Seeing the forest and the trees: Professional learning communities allow a transformational culture to take root
By:
Kristi Garrett
As a long-time football coach, George Tapanes was used to looking at game stats. His Fortuna High School Huskies were beginning to see more “points for” than “points against” by the time he retired from coaching to become the school’s principal.
But as he reviewed the averages at the end of his first “season” as lead educator in Humboldt County’s Fortuna Union High School District, “Coach Tap” could see he needed a whole new game plan. Of the 240 freshmen in the class of 2009, only 150 had graduated on time. Some lingered in continuation schools or other alternative programs, but it looked like most of the missing 90 students had dropped out.
“I just looked at that number and thought, ‘that’s too high,’ ” he says.
His search for a cause revealed that 100 of those freshmen had one or more failing grades on their very first progress reports.
“Almost half had multiple Fs,” Tapanes recalls. “They’re entering the culture of our school and we’re losing them. They’re starting to experience failure right at the get-go.”
That’s when Tapanes says he began to realize the potential of a new approach to teaching he’d been hearing about from one of the math teachers, Rob Marshall. Frustrated at the lack of success in his classroom, Marshall had been investigating professional learning communities as part of his master’s program. He’d discovered books and seminars by Illinois school principal Richard DuFour and his wife, Rebecca, which outlined a process for creating a schoolwide culture that ensures no student is overlooked and allowed to fail. Their key text, “Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don’t Learn,” suggested ways educators at a school could work together to identify students who are having trouble and take steps to intervene early.
Applying what they learned from the DuFours’ work, Tapanes, Marshall and a core group of teacher leaders devised a strategy to give struggling freshmen targeted help during their lunch period, and what was to become the Fortuna Lunchtime Intervention, or FLI, was born. Today, all freshmen and sophomores have a study hall at the beginning of their lunch period, and students with Fs meet with instructors and tutors to receive support for specific academic needs.
On the carrot end of the stick, students who score basic or better on their state tests get out of the study period early to enjoy a longer lunch. The result, says Tapanes, is that students capable of doing the work are motivated to work harder so they can retain their lunch break. FLI teachers can then focus more intensive help on the students who remain. Already, the number of students with Fs is down, Tapanes says.
Culture shift
Of course, teachers have long collaborated with colleagues and participated in continuing education, but becoming a professional learning community is an entirely new experience.
“A professional learning community is perhaps best defined as a fundamental shift in a school’s culture,” says Terry Wilhelm, director of educational leadership services at the Riverside County Office of Education, which offers a two-year program of assistance for schools moving toward becoming a PLC.
A PLC is distinguished by three key elements, Wilhelm says: a focus on learning, professional collaboration and a focus on results.
In a PLC, a team of educators works together to read and discuss research and strategies they would like to try, then they evaluate the results. The process of analysis, reflection and action is continual. Less successful teachers receive help and support from more successful members of the team. Ultimately, ensuring that no student falls through the cracks is the entire team’s responsibility.
“A PLC is not just teachers meeting together in collaborative teams,” says Wilhelm. “In a PLC, the members of each team regard all the kids as ‘our kids.’
“It doesn’t depend on a school having a Jaime Escalante on staff,” she continues, referring to the dynamic California math teacher immortalized in the film “Stand and Deliver.” “The common curriculum, effective instructional strategies and key assessments students are given are consistent from teacher to teacher.”
Mutual support
Reggie Wagner, a middle school teacher in the San Joaquin Valley’s Sanger Unified School District, virtually in the shade of the Southern Sierra’s stands of towering sequoia trees, likens the supportive culture of collaboration in a professional learning community to—appropriately enough—a grove of giant sequoias.
To someone standing at the foot of one of the massive organisms, peering hundreds of feet upward toward its top, the fragility of the sequoia’s shallow root structure may be hard to imagine. Growing in isolation, the giants are susceptible to winds and erosion that could easily topple them. But when growing close to other sequoias in a grove, their roots intermingle, providing the entire group of trees with a strong, supportive foundation that helps them all endure the ravages of nature.
Similarly, a lone teacher, however capable, may languish in isolation. The encouragement, expertise and support of colleagues in the learning community create a team even more resilient than the strengths of its individual experts.
“What scares teachers most in the beginning is the idea that they’re going to lose their academic freedom, their autonomy,” says Katherine Fundukian-Thorossian, assistant superintendent for educational services in the Glendale Unified School District, where other PLCs have taken root. “But once they get into their teams and start working together, the benefits are huge. It reduces that sense of isolation that all teachers have, and increases their mutual support of each other, their collegiality. … They share the workload and they share their responsibility for student success.”
Complementary reform
Becoming a professional learning community is unlike many reform efforts a school may undergo. Many approaches, such as those associated with federal Program Improvement, state School Assistance and Intervention Teams and accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, involve sending in a consulting team to assess needs, help create a plan, and possibly help the school get started before pulling out after a few months or years.
