Ideas I'd Like My Future Principal To Consider: Putting the 'L' Back in PLC

My district went to the Professional Learning Community (PLC) model several years ago. I really like the concept of scheduled, on-going, sustained staff development with time carved out of the regular school day. (We have ten two-hour late start days a year. Not enough, but a beginning.)

My concern, however, is I feel like our PLC's have become too narrowly focused. To be clear, we've done lots of good stuff in our PLC's, so I'm not saying they've been all bad. They haven't, but I worry that instead of a PLC we too often look at them as a PAC - Professional Assessment Communities. We spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out how to measure how our students are doing, and not enough time talking about learning.

Folks with more experience than I have with PLC's might argue that based on what I've described we've failed to effectively define our essential learnings. There is probably something to that, but I think - for the most part - our PLC's have done a decent job of defining those essential learnings as they are described in the PLC model. The problem, I fear, is that more and more I find myself disagreeing with the basic tenet of essential learnings, namely that there's a fixed curriculum that all students should master, and therefore there are essential learnings within that curriculum that our PLC's can define, focus on, and successfully teach.

I wish we could spend more time as learners ourselves, more time talking about what that's like in 2012. I would like our PLC's to look more like a PLN (Personal Learning Network) and less like a PAC. Now, to be sure, they must be somewhat different from a PLN, as by definition there's a group instead of it being personal, and it probably needs to be somewhat more focused than a PLN has to be, but I believe that we need to radically rethink how we are structuring schools, and we can't do that if we're more focused on assessment than we are on learning. We need to experience the world of 2012 as learners ourselves, and discuss that with other teacher-learners in our PLC's, before we can figure out how best to help our students.

So I'd like my future principal to ask us to put the 'L' back in PLC, to be learners first, and assessors . . . well, I'm not sure where, but not first. I'd like my future principal to be the Lead Learner, and model that for our staff, our students and our community. Perhaps then we can not only put the 'L' back in PLC, maybe we can put it front and center in everything we do in schools.

I Just Want to Say One Word to You: Collaboration.

With apologies to The Graduate . . .

Mr. Chambers: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.
Me: Yes sir.
Mr. Chambers: Are you listening?
Me: Yes I am.
Mr. Chambers: Collaboration.
Me: How do you mean?
Mr. Chambers: There’s a great future in collaboration. Blog about it. Will you blog about it?
Me: Yes I will.
Mr. Chambers: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.

The December/January issue of Fast Company has an interesting article on Cisco and its CEO John Chambers. Here are some lengthy excerpts (emphasis added by me).

He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization. The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. “In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us,” he explains. “All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there.” Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos – not to mention a new financial incentive system – encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and vitualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.

The bumpy part – and the eye-opener – is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be “me” is now “we.”

Cisco is moving from “me” to “we.” What about your district? Your school? Your classroom?

An avowed Republican (and a cochair of John McCain’s presidential campaign), Chambers politely ignored my observation that Cisco’s new regimen feels a bit like a socialist revolution. But Chambers did kick off the analyst conference with a slide that read, COLLABORATION: “CO-LABOR”; WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL. In language and spirit, Chamber’s transformation is a mashup of radical isms and collectivist catchphrases. Of course, with analysts suggesting that the “collaboration marketplace” could be a $34 billion opportunity, it’s radicalism of a reassuringly capitalist bent.

Cisco is emphasizing working toward a common goal and developing the collaboration marketplace. In your last staff meeting did you discuss a collaboration learning-place, or did you discuss moving borderline students up to the next cut score?

Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chamber’s office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers. Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company’s rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,” he says.

Cisco wants its employees to share. And share some more. It’s unacceptable not to. How much opportunity do you give your staff to share? Your students? Is it an expectation that they share? Or are they punished if they share?

So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. “Everybody is an author now,” he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes – all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.

Cisco provides resources and training opportunities so that less-engaged employees can “get with the program.” What is your school – or district – providing?

