Creating an overall plan for the year that allows for professional learning with the intentional focus of increasing teacher leadership ability is time well spent. We encourage leaders to do this professional development work along with the guiding coalition. The four critical questions of a PLC establish guiding questions for teacher leaders to use when facilitating the collaborative process. Figure 3.4 (pages 74–75) provides some guiding questions for each of the four critical questions of a PLC that you, as a school leader, and your teacher leaders can use during collaboration. Guiding questions are helpful in leading teams to reflect on the right work.
Reflection
Do you continually work to build common understanding and leadership capabilities in your teacher leaders? Do teacher leaders know what questions to ask during their collaborative meetings? How do you know?
FIGURE 3.4: Guiding questions for leaders and teams.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Scheduling
Thoughtful creation of teams often requires creative shifts in the master schedule to allow for meaningful collaboration. Teachers should share in the creation and development of a schedule that allows for purposeful collaboration. This is an important opportunity to share leadership and create teacher ownership and also helps prevent teachers feeling as though they should only meet to be compliant or due to top-down direction from the principal or district leadership. Several examples of master schedules are available on AllThingsPLC (www.AllThingsPLC.info) to use as a reference.
In many schools, we encounter leaders who have organized their staff into collaborative teams without consideration of the time needed for deep collaboration. Teams are expected to meet outside the instructional day or inconsistently during the school day. Sometimes we see a school that schedules a once-a-month shutdown so all collaborative teams can meet. Collaboration must be a part of the school day, and it has to be treated as a regular, expected responsibility rather than a stand-alone event.
As the leader of a PLC, you should seek to create a deep understanding that collaborating around the needs of students is just how we do things here. We know this takes time, and once teachers understand why they collaborate, they often experience great frustration when leaders don’t schedule appropriate time for collaboration to happen. Teachers have the will to do the work; your next step as a leader is to create time for the work. One option for scheduling collaborative time is for teachers to have common planning time every day. The designation of this time to collaborate is tight in a PLC. Ideally, you want your teams to experience the shared ownership and leadership that should naturally happen because they see the value of collaborative time. When this happens, collaborative teams will not need to be told when and how to meet; they will meet when they need to meet in order to make progress toward their goals. You may see a team working together every day during their common planning time, or you may find a team that only requires two collaborative meetings a week. As a school leader, you may have to decide how best to structure this time at first until teams can establish their own workflow pattern.
Figure 3.5 is adapted from a first-grade team schedule at Country Meadows Elementary School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. This first-grade team meets three times per week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays), with a different content-area focus for each meeting. Additionally, the teachers meet for thirty-five minutes each morning. They use this time flexibly. Figure 3.6 is a sample team agenda for one meeting. Each team in this building has a team leader who is also a member of the school leadership team or guiding coalition. Team leaders receive training at the district level three times per year to build their knowledge of district priorities and expectations. Additionally, team leaders meet with their principals weekly before school. The building leadership meetings also include ongoing leadership and facilitation of professional learning as well as a focus on district-aligned school priorities and expectations.
Source: Adapted from Country Meadows Elementary School, Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
FIGURE 3.5: Sample team meeting schedule.
Reflection
What do agendas look like for collaborative teams? What do they generally focus on? How do you know? What are some ways you can foster effective collaboration focused on the four critical questions of a PLC?
FIGURE 3.6: Sample team agenda.
Source: © 2018 by Country Meadows Elementary School First-Grade Team, Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Reprinted with permission.
Wrap-Up
Sharing leadership as described in this chapter is not an easy task, but it is possible, and it is a necessary component in a PLC. We have worked with principals who truly understand the value of distributing leadership and who are masterful in creating the capacity for others to share the leadership load. When we ask principals how they made the shift or how they developed their plans, many do indicate that they start with reflection and visioning. They describe asking themselves some tough questions to determine their next steps. The following are some of the reflections and questions they considered.
• Think about the type of environment you have created in your building; then think of the type of environment you want to create in your building. What do you need to do to create the environment you desire?
• Have you fostered the idea of shared leadership or taken action to share the leadership in any way? Consider what you need to keep doing, what you need to stop doing, and what you need to commit to doing to make the vision a reality.
• Consider where you would want to work; would you prefer a place where the leader makes top-down decisions that you are rarely, if ever, a part of, or a place where you are part of the decision-making process either directly or indirectly?
Start with reflection and begin planning your next steps. For example, if you determine that most decisions in your school or district are top-down, a next step could be to consider ways to involve staff in more decision-making opportunities like involvement in the elements of the master schedule, or determination of and involvement in presenting professional learning for future staff meetings. The teachers and students in your school will make extraordinary things happen when they have the chance to be a part of the decision-making process. Remember to celebrate your successes along the way. Wrap up your examination of building shared leadership by completing the “Making an Impact in Eight: Building Shared Leadership” reflections (pages 80–82).