“A PLC dovetails with any of those very well,” says Wilhelm. “But I think the main difference is that a professional learning community isn’t a program like that. You can’t really categorize a PLC as a sequence of steps or a strategy. … It’s really a shift in the culture.
“Of all the reforms I’ve been part of, this is the one that I think is the most sustaining, because the ownership on the part of a staff is so total,” she continues. “When the desire to ensure success for every student comes from the grassroots level, the presence or absence of a team of outsiders is not the deciding factor in the success of the initiative. All of the work is done by the school.”
Professional learning communities thus complement and help sustain other intervention efforts by creating a fundamental change in educators’ approach to teaching and learning. Some schools or districts develop their own framework by discussing selected readings and visiting other schools with established learning communities. Others may seek help in their journey toward becoming a PLC from consultants such as a county office of education or other consulting organization. But the journey is theirs.
“Those shared components of looking at student achievement, collaborative practices, reflective practices and leadership are going to be pervasive through any kind of school improvement effort,” says Fundukian-Thorossian. “Any kind of framework will include reading the research, discussing individual student achievement, and looking at reteaching efforts and developing support systems. These are all parts of the whole, and selecting one [framework] over the other really is contingent upon … what process will work best for your district.”
A new focus for professional development
In its search for a reform framework that would create sustainable change, Glendale Unified set out to discover the root causes of declining student achievement.
“I wanted professional development that related back to what we were doing in our classrooms,” says Mary Boger, president of the Glendale Unified School District board of education (and vice president of the California Schools Boards Association). “I don’t know about other boards, but in the past, too often I’ve seen us bring in some really wonderful person who was really inspirational and revved everybody up. Then they walked out the door and … it was over.”
The problem with one-time workshops, Boger says, is that, however motivational they might be, the new skills discussed there rarely get incorporated into classroom practice. “I think professional development that … doesn’t tie directly into the district’s strategic goals is not the wisest use of one’s money,” Boger says.
Boger says the board asked the superintendent, Michael Escalante, to identify professional development focused on improving student achievement. His research led him to Focus on Results, one consulting company’s methodology for teaching a school’s instructional leadership team to identify and implement a specific focus for schoolwide improvement. While outside consultants visit the school to train the team, the goal is to empower the instructional leaders with the skills to perpetuate a continual process of identifying needs, developing response strategies and evaluating results.
“Prior to this framework being put into place, professional development throughout the district was not necessarily coherent, comprehensive or far-reaching,” says assistant superintendent Fundukian-Thorossian. “This is a much more thoughtful, methodical process. It’s actually a lot more reflective.”
Some Glendale schools chose reading as their instructional focus, some chose writing, and one high school chose critical thinking. “Each school is going to be different,” Fundukian-Thorossian says. In Glendale, instructional leaders come together on a monthly basis to read the research and develop plans to drive continual improvement.
Cost-effective strategy
Of course, school board members will be interested in what it takes to support a professional learning community environment. Collaboration often involves schedule changes and release time for teachers to meet together, and that costs money.
Boger says Glendale uses general fund, Title I and categorical dollars to support its Focus on Results initiatives. “We also wrote grants like crazy,” she adds.
“The real investment was allowing our instructional leadership teams to be out of their classrooms, doing their job as a leadership team. And for that you have to be willing to find—beg, borrow or steal—the money to cover that expense. But the results and the actual professional development that takes place are well worth it.”
Because Focus on Results trained Glendale’s teacher-leaders and principals to maintain the momentum on their own, Fundukian-Thorossian says the educational services department at the district office has shrunk from a staff of 25 to eight: “It’s actually been cost-effective, because we would have been spending money for professional development anyway.”
The district’s implementation of Focus on Results won a Golden Bell Award from CSBA in 2009.
“We’ve found in the long run we’re not spending a great deal more on the professional development costs than we did before,” Boger says, “because now we’re spending it in-house rather than getting outside people to come in. It’s way more effective. It’s totally self-sustaining now.”
At Fortuna High School, Title I funds and a grant from a local educational foundation help keep the PLC initiatives in the black. A local businessperson learned about the freshman outreach component and volunteered to pay for the students’ books and supplies.
“Those are the kinds of connections we need to start building more of at Fortuna High, where our business community can … actually be partners with us in helping the kids,” says Tapanes, the Fortuna principal who brought the PLC concept to his district.
Just the latest reform?
Despite their record of success, PLCs often encounter resistance from teachers who may view them with a cynical eye.
“We’ve had a million things come and go, so I can really understand when a teacher says this is just another pendulum swing,” says Riverside COE’s Wilhelm.
Back in Glendale, Fundukian-Thorossian can also relate.
“I can remember saying to myself as a teacher, ‘I can ride this out,’ whatever the new practice was. But because this was developed by teachers on campuses, it’s not artificially imposed,” she says. “It just makes sense as a professional for me to work with others on my campus in my field to see how we can improve student achievement in this area.”
