Tim’s School Leadership Blog

The notion of professional learning communities has been around for some time and originates from the private sector. For decades, top companies have implemented communities of practice as a cultural expectation that engages employees in meaningful teamwork that recognizes the power of learning and sharing across the organization. Yet, in spite of numerous workshops and books that have been written in our field, PLC’s continue to falter in many schools. In such a critical time in public education, how can we improve the implementation and growth of professional learning communities in our schools?

Too often, schools send a group of teachers to a PLC conference and then ask them to implement them at the campus level. Principals and central office staff see their roles as supportive, but not directly engaged. Eventually, teachers become frustrated as the old culture of one size fits all (dictated by central office and campus administration) clashes with attempts to shift the decision making power to the classroom and teacher team levels. You can’t have both. What needs to change?

How many times I have heard school administrators declare victory soon after the implementation of a new program in their school! Really? With the plethora of variables that have an impact on student results, how can leaders be so sure that their new pet project is really getting results? Please weigh in on how we can do a more honest and effective job of informing our stakeholders about the impact of new initiatives!

Believe it or not, I once was a principal and associate superintendent in a school district for seven years and was never once evaluated by my superintendent. Would we accept this in other professions? Leaders are under a professional obligation to evaluate for the sake of the organization and ultimately, the customers. This means evaluating personnel as well as programs. When I was a principal of a large high school, I spent many hours writing detailed and comprehensive evaluations of my administrative team. Why? Because as their supervisor, I felt a professional obligation to have a major hand in each of their improvement plans for the coming year. Making them more effective leaders caused them to pay closer attention to their evaluation of faculty and program effectiveness. Why do schools spend so little time, evaluating their work? Where can we improve?

Why is it so difficult to find information on the results of a school? If you examine the website of most campuses, it is nearly impossible to find data that informs the public on the performance of the school. Advertising the state rating is not enough. Parents and community should be able to view student achievement data, attendance and discipline summaries, the percentage of students going to college, the educational degrees held by the faculty, and much more. If schools seek the support of their stakeholders, it is imperative that they communicate results that go beyond links to the state’s data base. Results are local and so should the communication. How can schools ramp up the quantity and quality of school results data provided to the public?

I have found it interesting that over the years, public schools have made numerous declarations of success when at the same time, student achievement results continue to paint a bleak picture of student learning in the U.S. Why? I suspect that too often we don’t properly evaluate the claims that are being made. We have a track record of implementing new initiatives and declaring immediate success using soft data such as opinion surveys and anecdotal stories. This leaves our public highly skeptical of schools. Superintendents do this every year when they declare improvements on state assessments, comparing this year’s 4th grade scores to last year’s 4th grade scores instead of comparing the results of the same group of children from one year to the next. How can educational leaders do a better job of evaluating the results?

Many schools include the tag, “lifelong learning,” in their mission statement as something we want to develop in each of our students. But when it comes to our own professional standards, we struggle with the notion of continued renewal and growth of our own skill sets. For example, in spite of research that clearly tells us that in order for students to succeed in classrooms, we must differentiate content, process, and assessment strategies. Yet, we continue to accept the presence of one size fits all instruction in most classrooms. How can leadership reengage teachers in lifelong learning?

Dr. William Sanders has continuously demonstrated that his Value Added system of tracking the longitudinal academic growth of students is spot on. Parent company, SAS provides rich data that shows the teacher effect size on each of the quintiles for a given classroom of students. We can actually see when a student only achieves half of a year of improvement in reading for a full year of attendance. With this data, we can not only track the growth of each individual student, but also identify teacher strengths and weaknesses so that improvements can be made in their performance. In spite of this, teachers unions continue to fight the implementation of value added systems, claiming that it is unfair to evaluate a teacher’s performance based upon test data. And in most cases, teacher unions have been successful in blocking parents from this information. What do you think?

Effective leaders are highly connected to daily work that is purposeful. Instead of spending a lot of time conducting tasks and routine work, they focus their efforts on those things that count so that by the end of the day, their leadership energy has been consumed by their purpose for leading. In such a busy profession, how do you keep your daily work focused on the big picture?

Effective teaching impacts student achievement far beyond any other variable that exists on a school campus. This has been well documented in the research and should cause school districts to invest considerable time and resources into the teacher selection, mentoring, coaching, and evaluation processes. We have a responsibility to measure teacher performance solely on the ability to get significant academic growth in each student assigned to a given teacher. Yet, critics claim that this is unfair and that we should also include other measures to soften the overall evaluation of teachers, especially when student achievement results fall short of expectations. Wrong! The first and most important job of teaching is to cause learning and thus, the academic results of students assigned to a teacher should be the card that trumps everything else. Great teachers get great results. Who would want their child assigned to anyone else? Effective leaders invest the majority of their time in mentoring great teachers, dismissing ineffective ones, and making sure that every vacancy is filled with the best teacher available.