Making an Impact in Eight: Building Shared Leadership
The following eight ideas provide opportunities for further reflection and action. We provide five reflections on what great leaders do and avoid doing to gain focus, as well as three considerations for how to make an impact in eight minutes, eight weeks, and eight months to guide your leadership planning and practice.
Chapter 4
Using Evidence for Decision Making and Action
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
—Jim Barksdale
In our coaching work in schools, one of the very first things we focus on with leaders is deepening their understanding of how to establish goals and priorities for the school. Throughout this book, we attempt to guide you to consider how to be more intentional and focused in your daily actions. We understand how many distractions there can be. We want you to strengthen your ability to stay the course. A critical component to staying the course is to make evidence-based decisions and set goals based on the evidence. DuFour et al. (2016) call this determining your current reality. It takes courage to really examine what is and what is not happening in your school, and a great deal of honesty. We don’t want you to do this by yourself. We recommend sharing this responsibility with your guiding coalition, as we describe in chapter 3 (page 57). In this chapter, we explore issues you might face as a school leader in determining your current reality and making decisions based on the evidence, and we guide you in reflecting on your current practice in
this area.
Using Evidence Versus Experience
You bring vast experiences to your role as a school leader. Perhaps you are a brand-new principal or assistant principal with a strong instructional background. You might be a seasoned school leader who has served in several schools. Or maybe you have worked in one school your whole career, moving from classroom to instructional coaching to assistant principal to principal. Despite how you arrived in your leadership role, your experiences will influence how you make decisions. As helpful as your experiences are in solving problems and addressing issues, evidence should be the main driver of your decisions. In other words, experiences are important, but we really want to help you understand that the evidence in front of you—your current reality and the evidence of student achievement—should drive your thinking and actions. Facing the brutal facts may mean you will need to go in a direction that is different than you may have anticipated. Author and leadership expert Douglas Reeves (2016) reminds us that it is human nature to use background knowledge, lean on past experiences, and influence others from our comfort zone; “However clear the evidence, personal experience remains triumphant in too many discussions of education policy” (p. 6).
Reeves (2016) also reminds us that in all of your daily practices as a leader, it is important for you to model evidence-based decisions. He describes the following six levels of evidence (Reeves, 2016):
1. Opinion: “This is what I believe, and I believe it sincerely.”
2. Experience: “This is what I have learned based on my personal observation.”
3. Local evidence: “This is what I have learned based on the evidence, which not only includes my own experience but also my friends’ and colleagues’ experiences.”
4. Systematic observation: “I have compared twelve schools that fully implemented my proposed intervention with twelve schools that did not implement it. Here are the results that show the difference between these twenty-four schools …”
5. Preponderance of evidence: “This is what we know as a profession based on many of our colleagues’ systematic observations in many different circumstances in varied locations and at many different times.”
6. Mathematical certainty: “Two plus two equals four and we really don’t need to take a vote on whether that statement is agreeable to everyone.” (p. 7)
In moving to the sixth level of evidence, leaders must use the evidence from observations, conversations, data, and intentional focus to make decisions. Leaders cannot rely on opinions and experiences to determine next steps.
Reflection
As you reflect on your own practice, do you rely primarily on your experiences to support decisions? Which of the six levels of evidence would be growth opportunities for you as you continue to build your own leadership capacity? What might be your next steps?
Using Data
Brian Wulf became principal of McLane High School in Fresno, California, in the middle of the 2017–2018 school year. Beginning one’s tenure in the middle of the school year is difficult enough; Principal Wulf spent the first few weeks at McLane trying to understand the school culture, evaluating how decisions were made, and deciding where he needed to focus his efforts. After reflection, conversations with Karen, his district support team, and his administrators (B. Wulf, personal communication, February 2017) and observations, Principal Wulf recognized that he needed to establish several priorities, set some short- and long-term goals, and create a shared leadership model. Principal Wulf knew he could not do this work alone—nor did he want to—so he focused on developing a guiding coalition that could address a few priorities at a time. Despite beginning in the middle of the school year, Principal Wulf felt things were going smoothly at McLane—until he faced a significant issue.
