Results Now

How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning

Mike Schmoker

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416612582
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

According to author Mike Schmoker, there is a yawning gap between the most well-known essential practices and the reality of most classrooms. This gap persists despite the hard, often heroic work done by many teachers and administrators. Schmoker believes that teachers and administrators may know what the best practices are, but they aren't using them or reinforcing them consistently. He asserts that our schools are protected by a buffer--a protective barrier that prevents scrutiny of instruction by outsiders. The buffer exists within the school as well. Teachers often know only what is going on in their classrooms--and they may be completely in the dark about what other teachers in the school are doing. Even principals, says Schmoker, don't have a clear view of the daily practices of teaching and learning in their schools.

Schmoker suggests that we need to get beyond this buffer to confront the truth about what is happening in classrooms, and to allow teachers to learn from each other and to be supervised properly. He outlines a plan that focuses on the importance of consistent curriculum, authentic literacy education, and professional learning communities for teachers.

What will students get out of this new approach? Learning for life. Schmoker argues passionately that students become learners for life when they have more opportunities to engage in strategic reading, writing with explicit guidance, and argument and discussion.

Through strong teamwork, true leadership, and authentic learning, schools and their students can reach new heights. Results Now is a rally cry for educators to focus on what counts. If they do, Schmoker promises, the entire school community can count on unprecedented achievements.

Section III
Learning and Leading in the Professional Learning Community

Organizations only improve “where the truth is told and the brutal facts confronted.”

—Jim Collins

The chapters in this section contain three arguments:

In Chapter 8, that “professional learning communities” (by whatever name), if rightly defined, feature the most powerful set of structures and practices for improving instruction (see Appendix B, with noted signatories supporting this claim).

In Chapter 9, I will advocate, therefore, that the most powerful actions that leaders can take are those built around the fundamental concepts of learning communities. Leadership built on this foundation will not only be simpler, but will allow ordinary leaders to have an extraordinary impact on instruction and its improvement.

In Chapter 10, I will argue that we could create the schools we’ve dreamed of on a grand scale—but only if we learn to embrace 1) the brutal facts about the current state of school leadership, and 2) clarity and simplicity. We need to coordinate and reinforce the few simple actions and emphases that will have profound benefits at all levels—for states, districts, schools, classrooms, and students.

Chapter 8
Professional Learning Communities: The Surest, Fastest Path to Instructional Improvement

A successful face-to-face team is more than just collectively intelligent. It makes everyone work harder, think smarter and reach better conclusions than they would have on their own.

—James Surowiecki

Teachers from Havasupai Elementary School were returning from yet another much-hyped but time-wasting workshop. In the van driving home, they began to construct, on a yellow pad, a new reading program. It was largely based on what they already knew but hadn’t had a chance to organize or refine—the need to greatly increase time spent on meaningful reading and writing activities. Grade-level teams, with support from the principal, began to collaborate regularly and to conduct frequent common assessments, which helped them to see the impact of their efforts, by grade level, and to make adjustments to instruction. That year there were significant, and in some grades dramatic, gains in reading. The principal, seeing the results, wondered aloud why they hadn’t always done business this way.

We’ve seen how various forces have prevented instruction from being all it can be. And so, in these propitious times, what are the most practical, effective actions and arrangements for ensuring that instruction improves, meaningfully and steadily, in every discipline?

It may seem risky to claim that there is any “best” way to do anything. Nonetheless, a stunning number of researchers agree with Milbrey McLaughlin when she confidently asserts that

The most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is developing the ability for school personnel to function as professional learning communities. (in DuFour & Eaker, 1998, p. xi)

Professional learning communities have emerged as arguably the best, most agreed-upon means by which to continuously improve instruction and student performance. For reasons that will become clear, they succeed where typical staff development and workshops fail.

The concurrence of the research community on this approach is quite remarkable (see the collective statement in Appendix B). More stunning yet is how rare such learning communities are in our schools and districts. Although this concept is now embraced in virtually every other industry and profession, we are way behind in instituting it in schools (Wise, 2004; Wagner, 2004).

Learning Communities: Fundamental Concepts

But what are true “learning communities,” and why are they more effective than traditional staff development? Whether we call them “communities of practice” or “self-managing teams,” clarity is crucial. If we are sloppy here, failure will follow. We can’t afford, as Rick DuFour points out, to corrupt or co-opt the “fundamental concepts” of collaborative learning communities (2004). What are those fundamental concepts?

First, professional learning communities require that teachers establish a common, concise set of essential curricular standards and teach to them on a roughly common schedule. Teams need to consult their state assessment guides and other documents to help them make wise decisions about what to teach (and what not to teach).