So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference – in any language, anywhere around the globe.

Sounds a lot like what GE is doing, as I blogged about previously. So GE and Cisco are embracing social networking, is your school? Are you?

Most of the videos are short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates, all created deskside and published directly to the network with the click of a mouse. No filter, no lawyers. It is a petri dish for ideas and exchange.

Cisco is open, no filters, no lawyers, in order to foster the creation and exchange of ideas. Compare that to your school. How open is your school? Your classroom?

“Collaboration this way helps a world community solve big problems,” says vice president Jim Grubb, Chamber’s longtime product-demo sidekick. “If we can accelerate the productivity of scientists who are working on the next solar technology because we’re hooking them together, we’re doing a great thing for the world.”

Cisco believes that seamlessly connecting people to others fosters innovation, problem solving, and productivity. What have you done to foster seamless connectivity for your teachers? Your students?

Executives are now compensated on how well the collective businesses perform, not their own individual product units. (Playing well with others is also an increasingly important part of rank-and-file employees’ performance reviews.) . . . Without buy-in or even permission from Chambers, they brought in 15 people with relevant skills – turning down an invitation to collaborate is not an option – and built a product called StadiumVision . . . A multimillion-dollar business came together in less than 120 days.

Cisco believes in empowering their employees and measuring their performance at least partially based on their collaborative abilities, and refusing to collaborate is not an option. What portion of your assessment program evaluates collaborative abilities?

---

So, if you’re an administrator, what are you doing to foster collaboration among your staff, and especially your teachers? And I’m talking more than just PLC’s, although that’s not a bad start. What are you really doing to fundamentally change the structure of your school(s) from one of isolation (close the door and teach), to one of sharing and collaboration (knock down the walls)? Is it unacceptable to share in your institution?

If you’re a teacher, what are you doing to foster collaboration among your students? And I’m talking more than putting them into groups of four and having the students create a PowerPoint presentation together. What are you really doing to fundamentally change the structure of your classroom from one of isolation (do your own work), to one of collaboration (work with others)? What are you doing to build their skills to succeed in a corporate environment that requires them to collaborate on a global scale?

If you're a student, what are you doing to improve your own collaboration skills - and those of your peers? What are you demanding of your schools, your teachers, your administrators to help prepare you for the collaborative marketplace that is your future?

Mr. Chambers: Are you listening?
You: ?

PLC Convening White Paper

As I mentioned previously, I was invited to a convening surrounding Creating Transformational Professional Learning Communities put together by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation back in September.

In hosting this convening, KnowledgeWorks Foundation hoped to:

• Learn more about strategies for developing professional learning communities
  
• Begin developing a vision for professional learning communities of the future and how they can help expand current thinking around school reform
  
• Examine what stakeholders, including philanthropy, can do to move toward such a future.
  

I haven’t really blogged about this for a few reasons. First, I’m still trying to get my head around what we talked about those two days. These were some very bright and thoughtful folks and I struggled to make a meaningful contribution to our discussions.

Second, it was also an interesting role-reversal for me. In my staff development, I’m the guy who’s always talking about what’s possible, and pushing folks to make changes, and getting frustrated at the obstacles and saying we should push through them no matter what. Meanwhile, the folks who actually have to try to do these things in the classroom are occasionally telling me I’m nuts, or to be patient, or asking exactly how they should push through a particular obstacle that I think they should push through. (In case you can’t tell from reading this blog, I’m sometimes just a little bit radical and/or unrealistic.) Well, in this convening, I played the role of the realist (as I see it, of course) to everyone else’s Don Quixote. I kept pushing back, primarily around the issue of time – suggesting that everything these folks were talking about was great, but that they were ignoring the very big issue of when were teachers actually going to have time to participate in these transformational professional learning communities. As one of only two current K-12 folks in the room, I sometimes felt like they were ignoring that one very big elephant in the room. So, it was interesting – and probably really good for me – to be the somewhat negative, “yeah, but” guy for a couple of days.

