Creating Collaborative Teams

Creating Collaborative Teams Anthony S. Muhammad, Ph.D.


 * //__Notes:__//**

We want to create a culture of collaboration. The U.S now ranks 29th in education throughout the world.

PLC – professional learning communities. Looking at a system to better the educational system. This model best is the PLC.

Dr. Michael Fuller wrote an article praising the PLC in 2004. Saying that the PLC has the opportunity to revolutionize the educational system. **//The learning process in a PLC starts with the adults in order to have a positive effect on students. (Book called “Breakthrough”)//**

//Ensuring that students learn// – More than just giving students the opportunity to learn. In a PLC, the focus isn’t on teaching, but on learning, going beyond the opportunity. Set up a system that guarantees and pushes kids until they gain the knowledge the need to be a good citizen.
 * Three Big Ideas to guide the process:**

Transforming School Culture, by Anthony Muhammad.

Stop thinking of kids in terms of low, normal, high. Compared to what??? Comparison has no educational value what so ever. Why do we always compare students to one another? Why do we slow the curriculum down to ensure that one student who struggles will never be as good as the one who doesn’t. The gap between the more proficient student and the one who isn’t, gets wider. It’s not fair to either student. We need to compare to the standard and not other students. Analyze the gap. Why is one student not proficient? To analyze that gap teachers need to use common formative assessment and intervention. Being proficient means meeting a minimum standard. Getting beyond proficient to make a student meet the mastery standard requires enrichment.

Columbia University Teaching College came up with an equation.

QI+T=L Quality Instruction plus time equal learning. Instruction (variable) + Time (variable) = Learning (constant)

How schools are set up don’t meet the needs of all students or learning styles. Instruction (constant) + Time (constant in schools) = Learning (variable) The traditional way schools are set up are not effective. The system has to be challenged When students don’t learn, what went wrong…most likely the way we are teaching.

Our problem is not intellectual, but is cultural. Second idea is collaborative culture: Labor is the key. Working together. Collegiality is not a pre-requisite. You don’t have to like each to work together.

Third idea is focus on results. The results we are looking for is student learning.

There are the three ideas that PLC are based on.

Six Characteristics (which characteristics you model.)
 * Shared Mission, Vision, Value, and Goals ( Dr. Lazotte said you can’t hold people accountable until they know what is expected. If it hasn’t been defined, it’s hard to hold people accountable.) These are the pillars of a PLC.
 * Collective Inquiry – adult learning component of a PLC. Level of enlighten that takes place. (Shared behaviors)
 * Collaborative Culture – Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results – Albert Einstein.
 * Action Orientation and Experimentation
 * Continuous Improvement
 * Focus on Results – student learning

Reflection:


 * Rate your current level of effectiveness in each one on the six characteristics of a PLAC using a Likert scale of 1-5, with 1 being ineffective and 5 being very effective.
 * Discuss how you can improvement the two weakest areas of performance for the 2011-2012 school year.

What Results Matter? LEARNING
 * What do we want students to learn? Common reference doesn’t equal common understanding.
 * How do we know if they have learned? We know we have taught them. Just because a kid didn’t learn it, doesn’t mean it was taught poorly. We need to assess often. This is called common formative assessment.
 * How are we going to respond when kids don’t learn? Some are going to get it and some are not. Do you have a plan to plug in the gap from the data taught and data learned? Take a step back to fill the gap so the kid is not doomed from that point forward.
 * How do we respond when students have learned? Do we have a system of enrichment.

These are the four questions that guide our teams.

Two forms of Change in a PLC


 * Technical – Changing structural, school culture
 * Cultural – changing people’s belief, behavior: we have avoided this change

School Culture is not one dimensional. Strategies won’t work if it is not in an environment that supports success.


 * “Healthy” School Culture** – “Educators have an unwavering belief in the ability of all of their students to achieve success, and they pass that belief on to others in overt and covert ways. Educators create policies and procedures and adopt practices that support their beliefs in the ability of every student.” If you don’t developed uniformed philosophical beliefs, it will manifest itself in aggressive behavior. You must get your team to “buy in” and have a high belief in their ability that believe in each other. To be a //Healthy Culture//, what you say you believe has to support what you do. When those two things don’t match then you don’t have a healthy culture.


 * Toxic Cultures** – How does a toxic culture respond when students don’t have ideal characteristics (see slide). Toxic cultures are descriptive and deflective. They are very good at giving a good description of the problem. Educators are very good at deflecting the blame. This is not productive behavior.

In a healthy culture, educators will be dogmatic and prescriptive. Success is the ability to come together to solve your collective problems. How you respond to those problems makes you either healthy or toxic.


 * The Root of a Toxic Culture**

Frustration = “A feeling of anxiety as a result of the inability to perform a task.” How you respond to that frustration determines whether you are successful or not as a team. Why do people complain? Has no organizational value whatsoever. Feedback and communication has great organizational value. Complaining becomes damaging when it becomes a culture of complaining. There are two reasons to complain: Venting – psychologically venting is not necessarily a bad thing. When it becomes a crutch, it becomes a sense of co-dependency. We feel between but doesn’t change the performance. When venting becomes a habit, you miss a chance to improve the frustration. Validation – Everyone wants to feed the ego and be validated in their beliefs. It validates that I’m not responsible for the problem if you can find more people that share the same problem to make yourself feel better in where you are in the situation. We are finding coping mechanisms.