With twelve weeks left in the school year, Principal Wulf took the time to review course pass and failure rates and met with teachers who had concerns about students. Still being new to the school, Wulf was at a disadvantage as he really didn’t know the teachers or the students. He decided to focus his attention on class-by-class, student-by-student data to really understand how many students had at least one D or F, the number of graduating students, and how many courses that they were failing. He took this information to the guiding coalition. The team determined that they needed to present this to the staff and work with the teachers to create action plans for the students. Because of the time of the year, it resembled a triage plan and was very late for many students; however, the important factor is that the school was using evidence to make decisions and bringing awareness to student needs. This was a very good first step for Principal Wulf and his guiding coalition. Table 4.1 shows the data Principal Wulf collected on student failure rates.
TABLE 4.1: Data on Students Receiving Ds or Fs for the Third and Fourth Semesters of the 2017–2018 School Year
Source: © 2018 by McLane High School, Fresno, California. Reprinted with permission.
Evidence-based decision making is part of the PLC culture; it is the basis for collaborative teams’ cycle of inquiry (DuFour et al., 2016). Teachers become better at meeting the needs of students by adjusting their instruction and intervention plans based on evidence.
Having data isn’t the same thing as knowing how to use data to make great decisions for students, however. Relying on data only as a summative tool—to provide an autopsy rather than providing a check-up—does not allow authentic data use to determine next steps (Reeves, 2016). Formative data—data gleaned during the learning process—are necessary if leaders and teams are to understand what’s working and determine next steps. In his powerful book Leverage Leadership, author Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (2012) states, “Data-driven instruction is the single most effective use of a school leader’s time” (p. 24). Bambrick-Santoyo (2012) explains that knowing we have data is one thing; truly using the data to drive instruction and achieve significant growth is another. Principals who learn to use data as a formative tool are able to plan next steps and take action based on real evidence, not just perception. The PLC process requires an understanding of current reality in order to determine next steps.
Reflection
Where are you as a data decision maker? Is examining data a “now and then” practice, or are you authentically relying on data to inform your decisions? How can you improve in this practice?
Measuring Current Reality
In The Knowing-Doing Gap, coauthors and professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (2000) explore what they regard as one of the great mysteries of organizational management: the disconnect between what we know and what we do. Unfortunately, the data do not always paint a pretty picture of what is happening in a school. What a leader perceives to be a well-managed school may not be meeting students’ academic needs; this a tough message for a principal to hear. It is, however, the evidence needed to know if practices are effective or ineffective. The deep work of school improvement takes time and energy, and, most important, understanding the truth of current reality and working on the right work to exact change. The use of data as evidence of successful and unsuccessful practice requires honest discourse without excuses. As habits go, measuring current reality is one school leaders must develop.
Data-driven leadership requires a schoolwide understanding of current reality—not just within grade- and content-level teams. Taking the time to focus on data that include student and staff attendance, student discipline patterns (what incidents are creating disruption and when, for example), as well as student learning data, provides an opportunity to understand the need for action—the why of planning. A simple one-page template (like the one Principal Wulf used to determine his reality; see table 4.1) can be combined with other data points as well as areas for reflection and next steps. A sample of a template that combines several data points, reflection, and action to help structure a leadership team, focus, and summarize the results appears in figure 4.1 (page 88).
FIGURE 4.1: Leadership template for data focus.
Visi
t go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks for a free reproducible version of this figure.
When leaders and teams dig into the data, they look for the root causes of underperformance. Why are so many teachers staying home? Why are so many students late for sixth period every day? Why are students not reading at grade level? Is it because of a lack of decoding skills? A lack of close reading skills to support deep comprehension? Are they lacking the strategies to unpack a mathematics word problem so they know what a task is asking them to do? The data must help you and your teams understand the why in addition to the what. Once the why is apparent, planning for improvement can move forward with action plans tailored to the why. Without knowing the why, it is difficult to have buy-in for change. For example, an elementary principal who has studied her data believes that not enough instructional time is being dedicated to guided reading. When she asks the teachers to increase their focus on guided reading, she does not explain why. One day, she walks into the faculty lounge and overhears several teachers talking. They sound angry and overwhelmed. They are discussing the additional time that they are trying to spend on guided reading and how tired and stressed they are from the additional responsibilities. They express their frustration with what seems to be “just more work” to them. The principal realizes that there is a lack of understanding and that she has to do something about this. She immediately calls a staff meeting and shares with the staff the reading data that caused her to believe that more time needed to be spent in guided reading practice. She also shares the benefits of guided reading with the teachers and asks them to reflect and discuss with each other on what they would need to have for support in order for more of their literacy time to be spent doing guided reading. After the reflection and discussion, the teachers express to the principal that they could see ways to change their literacy block to have more guided reading time. She leavers the meeting feeling that she has started to create more understanding and willingness to accept a change.
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