What Your Rules Say About You

Our focus today is in helping you get a deeper understanding of how your content standards are constructed.  As such you’ll be completing activities that will guide you through the actual standards documents and you’ll be discussing as a PLC exactly what individual objectives in the standards mean, how students will master those standards, how you will assess their mastery, and how you will design instruction to empower student mastery of the objectives.  PLC time on the Understanding the Standards segments should take you approximately two hours – if you finish early please repeat the activity and select a different objective (or grade level if you are a multi-grade level PLC or even content area if you are with a group of teachers who teachers more than one content area).   Answers you generate on the feedback forms will be submitted back to your building principal and will also be used to assist us as we work to both develop future trainings and identify important trends needed when we being to develop new curriculum guides.

For the record, much of the content and many of the activities in the Understanding the Standards segment (contained in the Livebinder activity) comes from the Understanding the Standards module available for all teachers on NC Education (the website you visited to complete your NC Falcon modules).  There are additional online trainings available on that site, and should any teacher like further information you are free to enroll yourself in the modules (they average about 90 minutes in length).  Module titles, along with the comparable trainings completed here in PCS, are:

• A Call to Change (the information from this module was covered during the August 19 and October 28 PD days)
• Revised Blooms Taxonomy (the information from this module was covered during the October 28 PD day)
• Understanding the Standards (the information in this module is being covered today)
• Designing Local Curricula for 21st Century Learners (the information in this module will be covered on our future PD days as well as completed by all who are going to work on county-level curriculum guides)

And now, on to your trainings!  We hope you find these sessions meaningful and enlightening as we journey together towards ensuring the success of every child every day.

Links for K-5 Trainings

• Click Here for the Livebinder for the Understanding the Standards session (afternoon session)

Links for 6-12 Trainings: AM

• Click Here for the Livebinder for the Understanding the Standards session (morning session for all teachers)

Links for 6-12 NON-MATH Trainings: PM

• Click Here for Adobe Connect webinar for non-math teachers – this will start at 1:00pm (afternoon session for all 6-12 non-math teachers – choose Guest as your login and when asked for a name indicate your school name (ie, Bethel); if you have more than one group from your school participating indicate your groupe (ie, DHC ELA Teachers))
• Click Here for the Shift 2 Video (6-12 non-math teachers will watch this during the webinar)
• Click Here for the Problem Based Inquiry video (6-12 non-math teachers will also access this during the webinar)

Links for 6-12 MATH Trainings: PM

• Click Here for the Post-Survey for the Math Training

Beginning on February 1 we’ll be offering after-school trainings that are grade-span and content-specific around the county.  Each core content area will offer an in-depth training every month, repeated around the county every week, so that teachers can attend the training time and location that works best for them.  We have trainings for grade spans K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.  K-2 and 3-5 sessions will be from 3:30-5:30 and 6-8 and 9-12 sessions will be from 4-6.  These optional training sessions will allow teachers and administrators the chance to dig-in deeper to the new standards.

Level I training will be offered the month of February, Level II the month of March, and Level III the month of April.  We’ll focus on Math on Mondays, ELA on Tuesdays, Social Studies on Wednesdays, and Science on Thursdays.  Since trainings are offered around the county teachers need only attend the session most convenient to them. The schedule is designed so that teachers need only attend one training per month per content area (since each training is offered four times each month)

Host sites are as follows:

• Northern Area: Pactolus (for all K-8 sessions) and North Pitt HS (for 9-12 sessions)
• Western Area: HB Sugg (K-2), Sam Bundy (3-5), Farmville Middle (6-8), and Farmville Central HS (9-12)
• Southern Area: Ayden Elementary (K-2 and 3-5), Ayden Middle (6-8 and 9-12)
• Eastern/Central Area: Eastern Elementary (K-2 and 3-5) and CM Eppes Middle (6-8 and 9-12)

You can sign up in MyLearningPlan now for the individual sessions you want to attend – there are currently 128 listed in MLP (covering the months of February and March) with 64 more to come in April.  To easily access the listing click on “District Catalog” and then choose “CC/ES Trainings” on the left side of the screen – this will pull up all the sessions currently offered (note: there are multiple pages!)

Sign-up now before they fill up!

