Cultures Built to Last. Michael Fullan
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helped 90 percent or more of its students achieve proficiency in mathematics and language arts, transform itself into a system where nineteen of its twenty-seven schools achieved this benchmark goal in just a few years?
• How did Whittier Union High School District in California steadily improve student achievement in all of its schools at the same time the percentage of its students living in poverty skyrocketed from 40 percent to 80 percent?
• How did Blue Valley School District in Kansas move student achievement from good to great—and then sustain greatness year after year?
In each case, district leaders maintained a commitment to and focus on building the individual and collective capacity of educators throughout the district. In each case, the district provided educators with the ongoing clarity and support to help them succeed at what they were being asked to do. In short, they worked to ensure that every school in their districts was functioning as a PLC.
It is revealing that successful districts—those effective at districtwide reform within all of their schools—not only have used PLC principles in their reform, but have also tended to be committed to larger-scale reform efforts within their states. This is a crucial point. Successful districts think bigger—beyond their boundaries—and could become great resources for statewide reform. Indeed, our message is that the entire system—whole-system reform—must become the focus of future change efforts.
There are fewer examples of statewide or provincewide reform efforts involving all the schools and districts in the system. The Wallace Foundation study (Louis et al., 2010) concluded that few states in the United States had developed comprehensive approaches to education reform, that they tended to focus on mandates rather than capacity building, and that they offered very limited guidance for specific approaches to improving teaching and learning. On the other hand, a series of reports on the most effective school systems in the world conducted over several years by Sir Michael Barber, Mona Mourshed, and Chinezi Chijioke (Barber & Mourshed, 2007, 2009; Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010) for the McKinsey Group identified provincial and national policies that led to higher levels of student learning.
Ontario provides one case study. From 2003 to the present, the province has engaged in deliberate strategies for system reform across its 72 districts, which include 4,000 elementary schools and 900 secondary schools. A focus on learning, capacity building, wise and thorough use of data, and identifying and spreading good practice are all integrated in the Ontario strategy. Fostering leadership at all levels has been a core part of Ontario’s success that includes a substantial increase in literacy learning across the 4,000 schools, as well as major gains in high school graduation rates—from 68 percent to 83 percent in the 900 secondary schools (Fullan, 2013a).
Delaware offers an example of a statewide attempt to implement the PLC process on a systemic basis. In 2009, then state Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery worked with the state’s forty-one Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to gain support for building educator capacity by using PLCs as a cornerstone of Delaware’s educational agenda. The commitment to PLCs was evident in Delaware’s application for a Race to the Top (RTTT) award in 2010. It stipulated that the state’s instructional improvement system would include “collaborative planning time in which teachers analyze student data, develop plans to differentiate instruction in response to data, and review the effectiveness of prior actions” (Delaware Department of Education [DDOE], 2010, p. c27, emphasis in original). The application also explained that the system was to “provide teachers, principals, and administrators with meaningful support and actionable data to systematically manage continuous instructional improvement, including such activities as instructional planning, gathering information with the support of rapid-time reporting; using this information to inform decisions on appropriate next instructional steps; and evaluating the effectiveness of the action taken. Such systems promote collaborative problem solving and action planning” (DDOE, 2010, p. c27).
The application also stipulated specific action steps that would be taken to support PLCs. Included among those steps were the following (DDOE, 2010):
• All core subject teachers of grades 3 through 12 would be organized into “small relevant groups such as six third- and fourth-grade teachers” to work collaboratively toward “instructional improvement.”
• These collaborative groups would receive at least ninety minutes of collaborative time per week, and teachers would be required to attend.
• Collaborative time would be considered sacred and not used for other purposes.
• Teachers in these groups would examine achievement data on their own students and use the data to inform, adjust, and improve their instruction and accelerate student learning.
• The state would provide data coaches for two years to support schools throughout the state in implementing the initiative and building their internal capacity to continue creating a collaborative culture focused on evidence of student learning.
• School administrative teams and data coaches would meet monthly to discuss the status of the work.
• Administrators would take steps to remediate a teacher or teachers who did not participate in the collaborative team or were disruptive to the team process.
The application articulated three specific goals the state hoped to achieve by providing educators with time to collaborate:
1. Creating cultural acceptance for sharing data among peers and leaders
2. Helping educators build the necessary technical skills to access and analyze achievement data from a variety of sources
3. Ultimately to improve the content knowledge and pedagogical skills of teachers so they could revise instructional strategies in response to evidence of student learning (DDOE, 2010)
When Delaware was named one of the first two states to receive the RTTT award, every district and charter school in the state, as well as their education associations, agreed to implement common weekly planning time for at least core content teachers. Furthermore, the department stipulated that the collaborative team meetings were to be considered sacred time that would never be pre-empted by other meetings or activities. State and district leaders were convinced, however, that providing teacher teams with coaching and building the capacity of school leaders to effectively coach were critical to the success of the initiative. So DDOE contracted with an education software and assessment company to provide twenty-nine data coaches to support schools throughout the state. These coaches not only modeled effective coaching language and strategies but also supported professional learning by facilitating nonthreatening data conversations with both teachers and administrators.
Between February and June of 2011, the state piloted the program with over five hundred teachers in twenty schools in seven LEAs and held focus groups with those involved to get feedback on ways to improve. With the beginning of the 2011–2012 school year, the program was implemented throughout the nearly two hundred schools in the state.
Although the DDOE stipulated the conditions listed earlier as prerequisites for participation, LEAs had considerable discretion regarding implementation. Some provided teachers with one ninety-minute block for collaboration while others used two forty-five-minute blocks. Some organized teachers into teams by content, others by grade level, and still others created interdisciplinary teams. Some districts assigned data coaches to work directly with their schools, while other districts used the coaches to train their own staff to facilitate team meetings. The DDOE used broad guidelines to clarify the focus and purpose of the meetings, but meetings were not scripted, nor were teachers asked to adhere to a single agenda template for meetings.
At the end of the first full year of implementation, the percentage of students in the state scoring proficient in reading increased from 61 percent to 68 percent and in mathematics from 62 percent to 69 percent. Every grade level and every subgroup experienced improvement, and the percentage of students scoring advanced proficient increased in both subject areas (DDOE, 2012b). As Donna Lee Mitchell of the DDOE’s Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Unit reports, “Everyone from the Governor Jack Markell, to our new Secretary of Education Mark Murphy, to administrators, and teachers throughout the state attribute much of our improvement