June 2008
Kathy S. Emeigh
Assist. Director of Curriculum, IU 20
610-515-6546
[email protected]
How do you have meaningful
conversations about student
achievement in your buildings?
Training Methods & Levels of Impact
Joyce & Showers (1980)
Method: Didactic presentations of theory
and concepts
Level of Impact: Awareness
Evidence of Impact: Participant can
articulate general concept and identify
problems
Training Methods & Levels of Impact
Joyce & Showers (1980)
Method: Modeling/Demonstration (i.e. live,
video)
Level of Impact: Conceptual
Understanding
Evidence of Impact: Participant can articulate
concepts clearly and describe appropriate
actions
Training Methods & Levels of Impact
Joyce & Showers (1980)
Method: Practice in protected or simulated
situations with immediate feedback
Level of Impact: Skill Acquisition
Evidence of Impact: Participant can begin
to use skills in structured or simulated
situations
Training Methods & Levels of Impact
Joyce & Showers (1980)
Method: Coaching & Supervision during
application
Level of Impact: Application
of Skills
Evidence of Impact: Participant can use
skills flexibly in actual settings.
Results-driven Planning for
Professional Learning Schmoker

What do STUDENTS need to know?

What do Teachers need to know and be
able to do to ensure student success?

What professional learning will ensure
educators acquire the necessary
knowledge and skills?
Agenda for Keeping Meaningful
Conversations Alive!

It’s time to ask yourself, what do you
believe?

How do you communicate your goals?

What strategies/routines enhance and
facilitate communication?
Pair - Share

"The problem is not tests per se but the failure… to
be results focused and data driven. Coaches
regularly adjust performance in light of ongoing
results, even dramatically altering their lesson
plans in light of unexpectedly poor results."
Grant Wiggins

“A rapidly growing number of schools have made a
momentous discovery: When teachers regularly
and collaboratively review assessment data for the
purpose of improving practice to reach measurable
achievement goals, something magical happens.”
Michael J. Schmoker
“Professionally skim:”

What does meaningful conversation look
like?

….

….
How do we go from intuition to
fruition?

Intuition - instinctive knowing (without the
use of rational processes)

Fruition –
 1. Realization of something desired or worked for;
accomplishment: labor finally coming to fruition.
 2. Enjoyment derived from use or possession.
 3. The condition of bearing fruit.
How To “Build” Collaboration:

Articulate:

Communicate:

Speculate:

Cogitate:

Demonstrate:
“ate”
Latin Suffix – to do, or act upon, to
do something with
Where should schools begin?

Focus on a few things:
1. Measurable goals
○
Your energy is diffused by trying to tackle too
much.
Or, if what you are trying to accomplish, or the
problem you are trying to solve, is too vague,
your efforts get diluted.
“A Goal” – reserve that one word for a subject
area.
○
○

“This year we’re going to improve in math, from 47% of
the kids reaching proficient, to 50%.”
Schmoker, 2001
Measurable Goals: Criteria for
Effective Goals
(Schmoker, 1999)





15
Measurable
Annual: reflecting an increase over the
previous year of the percentage of students
achieving mastery.
Focused, with occasional exceptions, on
student achievement.
Linked to a year-end assessment or other
standards-based means measuring
established level of performance.
Written in simple, direct language that can
be understood by almost any audience.
Where should schools begin?

Focus on a few things:
2. Look at your data – assessment data
1. Determine areas of weakness – areas of
“opportunity.”
2. Look for patterns and trends.
3. Look for those high-leverage areas where
kids aren’t dong so well.
Schmoker, 2001
Where should schools begin?

Focus on a few things:
3. Bring the real resource, teacher expertise, to the
scheme.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Collaborative structures/meetings
Begin with a simple agenda
Agendas focused on problems that the students are
having.
Find those patterns and trends….
Generate solutions to those problems
Gather and analyze those results.
Schmoker, 2001
Strategies and Routines to promote collegial
collaboration and communication:

Professional Learning Communities
 School perceptions – Are you a learning organization?
 Fostering healthy conversations

30 Minute Meeting

Protocols to examine student work

PASS – Principal Alignment for Student Success
Isolation: The Enemy of Improvement?
Just leave me alone
and let me teach!
What are the consequences of
teacher isolation in schools?
Building and Fostering Collegial
Conversation through the “PLE”

Professional – someone with expertise
in a specialized field.

Learning – Suggest ongoing action and
perpetual curiosity.

Community – a group linked by common
interests.