(this is part two of a two-day series summarizing training I attended with a team from across the district.  For day 1′s recap click here)

It’s really pretty simple, when you think about it.  It’s all about the kids.  That pretty much sums up what our representatives learned over the past two days.

Today’s session focused on addressing some of the nuts-and-bolts, so to speak, of implementing PLCs.  We spent a good deal of time reinforcing the basic concepts we were exposed to yesterday, which was actually really good because it helped us all keep our focus.  Here are some key points that will be used to drive discussion over the next several months (perhaps I’ll actually do a blog post on each of these!):

The Big Ideas of a PLC

1. We accept learning as the fundamental purpose of our school and therefore are willing to examine all practices in light of their impact on learning;
2. We are committed to working together to achieve our collective purpose.  We cultivate a collaborative culture though development of high performing teams;
3. We assess our effectiveness on the basis of results rather than intentions.  Individuals, teams, and schools seek relevant data and information and use that information to promote continuous improvement.

Because PLCs function as a team, we also identified the Seven Keys to Effective Teams:

1. Embed collaboration in routine practices of the school with focus on learning (the entire school is a team);
2. Schedule time for collaboration into the school day and calendar;
3. Focus teams on critical questions;
4. Make products of collaboration explicit;
5. Establish team norms to guide collaboration;
6. Pursue specific and measurable team performance goals (SMART goals);
7. Provide teams with frequent access to relevant information.

When you take all that information, you get this basic picture of a PLC: it’s a team who spends time meeting regularly to identify goals for their students and then uses formative assessment to monitor student performance, making adjustments along the way based on the information they receive from those assessments.  They also examine the data of these common assessments to look for trends in terms of student performance (who’s weak and strong across the board) as well as teacher performance so teachers can help teachers.  It has nothing to do with student or teacher evaluation but with teacher and student growth.  The Dufours summed it up this way:

“The heart of work in a PLC is when educators collectively analyze evidence of student learning to (1) inform individual performance practice, (2) improve a team’s ability to achieve it’s SMART goals, and (3) intervene on behalf of individual students.  The other steps on the PLC journey (ie, identifying essential goals, establishing norms, creating common formative assessments, etc), are designed to help teams engage in this essential work.”

What educator couldn’t agree that this “vision” for PLCs isn’t the exact same vision we have for our schools in general?  Doesn’t every decent educator strive to do the best they can to help the students do the best they can?  That’s what PLCs are all about.  We’ve gotten distracted and lost our focus (as we often do as humans) and made PLCs into book studies, team meetings, PD sessions, and gripe sessions.  But that’s not what PLCs are.  “The heart of work in a PLC is when educators collectively analyze evidence of student learning to (1) inform individual performance practice, (2) improve a team’s ability to achieve it’s SMART goals, and (3) intervene on behalf of individual students.”

Over the next couple of months I’ll begin to dig deeper into PLCs in both trainings throughout the district as well as posts on this blog, but for now ask yourself this question: Is the team I’m currently working on functioning as a PLC (as defined above) or are we doing other duties?  If the answer is “other duties” then I challenge you to reflect on your work and figure out if you could be more focused on what’s important.  If you are serving on a functioning PLC as defined above, please contact me because as we venture down this path as a district we’re going to need people to serve as models and supports for the rest of us – and you could fill that role.

At the October 28 district-wide PD day we introduced the whole idea of PLCs, or Professional Learning Communities.  During the morning training that day all schools conducted a three hour training answering the basic questions “What does a PLC look like?” and “How should a PLC function?”  Then in the afternoon teachers were divided into PLCs to begin walking through the new standards documents as they learned how the Revised Blooms’ Taxonomy (RBT) aligns with the new NC Essential Standards.

This week a team of over 40 teachers, administrators, and instructional coaches are attending a two-day training in Raleigh entitled Professional Learning Communities at Work: Bringing the Big Ideas to Life, led by Dr. Rick and Becky Dufour (the training is Wednesday, December 14 and Thursday, December 15).  The next several blog posts will serve as summaries of our work there, as well as how this will impact our work here in Pitt County Schools.  If you want to follow live updates of the training I’ll be tweeting highlights each day.