What part are you willing to do? || Yes: What part? No: How can we help you? You can’t. Do you understand learning? Do you have a better idea for extending what we teach in an activity class to the real world? ||
 * Frustration || Attempted Resolution ||
 * Lack of Communication || How can we help you?
 * Collaboration || Do you buy into the PLC?


 * Great to Good** by Jim Collins

What separates a healthy culture and a toxic culture? Analyzing a school culture based on Jim Collins ideas:


 * 1) 1. They seek and confront the “brutal facts.” Schools are good at this. They know how to seek and identify those brutal facts.
 * 2) 2. Collins said that great corporations managed to get the right people on the right bus. The bus represents a technical change needed for schools. Great organizations move swiftly from identifying the problem to collectively solving the problem. Bus is the team, everyone is going to the same place. Think about….How long does it take you and your team from talking about a problem to talking about solving the problem. The time between the two is called adult drama. In a healthy culture the time is shorter than in a toxic culture.

Why do we need to Collaborate?

//Because not one person can solve every problem.// A collaborate team is where people use their gifts and talents to move the organization forward. Our problems are too complex to solve alone. The issue we face as teachers are so complex, they can’t be saved alone. It’s unfair to be asked to solve everyone on your own. It helps you create a meaningful experience, a sense of being part of something larger than itself, a sense of being connected, and a sense of being generative. It creates a group IQ.

A collaborative culture
 * Develop teams – when you create a PLC, create the work first. This is what makes labor makes sense. Two very important components. In order to have a good team: interdependence and common goals. (Working interdependently to accomplish a goal)
 * Organize team structure and collaboration – Develop norms, this is not a wish list. Be specific. Your Mission: What do you value? What is the purpose? How will be celebrate student success? When you develop norms, also determine consequences to not following norms**. The Influencer**by Kerry Peterson. Peer pressure is a very effective tool. Norms don’t mean anything if you don’t hold people accountable. There are four things to teams
 * o Forming – putting your teams together
 * o Norming – developing norms for your team
 * o Storming – agreeably disagree
 * o Performing – you can’t get the benefit of the team without understanding the rules of teaming.
 * **//A team is only as good as the worst behavior you will tolerate.//**
 * If you care more about being liked than the success of your team, then the team will never be successful. Don’t care more about the person’s response than the team. It is important to have a productive team than to be liked by the team.

Teacher Curriculum – when the teacher gets smarter, the student benefits.
 * Review Critical Data – diverse leadership team that represent the diverse needs of the entire school. Data is objective and is pretty clear.
 * Choose Goals (no more than four/five goals) Don’t make subjective arguments.
 * Identify best literature/research that helps increase staff ability to meet goals. Each person takes one goal and reports back.
 * Develop study questions that applies the research to school’s current reality
 * Prepare study guide for teachers and place their curriculum for the entire school year.

Reflection
 * What is your current system of support for teacher learning?
 * Brainstorm ways that your school could possibly institutionalize a system of learning for educators.



What do we want students to learn?
 * Identify “essential standards/outcomes” – one of the problems is that we teach them too much at a surface level, but don’t teach the most important stuff in-depth. The difference between must know and nice to know. Power standards are must know.
 * o Endurance Skills – a skill student will use outside the classroom.
 * o Leverage skill – using a skill across the curriculum.
 * o Next level skill – requires vertical articulation skills.
 * Pace them per quarter
 * Identify instructional material necessary to ensure mastery of standards
 * OPI – other pertinent information

How do we know if they have learned?
 * Develop common formative assessments – A formative assessment is an ongoing assessment used for data feedback. A summative assessment is a summary of comparative scale. Summative do nothing to improve learning.
 * Common assessments measure if students can perform the desire task
 * Common assessment should be given at least each quarter in each core subject matter
 * //Common assessments should not exceed 25 questions. 17 for elementary(Assessment for learning by Rick Stiggins.)//
 * __Assessments should be developed by the teachers that teach the content.__ They are best qualified to recognize when a student is proficient or not. (Backward Design) The best formative assessment is daily classroom assignments and homework.
 * Assessment questions assess deeply; preferably deep than the state assessment. Get rid of multiple choice and true/false all together.

Leading schools in a data rich world – feedback is very important to how we assess.

Formative assessment is one of the most important thing as a PLC we can do. Validity is based on the relevance. What you are assessing has been taught. Real time feedback on what you taught your kids. Reliable is not as important. Validity trumps reliable every time except on standardized testing.

How you answer this question will determine if you are truly a PLC…..
 * How will we respond when students don’t learn?**

Characteristics of an Effective Intervention Program….
 * Urgent – When a student doesn’t learn something is there a sense of urgency?
 * Directive – Are all at-risk students “required” to receive help?
 * Timely – Extended time to learn essential standards, timely school response when students don’t learn
 * Targeted – Students who don’t do their work (intentional non-learners) and students who lack the skills to do their work (failed learners). Be specific enough to target why the students didn’t learn. Is each at-risk student receiving the “right” interventions? Are you suing data to identify these interventions? Putting all the kids with the same problem in one group is not good compared to why students have the same problem may be different.
 * Administered by Trained Professionals – Do you have the teacher with the right skills teaching the students that need those skills? Does that person have the appropriate skills to complete (or teach) that task.
 * Systematic – Do you have a system? Or is it a whim of how we fix learning problems or do we have a support system that is in place? There needs to be a system of intervention not an individual choice to get intervention.

**//__ This is how to scrutinize whether you have a good PLC. __//**