Then they must meet regularly. I suggest that teams meet at least twice a month, for a minimum of 45 minutes, to help one another teach to these selected standards (I have seen great things come of 30-minute meetings). This time must be very focused; most of it must be spent talking in “concrete, precise terms” about instruction with a concentration on “thoughtful, explicit examination of practices and their consequences”—the results achieved with specific lessons and units (Little, 1990, p. 519). Or, as Bob Eaker asks, “Based on a collaborative analysis of the results of our efforts, what can we do to improve student learning?” (2002, p. 21). To perform this work, teachers must make frequent use of common assessments. These assessments (the use of which Doug Reeves refers to as the “gold standard” of true assessment literacy), are pivotal. With common assessments and results, teachers can conduct what Eaker calls “active research” where “a culture of experimentation prevails” (2002, p. 21).

These simple, fundamental concepts combine a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” (Marzano, 2003) with continual analysis of actual lessons and units, and improvement of instruction. These elements, so rarely emphasized in school or state improvement or accreditation plans, deserve our attention more than anything else we do in the name of school improvement (Schmoker, 2002). Failed attempts to establish professional learning communities can usually be traced to a lack of fidelity to these fundamental concepts.

Many educators are starting to define the ideal professional learning community as the entire school or district—including the state department. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is an excellent development, as long as we don’t lose sight of the central importance of small, instructionally focused teacher teams as the basic unit of professional learning communities. Indeed, schools will be much more successful when entire districts and state departments emphatically reinforce and support teacher teamwork and operate using the same empirical processes: the same team-based, short-term implementation, assessment, and adjustment cycle that effective teaching teams employ.

Getting Teamwork Wrong

Unfortunately, most so-called “teamwork” lacks these essential features. There are dangers here. Decades ago, Judith Little found that most team talk floats high above the level of implementation: “distant from the real work in and of the classroom” (1987, p. 507). Instead of closely and constructively examining practice, most teams serve to “confirm present practice without evaluating its worth”—in other words, without using short-term assessment results as the basis for improvement (1990, p. 517).

Almost 20 years later, the situation hasn’t changed. Little and her colleagues found that teams continue to discuss “wide-ranging issues” instead of looking closely and analytically at teaching, and at how their teaching affects learning on an ongoing basis. They found that the traditional ethos of the buffer—“non-interference, privacy, and harmony”—still prevails at the expense of improved instruction (Little et al., 2003).

We have to be very clear about what true teamwork entails: a regular schedule of formal meetings where teachers focus on the details of their lessons and adjust them on the basis of assessment results. The use of common assessments is essential here. Without these, teams can’t discern or enjoy the impact of their efforts on an ongoing basis. Enjoying and celebrating these short-term results is the very key to progress, to achieving “momentum” toward improvement (Collins, 2001a).

There are deeply practical reasons that team-based “learning communities” have become, in both education and industry, the state of the art for improving performance. As Tom Peters has written, self-managing teams have become “the basic organizational building block” in effective companies (1987, p. 297). Let’s look at the reasons why.

Why Professional Learning Communities? Why Now?

We have relied far too much, with miserable results, on a failed model for improving instructional practice: training, in the form of workshops or staff development. Despite the millions of teacher-hours we’ve invested in such training, it has, by common consent, been monumentally ineffective (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001; Guskey, 2003; Sparks, 2001a). In fact, Dennis Sparks, the executive director of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) urges schools to see that professional learning communities are indeed the best form of staff development (Sparks, 1998). We saw in Chapter 1 that the NSDC ran a series of blunt ads in Phi Delta Kappan (2004) decrying the ineffectiveness of most professional development (Sparks, 1998).

What’s missing? For one thing, professional development often is bad beyond hope. Second, most of it typically makes no formal, immediate arrangements for teachers to translate learning into actual lessons or units, whose impact we assess and then use as the basis for ongoing improvement. Without this simple cycle, training is irrelevant. Finally, training characteristically promotes a mentality of dependence. Training implies that teachers must depend on new or external guidance because they don’t know enough about instruction to begin making serious improvements. But teachers do have this capability—if, that is, they pool their practical knowledge by working in teams.

True learning communities work against such dependency. Unlike typical staff development, learning communities encourage teachers to recognize and share the best of what they already know. This approach insists on the fundamental elements that workshops routinely ignore: collective follow-up, assessment, and adjustment of instruction. In a five-year period during which Adlai Stevenson High School made immense achievement gains, not a single external staff development initiative was launched. Their gains were the result of internal expertise, shared and refined by groups of teachers.