After Fortuna High School’s learning community launched its lunchtime study hall, math teacher Marshall says other faculty members’ resistance faded away as they began to see the benefits: “Once we implemented it, even some of the dissenters on staff were saying, ‘You know what? I’m watching kids engage. I’m watching kids do homework.’ ”
Strong leadership
Because their influence is critical to the success of the school’s reform efforts, the members of a learning community need to be strong, persuasive leaders who can elicit cooperation from staff.
In Glendale, Fundukian-Thorossian says the instructional leadership teams were selected by the school principals.
“Sometimes they’re the department chairs, sometimes they’re simply key leaders on the campus who are seen as change agents or respected for their abilities and what they bring to the table,” explains the assistant superintendent.
“It takes a strong principal who has a vision of what this could look like and what it will mean, and it doesn’t have to happen overnight,” says Riverside’s Wilhelm.
While patience is valuable, key leaders can’t just wait for everyone to get onboard.
“There has to be a tipping point when you’re ready to do it, so strong site leadership is a really important factor,” Wilhelm says.
Still, those who’ve tried it say that becoming a professional learning community isn’t something that can be imposed on teachers from above.
“It’s important that for any new ideas that come to Fortuna High School, the teachers have an opportunity to take it and own it,” Fortuna principal Tapanes says. He has proposed a new mentor program for next year, but he realizes that some teachers may not be ready to tackle yet another intervention.
“If I don’t have a clear consensus that the teachers really want to do this, I’m going to stop and not do it right away,” he says. “I need to make sure the staff buys into this if it’s going to work.”
Tapanes found that the key was to personalize the professional learning community as a Fortuna Learning Community.
“It’s not just the wording,” he says. “What was implied … was the need to make sure the teachers took ownership of the whole reform package, that it became theirs. It wasn’t something top-down, the latest new reform thing that was being shoved down.
“This is really something where you create your own unique community of educators who are trying to find ways within their school culture to reach students.”
How boards show support
While most of a PLC’s work is accomplished by the effort of the team members themselves, members of the governing board can do much to support their success—approving schedule adjustments and contractual changes, for example, or allocating resources the professional learning community needs. The more board members know about PLCs, how they work and what they need to be successful, the better.
In Glendale, board members participated in the training received from Focus on Results consultants.
“It’s such a gift to have board members who are that committed that they too are learning alongside the rest of us,” Fundukian-Thorossian says.
Boger, the board president, is one of the framework’s biggest proponents. What she likes best about it, she says, is the way Focus on Results engages the district’s best teachers.
“We have wonderful administrators who are great teachers,” she says, “but the teachers who are wedded to their classrooms don’t become administrators. Therefore, we lose the opportunity of their being the leaders for the instructional focus for their schools. Now we have our best teachers leading our instructional leadership teams.”
Having reform efforts driven by experienced, respected local teachers is transformational, Boger says.
“It’s a whole different atmosphere when you, as a teacher, walk into a room and … other teachers are saying to you, ‘Gee, all of our fifth-grade kids did really well on fractions except your kids. Maybe we could help you with that. Let me show you what I do to teach fractions,’ ” she says. “No matter how great the administrator is, no matter what their people skills, it’s a different atmosphere when you have your very best teachers leading your instructional teams.”
Tapanes says he appreciates having his board’s support, even when a particular initiative fails to get the desired results.
“I feel like I can dream the vision that I’d like to see for the school and I’m being supported in it. That follows through with the school board allowing the leadership team to lead and not be afraid if something doesn’t work,” Tapanes says. “Sometimes mistakes can be our biggest teachers as far as getting us in the right direction.”
The beauty of professional learning communities is that the cultural journey they establish need never end. Even if all students achieve proficiency, there will always be room to grow in various ways.
“It’s an interesting journey,” says Tapanes. “There is no end, but there’s always a movement upward.”
Kristi Garrett (kgarrett@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
Branching out: More PLC resources
Local educational agencies can learn more about professional learning communities from a number of sources, including:
The DuFours are nationally known for their books and seminars about professional learning communities. Titles by Richard and Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas W. Many include:
“Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don’t Learn” (part of the “Whatever It Takes” series)
“Professional learning communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement”
Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work”
Focus on Results consultants work with schools and districts nationwide to identify local needs, and develop methods and practices to help drive improvement.
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation process fosters improvement of the school’s programs and operations to support student learning.
CSBA’s Masters in Governance program helps board members learn how to ensure district processes and policies establish student achievement as the first priority.
The Lighthouse Research project by the Iowa Association of School Boards provides insights for school boards nationwide and highlights the role of school boards in improving student achievement.
Technical assistance from McREL, a regional education research laboratory based in Denver, Colo., is available to schools and districts seeking help creating professional learning communities focused on improving student achievement.