Finally, I didn’t want to blog about this until the white paper that Knowledgeworks Foundation was putting together from the convening was published. Well, they’ve now published the white paper (pdf). If you’re interested in PLC’s, you might want to take a look. Despite my “yeah, buts,” I think all of the folks in the room would be excellent resources to tap if you’d like to know more about transformational PLC’s.

I appreciated the opportunity to participate and, in fact, just returned from a second convening that KnowledgeWorks Foundation hosted surrounding Modernizing Teaching Tools. (I think they wanted to give me a chance to redeem myself.) I’ll wait until that white paper comes out to blog about that experience, but I felt like I had much more to contribute to this one.

The Most Successful PLC

So, Will pointed me to this New York Times article An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers:

Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

I think there’s a lot to think about there (a whole lot), but it also reminded me of something someone said at a recent convening I attended. I don’t mean to offend anyone with the following statement, but I think it’s also worth thinking about. They made the statement that the most successful Professional Learning Community they knew of was Al Qaeda. They have a passion for their subject, are trying to meet a perceived need, have individual cells that are operating both independently and in conjunction to try to achieve their goals, make effective use of technology, and have a strong belief they can change the world.

The point this person was making was two-fold (I think). First, that PLC’s aren’t necessarily a good thing in and of themselves - even if they’re successful - it depends on their purpose and goals. So as we utilize PLC’s in our schools, we need to keep in mind that the goal is not successful PLC’s, the goal is student learning and growth.

And second, that a small group of people with passion, commitment, and a belief they can make a difference can change the world. If our PLC’s operate with those same attributes and beliefs, then why can’t we change our schools – and the world - for the better? This brings to mind two of my favorite quotes,

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

Some men see things as they are and ask "Why?"
I dream things that never were and ask, "Why not?"
– Robert Kennedy

I think as we work on our school's vision and implementing PLC's, we need to continue to ask, "Why not?"

Sharing Our Staff Development

Those of you who have read this blog for a while realize that while this also serves as my personal blog, its initial (and still main) purpose is in support of our staff development efforts. It’s a place to stimulate and continue the conversations we have in our staff development sessions, as we explore constructivism and the use of technology to create a more student-centered approach to teaching and learning.

One of my blog goals for this year is to do a better job of sharing our staff development efforts. I hope to give readers from outside of Arapahoe a better idea of the specific activities we are doing and the discussions we are having, as well as give the teachers participating in the staff development a place to comment on the specific sessions. (While we’ve always used the blog to continue the conversations we’ve begun in the sessions, we haven’t focused so much on commenting on the quality of the sessions themselves.) I realize there’s no way that I can accurately portray our staff development on the blog, because you really have to experience the three-hour sessions yourselves to get a feeling for what’s happening. The power and success of what we’ve been doing comes from the discussion, interaction, collaboration and push/pull of the teachers in the face-to-face sessions. But I hope to at least give a window into that process on the blog in hopes of possibly stimulating a good idea for someone else.

So, last Monday we had our first session of the new school year. This was before teachers had to officially report back, and before students start back (they start next Tuesday), so we were able to have both cohorts of teachers (46 of us total) meet together for a little over four hours. The session was divided up into four sections, although the time was not evenly split.

The first part was a discussion of the introduction and first three chapters of the book Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement by Dufour and Eaker. Like many school districts, ours is making a major push into Professional Learning Communities. We have an altered calendar this year, with ten late-start days (two hours late) spread throughout the year for teachers to work together in PLC’s. Many of the ideas in this book complement what we’ve been trying to do in our staff development, as well as we hope to support our building as we develop mission, vision, values and goals. Four teachers (two from each cohort) took on the task of planning and facilitating our discussion of these chapters (everyone got a copy of the book to take home and read over the summer). You can read a nice summary over on Michele’s blog, but basically we discussed both the negatives and positives of past school reform efforts as well as what was necessary to make this one succeed. The big take-away for me was, as Michele said, “it’s up to us, the teachers, to make this work.” I think most of us left that discussion feeling positive that we do have the power and ability to use this process to make good things happen for our students. Thanks Michele, Brad, Lauren and Jared for planning and facilitating our discussion.