Effective team-based learning communities—not workshops—are the very best kind of professional development. Other countries learned this long ago.

Lesson Study: Team-Based Continuous Improvement

In Japan and Germany, they don’t do professional development on the American model. Instead, school leaders arrange for teams of teachers to meet regularly to create—to craft and refine—lessons and teaching units until they have the maximum impact on student learning (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). The teacher teams carefully deliberate over each step and the best possible sequence of steps in the lesson; how to most effectively introduce and explain the concept; how much time to devote to practice exercises; and how to assess and adjust during and after each lesson and unit.

When a lesson works well, educators publish it (in books you can buy in convenience stores). Practitioners provide demonstration lessons for other teachers at “lesson fairs.” These fairs represent professional development at its best—conducted by professionals themselves.

If we think that training or “pro-dev” typically leads to such carefully crafted lessons, we are mistaken. This is the chief reason staff development has little or no impact on practice—or on learning results.

This simple approach may seem unexciting to some; there is no big send-off, no program launch—just regular team meetings, year after year, where teachers help one another find a better lesson for teaching subtraction with regrouping, or effective introductions to persuasive essays, for example.

Collins points out that the most powerful improvement actions will “appear boring and pedestrian” to those who love glitzy initiatives and programs (2001a, p. 142). We have to see how this seemingly mundane concern with creating, testing, and refining lessons and units, in teams, is the real—guaranteed—path to better instruction. Our resistance to such procedures represents no less than a battle over the soul of school improvement.

Teams vs. Workshops

A team of 5th grade teachers at Holaway Elementary School saw steady, considerable improvements at each consecutive team meeting. They learned, by analyzing their common assessment results, that their math rubric needed to be much more carefully taught (not just quickly explained), point by point, with examples and opportunities to practice and receive feedback; they learned that self-assessment also needed to be taught, and they learned from one another how to teach it, carefully and explicitly, so that students became less dependent on the teacher for their learning. And teachers learned to depend on their colleagues instead of outside experts.

Such results can be achieved anywhere, wherever people have learned that collective effort and intelligence are the most powerful force for improvement—more powerful than “even the most knowledgeable individuals working alone” (Little, 1990, p. 520). As Surowiecki discovered, teams are almost always “genuinely smarter than the smartest people within them” (2004, p. 182). Because of this, we must re-evaluate our workshops and standard-issue staff development, which have had such a miserable payoff. Workshops “do not work,” Stiggins points out, because they “don’t permit the application and experimentation in real classrooms, and sharing that experience in a team effort” (1999, p. 198). Teamwork, not training, fosters continuous, targeted attention to the details and the impact of effective lessons and units.

If we are going to conduct workshops, let’s insist on a radically different format: they should be designed on this same team-based, cyclical format that focuses immediately on producing lessons and then evaluating and refining them on the basis of results. If we’re smart, we’ll pilot workshops with only a single team (instead of an entire school or district) until the team produces a convincing body of short-term assessment results. In the main, let’s have our own teams provide professional development, by sharing their most successful lessons and units at “lesson fairs”—always with their assessment results (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Organized teamwork combined with such lesson fairs perfectly captures what is meant by a true “professional learning community.”

Fortunately, more educators are becoming at least familiar with “lesson study.” But it concerns me that many teachers still write it off as an exotic, time-consuming process that we can’t imitate or adapt. That is a misconception.

Making Lesson Study Our Own: The 20-Minute Team Meeting

In my workshops, I like to do a pared-down version of lesson study. I take teachers through an entire team meeting—from identifying a low-scoring standard, to roughing out an appropriate assessment, to building a lesson designed to help as many students as possible succeed on the assessment. We do all this—somewhat crudely—in less than 20 minutes. Once completed, we take a break, and then we posit that the lesson didn’t work as well as we’d like. So we make a revision or two.

The results can be surprising: teachers see that in even so short a time, they can collectively craft fairly coherent, effective standards-based lessons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Results Now
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Brutal Facts About Instruction and Its Supervision
• Section I. Reality and Illusion in Public Schools
• Section II. Literacy Education: The Greatest Opportunity of All
• Section III. Learning and Leading in the Professional Learning Community
• Conclusion: Why Not Us? Why Not Now?
• Appendix A. Suggestions for Teaching Critical and Argumentative Literacy
• Appendix B. Start Here for Improving Teaching and Learning
• Appendix C. Agreements
• Bibliography
• Related ASCD Resources: Improvements in Teaching and Learning
• About the Author
• Study Guide
• Copyright