Wednesday’s sessions focused on addressing this issue of “What does a PLC look like?” and then began laying the groundwork for “How do we do that here?”  Before I give a definition of what a PLC is, however, let’s take a moment to talk about what a PLC is not.  When educators hear the term PLC a broad variety of mental images come to mind – and many are not correct.  Most schools in Pitt County will report they have PLCs at their schools, but when asked to describe their “PLC” the answers range from what is essentially a team meeting covering the latest information from the previous SIT meeting, planning time to discuss the upcoming parent curriculum night, to something more along the lines of a book study.  While these things are not in-and-of-themselves bad things (and they are needed in order to ensure a school functions effectively), they are not a PLC.

PLCs are not a program or event, they are not a team meeting, nor are they something that is short-term.  PLCs are an “on-going process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”  They operate under “the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators.”

As we transition into the new NCSCOS (the Common Core & Essential Standards), PCS has invested a lot of time and money into using PLCs as a key component to school-improvement.  PLCs will form the backbone of professional development in the new standards for the next several years, so it’s important that we have a firm understanding of what that means both theoretically and practically.  As our work on the district-wide PD days has demonstrated, much of our work learning and applying the new standards will happen in PLCs.

Some of the Theory

PLCs will need to operate in what Marzano and Waters refer to as “defined autonomy” – meaning that teachers will have freedom to act within clearly articulated boundaries.  These boundaries should be established by building and district-level administrators and may include expectations such as how often PLCs meet, deadlines for creation of common assessments, etc.  But perhaps the most important “theory” line for us to understand in regards to PLCs is that PLCs “accept learning” (as opposed to “covering” or “teaching”) “as the fundamental purpose of school”, meaning that if students aren’t learning educators must answer the question “Why not?”, even if the answer to that question indicates a deficiency on the side of the teacher (which then leads to teachers working together to grow out of that deficiency).  Educators who embrace this principle (or one of several “big ideas”) are “committed to working together to achieve the collective purpose [by] cultivating a collaborative culture” and assessing teachers’ (both individually and collectively) “effectiveness on the basis of results rather than intentions.”

This all boils down to one simply statement shared by the Dufours during the training: “Professional learning communities always attempt to answer critical questions by BUILDING SHARED KNOWLEDGE – engaging in collective inquiry – LEARNING TOGETHER.”   Remember our earlier definition?  PLCs are an “on-going process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”  They operate under “the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators.”

Now all that theory is great, but it still begs the question, “What does this look like for me?”  So let’s get practical!

Practical Implications

Every teacher in the district will be involved in a PLC, and the make-up of that PLC may be content or grade level focused, or perhaps it could address vertical articulation from grade to grade.  But the point is that educators in our district will continue investing in themselves and each other through the PLC process.  PLCs will meet not just this year, but throughout the coming years to answer the question (by examining the standards):

• What are the essential learning outcomes students need to master by the time they complete this grade/course?
• How will I know they have mastered these learning outcomes?
• What common formative assessments can we as teachers develop so we can track not only student growth but also teacher effectiveness (not for evaluation sake, but for the purpose of bettering our instruction so students achieve more)?
• What do these common formative assessments tell me and my colleagues about where students are weak and strong?  What do they tell me I need to improve on as a teacher?
• What do I need to address these deficits?
• How can I use my strengths to help other teachers who may be weak where I am strong?

Wow!  That’s a lot of stuff to cover – much more than I can address in just one blog post; which means the answers will be given over multiple posts, but also in trainings offered over the next several months throughout the district.

Check back tomorrow for more on what our team is learning from the Dufours!

Mondays in December at 7:00am

Fridays in December at 3:30pm

Tune in to WECU 1570 AM on your radio dial, or listen online.

 Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a social studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock , did something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with the permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she removed all of the desks out of her classroom.  When the first period kids entered the room they discovered that there were no desks.

‘Ms. Cothren, where’re our desks?’

She replied, ‘You can’t have a desk until you tell me how you earn the right to sit at a desk.’

They thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s our grades.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Maybe it’s our behavior.’

She told them, ‘No, it’s not even your behavior.’

And so, they came and went, the first period, second period, third period. Still no desks in the classroom.  By early afternoon television news crews had started gathering in Ms. Cothren’s classroom to report about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of her room.

The final period of the day came and as the puzzled students found seats on the floor of the deskless classroom, Martha Cothren said, ‘Throughout the day no one has been able to tell me just what he/she has done to earn the right to sit at the desks that are ordinarily found in this classroom. Now I am going to tell you.’