The second part of our morning was the ranting and raving portion of our session. In other words, I talked for a while. Over the last two years we’ve been doing this staff development (well, two years for cohort 1, only one year for cohort 2), I’ve been known to occasionally launch into passionate, emotional, and slightly crazed soliloquy’s that are affectionately (or perhaps not so affectionately) known as Fischrants. These are usually in one of our sessions, but occasionally play out on our staff development blogs (typically in the comments of either this blog or one of the cohort member’s blogs). They are instances where I really try to push an idea whose time may or may not have come, and the folks in my staff development typically push back. The topic for this Fischrant was Lifelong Learning and Personal Learning Networks. I shared this PowerPoint with them (as always, to try to spur thought and conversation), and then spent some time talking about how I think learning networks have always existed for humans, but that they have evolved over time. And that in our current time, with the Internet and other flat-world factors, the scope and power of learning networks has expanded exponentially. I then closed with a plea that they needed to do three things:

• First, they needed to think long and hard about this.
  
  
• Second, if they thought I was even partially correct, then they needed to start thinking about how they can help their students create, develop, manage, learn from, and contribute to their own learning networks.
  
  
• And third, that they needed to work on creating, developing, managing, learning from and contributing to their own personal learning networks; that they could not possibly do a very good job helping their students if they hadn’t experienced it themselves.
  

Like most Fischrants, I think this one was partially successful and did some good, but also probably convinced some of them that I’m completely insane. (Those are not mutually exclusive outcomes, by the way.)

The third portion was really a continuation of the Personal Learning Network piece, as we gave them time to learn. The suggested activities to choose from included:

• reading some blogs
  
  
• writing/reflecting in their own blog
  
  
• reconnecting with Bloglines or exploring/setting up Google Reader or iGoogle
  
  
• thinking about personal learning networks – both their own and how they could help students create them
  
  
• watching the Andrew Zolli keynote from NECC and reading The Coming Death Shortage from The Atlantic (part of their assignment for next time is to watch the keynote and read the article, but they could choose to do that now if they didn’t like the other choices).

I wasn’t sure how well this would go over, as some folks taking a class really want the time filled with “instruction,” but they were all very engaged so I think it went well.

The final portion was pizza, soft drinks, and catching up with each other. I know this part went well.

Their assignment for next time (a three hour session in the first week of September, where they meet in three different groups) is:

• Reading Chapter 4 of the PLC book, with their focus being creating a mission and vision for our 21c staff development efforts (as well as thinking about our school-wide mission and vision). Two teacher participants will plan and lead the discussion in each of the three groups.
  
  
• Explore creating their own personal learning network, and think about how to help students do that.
  
  
• Watch the Zolli keynote and read The Atlantic article, the focus here being both on changing demographics and increased lifespan, and what that means in terms of K-12 education and lifelong learning.
  
  
• To reflect in their personal blogs (or in a Word document emailed to me if they are completely uncomfortable with doing it publicly – a few are) on the ideas we are talking about, things they are trying in their classes, successes and challenges, reactions to our discussions today, reactions to the Zolli keynote and accompanying article, or whatever they feel would be helpful for them to reflect on.

So, I know this was rather long, but hopefully it gave some folks an idea of what this staff development session was like, and perhaps may spur some ideas for your own sessions. As always, I don't hold our examples up as being perfect or fantastic in any way, but I am attempting to be just as transparent with our staff development efforts as I'm encouraging the teachers in my building to be with their teaching efforts. Hopefully by being transparent - by sharing and communicating and collaborating and being open with what we do - we will all learn more from each other and, ultimately, do a better job helping our students learn.