’s learning, that teacher faces a quandary. On one hand, the curriculum calls for moving forward with new important content, and the teacher hopes to ensure his or her students have access to that content (or an opportunity to learn). Most students in the class are ready to proceed. On the other hand, some students cannot demonstrate proficiency in essential prerequisite skills for the next unit. The school has charged the teacher with leaving no student behind, so what does the teacher do? Does the teacher provide most students with busywork for a few days so he or she can attend to those who are struggling? Or should the teacher move on and hope that students lacking prerequisite skills somehow pick them up on their own? Imagine this teacher has a daily class load of more than 150 high school students. Given this scenario, the teacher’s job is not difficult—it is impossible.
In a traditional school, the individual classroom teacher must resolve this problem. The disparity with which teachers address the question, What happens when students don’t learn? provides one of the best examples of the traditional school model’s inherent inequity. Some teachers allow students to retake assessments; others don’t. Some teachers provide feedback on student papers or projects before assigning grades; others simply grade the first attempt. Some teachers keep parents informed of students’ progress; others won’t. Some teachers come early and stay late to assist struggling students; others won’t or can’t. Some teachers accept late work without penalty; others accept the work but deduct points for tardiness. Still others won’t accept late work and assign a zero. Some teachers average scores to determine a final grade; others consider early efforts formative. Perhaps the best evidence of the variety in what teachers do when students struggle is that teachers often appeal for their own children to get assigned to certain teachers while avoiding others.
Educators in a PLC recognize the inherent inequity in the traditional system and work collectively to establish a systematic process for providing students with additional time and support for learning, regardless of students’ assigned teachers. The master schedule’s purposeful design provides time during the regular school day when students receive this support without missing new direct instruction. The system of interventions relies on frequent, timely monitoring of each student’s learning and provides additional time for learning as soon as a student struggles. Students continue to receive this support until they demonstrate proficiency.
Let’s apply this premise to the dilemma of the teacher who teaches a unit and then discovers that most students have achieved the intended standard, but a few have not. In a PLC, the teacher would teach the next curricular unit, ensuring that struggling students receive additional time and targeted support. Because the collaborative team has agreed on the unit’s essential or priority standard, pacing, and common assessment, the teachers providing intervention know what help students need. The team can say, “These students need help with subtracting two-digit integers,” as opposed to, “These students are not doing well in mathematics.” When the teachers working with these students have confidence in the students’ ability to demonstrate proficiency on the intended skill, they give the students a similar iteration (form B) of the original assessment, and their new scores replace their previous struggling scores.
Traditional schools have operated under the assumption that they have fixed time and support for student learning. Every student will receive sixty minutes of language arts instruction per day for 176 school days. Every student will receive essentially the same amount of the teacher’s attention and support. But if time and support for learning remain constants, that will always make learning the variable. Some students will learn given that amount of time and support, and others won’t.
In a PLC, because of the collective commitment to high levels of learning for every student, time and support are variables, and learning is the constant. Perhaps most students will master a skill in three weeks of sixty minutes of instruction a day. Others may need four weeks of ninety minutes a day to achieve mastery. Most mission statements do not say, “Our mission is to help all students learn fast and the first time we teach a skill”; they simply say, “Our mission is to help all students learn.” In order to stay true to that mission, faculty members must create a system that ensures students receive additional time and support when needed.
Some schools attempt a system of interventions that has teachers stop new direct instruction and create different groups in the classroom to meet different