At this point, Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it.  Twenty-seven (27) U.S. Veterans, all in uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. The Vets began placing the school desks in rows, and then they would walk over and stand alongside the wall. By the time the last soldier had set the final desk in place, those kids started to understand, perhaps for the first time in their lives, just how the right to sit at those desks had been earned..

Martha said, ‘You didn’t earn the right to sit at these desks. These heroes did it for you. They placed the desks here for you. Now, it’s up to you to sit in them. It is your responsibility to learn, to be good students, to be good citizens. They paid the price so that you could have the freedom to get an education. Don’t ever forget it.’

By the way, this is a true story. And this teacher was awarded Teacher of the Year for the state of Arkansas in 2006.

Here’s why I share this story (one that honestly brought tears to my eyes as I read it).  The power and influence teachers have over children is absolutely astronomical – teachers can single-handedly chance the course of a child’s life, for good or bad.  Recently I was on vacation and was lucky enough to spend a day at Sea World – one of my absolute favorite places.  While I was there I kept thinking to myself, “Wow – what a cool place to work!”  That thought was immediately followed by, “But I’m not a science person, this isn’t the job for me.”

But that’s the funny part – when I was a kid I absolutely loved science – it was my favorite subject.  There was one teacher in particular who made the world come alive for me in a way I had never experienced – everything was hands-on and inquiry-based.  We asked questions and solved problems.  And we learned – if you asked me to identify the different types of clouds I can still recall laying on my back in the middle of the field during class as we looked up and learned about the types of clouds back in elementary school (much more interesting and engaging that learning it from a textbook).

Then I got to a new school – I was so excited to go to science, but once I got there my excitement quickly faded, in large part because the teachers just didn’t cut it.  They were boring, had low (and I mean LOW) expectations, and didn’t challenge me to learn.  The same is true in the field of art for me.  My wife loves the visual arts (her grandmother was an artist).  But me?  Not so much.  For the very reason I don’t understand it.  When we visit art museums I get bored, because I don’t understand what I’m looking at, and I can’t appreciate it.  But when I go with her and she explains it to me I enjoy it much more.  And guess what – my visual art teachers weren’t always the best, they were unable to connect with me (in all fairness, there was one in particular who did a great job, but by the time I got to him I was already turned off to art so I just didn’t work as hard as I could have for me).

But then there were teachers I absolutely loved – teachers whose class I didn’t want to miss for anything – teachers I worked hard for and invested time in because they did challenge and engage me.  Those teachers were ones I signed up to take extra classes with when I could, because I knew my time would be rewarded.  Choir, music, photography, English (I still remember my Lit G class to this day!), and history – all classes where the teachers taught me to think for myself, encouraged (and expected) me to ask questions, and helped me find answers.  When one of those teachers first said to me, “I could picture you as a teacher one day.”  It was the first time that thought had ever crossed my mind, but it’s the thought that stayed with me and helped direct and entire career path that’s brought me to where I am today.

Which gets out back to where I started… For those teachers out there who follow this blog, look for ways to engage and encourage your students – which will often require a dramatic shift in how you think about education (that’s what the story above demonstrates, a dramatic shift!).  And for you Vets out there who served and sacrificed so that I and others could go to school, thank you.

Every year I create a list of what I’m thankful for.  This year you can believe that teachers (some very specific ones) and Vets (again, some very specific ones) are on my list.  Happy Thanksgiving!

A non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the “FlexBook™,” CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.

Their website has FREE, ONLINE access to approximately 90 textbooks, all aligned to state standards.  While they don’t currently offer textbooks for every area, they are constantly updating their resources.  For those teachers concerned about finding cost-effective resources for the new standards, you may want to check out their FlexBooks Website.

8:15-11:15 – School-based PLC Training at your school site

12:45-3:45 – PLC time either at your school or your district-appointed site

If you’d like to participate in an online-conversation during your PM training please visit http://todaysmeet.com/PCSRttT, where you can type 140 character feedback comments or questions; I’ll be attempting to answer as many of the questions throughout the day as possible.

Resources for your PM training are available at this site; make sure you “Download” each file instead of “view” each file.  There is also a zip file of all needed resources for the entire day located under the “PCS Resources/Downloads” tab on the top of this page.