In a Professional Learning Community:
 All these characteristics are present
○ See tools to help develop a collaborative
culture in your schools.
 All educators create an environment that
fosters mutual cooperation, emotional
support, and personal growth.
 All educators work together to achieve what
they could not accomplish alone.
www.allthingsplc.info
Professional Learning Teams
Why create them?
To improve professional
development by encouraging
teachers to recognize and share the
best of what they already know.
(Schmoker, 2006)
Effective team-based learning communities – not
workshops –
are the very best kind of professional development!
Professional Learning Teams
Why create them?
To improve student achievement
by assuring that instruction at each
grade level builds on the previous
year and prepares students for
success in the next grade level.
Professional Learning Teams
The basic structure of the professional
learning team is a group that shares a
common purpose.
(DuFour and Eaker, 1998)
What would be the common
purpose of a grade level,
social studies Professional
Learning Team?
Professional Learning Teams
Until a school has clarified what
students should know and be
able to do and the dispositions
they should acquire as a result of
schooling, its staff cannot
function as a professional
learning community.
(DuFour and Eaker, 1998)
Four Focused Questions
1. What do we want students to know and be
able to do?
2. How will we know when they know it?
3. What will we do if they don’t know it?
4. What can we do to extend understanding?
( DuFour and Eaker, 1998)
Professional Learning Teams
Finding time for collaboration:
Provide common preparation time.
 Use parallel scheduling.
 Adjust start and end times.
 Share classes.
 Use scheduled time for group activities, events,
and testing.
 Bank time.
 Use in-service and faculty meeting time wisely.

(DuFour, et.al., 2006)
Listen to the story of a teacher….

What were the unwritten rules this teacher
lived by?

Why did she return to those rules after a 3
year leave of absence to work in professional
development role?

What recommendations could help teachers
transform their practice?

Why is the isolated classroom scenario not
working anymore?
Assessing your environment:
 Shared
and supportive leadership
 Shared Values and Vision
 Collective Learning and Application
 Shared Personal Practice
 Supportive Conditions and Capacities
(Structures, Relationships)
Building Collaborative Teams

Build a community of listeners

Developing effective dialogue through
the use of protocols
What are protocols?

Agreed upon guidelines for a
conversation
 Permits a focused kind of conversation to
occur

Vehicles for building the skills and
culture necessary for collaborative work
 Actually creates a culture of trust by actually
doing substantive work together
www.lasw.org/protocols.html
Why use a protocol?

Makes is safe to ask challenging
questions of each other

Makes the most of the time
Important note!!

The point of a protocol is not to “do” the
protocol well, but to have an in-depth,
insightful, conversation about teaching
and learning.
The 30 Minute Meeting:

A protocol created for short, focused
meetings aimed at achieving real,
measurable results based on an agreedupon goal.

Getting from “intuition” to “fruition”
Examining Student Work:
Assessment Literacy
The capacity of teachers to examine
student achievement data and student
work.
 The capacity to create/develop and
implement classroom and school
improvements plans designed to get better
results.
 The capacity to positively enter the debate
and be influential in the discussions about
the uses and misuses of achievement data.

Examining Student Work

Schools need to examine, simply and
conscientiously, the number of students
who can compute, calculate, analyze
and compose.

Discuss the implications of where there
are strengths and where there are
weaknesses.
Examining Student Work

From there:
 And this is where we fall down –

Instead of just talking….

Adjust instruction in a way that enables
more students to compute and calculate
and analyze and compose
“PASS” –
Principal Alignment for
Student Success

Goals:
 “They constantly remind students, staff and
the community that the core purpose of the
school is teaching and learning.”
 Increase learning for all students
 Increase purposeful and practical support for
teachers and their pedagogy

The three surefire ways to kill your
collaborative efforts
1. Ignore input
2. Use the collaborative processes in
evaluation
3. Allow “planning time” to become a time
for other things (like disseminating
information that could be shared other
ways)
41

…and some advice on keeping it going
1. Time for “do the data” is essential
2. Share data in multiple formats – graphs
as well as charts
3. Illuminate your successes, especially
the small ones!
42
Final Thoughts:
“Collegiality
among teachers, as measured
by the frequency of communication, mutual
support, help, etc., was a strong indicator of
implementation success. Virtually every
research study on the topic has found this to
be the case”
(Fullan, 1991, p. 132).
43
Warning:
“Much of what we call teamwork
or collegiality does not favor nor
make explicit what should be its
end: better results for children …
the weaker, more common forms
of collegiality ‘serve only to
confirm present practice without
evaluating its worth’.”
(Schmoker, p. 15).
Professional Learning Teams
Read more about Professional Learning Teams:

DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional learning
communities at work: Best practices for enhancing
student achievement. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., & Many, T. (2006).
Bloomington, Ind.: Solution Tree.

Langer, G., Colton, A., & Goff, L. (2003). Collaborative
analysis of student work: Improving teaching and
learning. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

Schmoker, Mike. (2006) Results now: How we can
achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and
learning. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

http://www.msdconline.org/Newsletters/
msdc_2006-09.pdf