1. Keeping Meaningful Conversations Alive!
June 2008
Kathy S. Emeigh
Assist. Director of Curriculum, IU 20
Keeping Meaningful Conversations Alive!

2. How do you have meaningful conversations about student achievement in your buildings?
How do you have meaningful conversations about student achievement and school improvement now in your buildings?
Do the Ten Expectations for quality Professional learning handout
Throughout our time together, I will be turning your attention to a myriad of ways that you can foster collaboration and effective communication among your learning communities…. At the end, see how many you can state>>>

3. 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 1
inclined to teach or lecture others too much:
“a boring, didactic speaker.”
Where does the majority of your professional development fall? Which category resonates with the way you experienced PD?

4. 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 2

5. 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 3

6. 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. 4

7. 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?
As we share and collaborate today, we want to keep these three questions “powering” and focusing our discussion.

8. 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?
What DO you believe?
What IS your vision/goal for your students/teachers/community???
What are the ways that you can walk your talk? – to communicate your vision, make it a part of your community and be successful with your goals.
How and when can you foster meaningful conversation? How do you foster an environment of communication and dialogue that promotes a school culture that is not toxic but instructional??

9. 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
Think pair share – Do you believe these statements????
Does your staff believe these statements.
Read this and think about it. Note any phrases that resonate with you or thoughts/impressions that come to your mind.
Pair up and share your thoughts with the intent of choosing a thought you want to share with the group.
Groundrules: no thought is ridiculous
you can trust that what you say here is confidential and collegial
(Discussion is intended to surface discussion around school improvement that is founded on collegial trust and discussion…. And beginning to think about and alter our current practice as school administrators)

10. “Professionally skim:”
What does meaningful conversation look like? ….
Professionally skim the article. This is another routine that you can develop with your staff to set the stage to get them communicating.
Using the article “Reflections of an Administrator” - what resonates with you?
Purpose is to move from intuition to fruition…..

11. 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.
What really resonated with me and the article was when the administrator realized that he had to practice the routines associated with collaborative and meaningful meetings.
I love words and had to look up the meanings.
This is a slide for you to ponder/reflect upon individually. Where do you stand? Do you hold meetings and hope that they will bear fruit…. That there will be enjoyment derived from the meetings,…. That the desired result will actually happen and be measurable?

12. How To “Build” Collaboration:
Articulate:
Communicate:
Speculate:
Cogitate:
Demonstrate:
Articulate:
We need to “hone” our abilities to articulate instructional goals and best practice.
Communicate:
Facilitate conversations/communication specifically tied to student achievement. (Look at the goals that many people have at their schools. How many of them are really tied to student achievement???)
Speculate:
We build collaboration to support and challenge teachers/administrators, our colleagues to question the status quo and to take risks
Cogitate:
We build collaboration to model ongoing inquiry and learning.
Demonstrate:
We build a collaborative environment when we demonstrate congruence between the talk and the walk.

13. “ate” Latin Suffix – to do, or act upon, to do something with
Do we build a school culture that moves into a culture that is supportive, trusting, and accomplishes the vision to improve students’ lives and futures.
What are we doing now? Are we agitating? Are we “barbituating?” – dulling the responses of our colleagues?
Do we really coach? Look at Mo Cheeks. How does he coach? What does he do that is out of the box? And what were the results?

14. 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%.”
How Many Goals?
That’s your goal. Then you look at – the sub goals. You look at those specifric areas identified in your assessment data. You look at specific subgroups.
What’s a good number of goals? – It seems to me that a goal, an annual improvement goal, is worth its salt, it’s a goal for which you are willing to meet a minimum of once a month.
So if you have two goals, that’s two meetings a month. And if those monthly meetings are 30 some minutes – which is really enough time to get a lot of good work done.
Two meetings in the economy of all the stuff that goes on in any school is probably about as much as we can handle.
Why measurable? – what fuels our desire, energy, our imagination, to reach a goal is a vivid sense of the desired outcome. Stephen Covey’s – “begin with the end in mind.” If we really know what that end is, we’ll know if we’ve gotten there… if we haven’t, or if we exceeded the goal. If you take that out of the game, you remove a lot of good motivation, and that’s essential to anything we accomplish.
Schmoker, 2001

15. Measurable Goals: Criteria for Effective Goals (Schmoker, 1999)
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.
Here you could look at “sample” paayp and have the group decide on specific goals… could use the Getting Results Examples. OR, think back to your data discussions from yesterday. From the data that you know, what are possible goals for your school?

16. Where should schools begin?
Focus on a few things:
Look at your data – assessment data
Determine areas of weakness – areas of “opportunity.”
Look for patterns and trends.
Look for those high-leverage areas where kids aren’t dong so well.
To help you determine your goals you must take a look at your data… assessment data.
Schmoker, 2001

17. Where should schools begin?
Focus on a few things:
Bring the real resource, teacher expertise, to the scheme.
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.
If it gets more complicated than this, it tends to bog down; it’s nowhere as productive.
Benefits of analyzing data – be sure to look for the patterns and trends. This is more important that looking at every individual child’s performance. If you’ve got 30 or 150 kids, and you can find the predominant patterns of weakness amongst those students, the time and creative energy that you devote to those predominant patterns is going to pay off for the greatest number of individual students.
Schmoker, 2001

18. 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

19. Isolation: The Enemy of Improvement?
Just leave me alone and let me teach!
What are the consequences of
teacher isolation in schools?
Schmoker, Mike. (2006) Results now: How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and learning. ASCD: Alexandria, Va.
We’ve all heard teachers say, and probably said so ourselves at some point in our careers, “Just leave me alone and let me teach!” Should school leaders just leave teachers alone? Will they do their best if we leave them alone?
In an effort to respect a teacher’s professional privacy and decision making, many administrators, teachers and other school personnel, have established a culture of isolation.
Schmoker titled chapter 2 of his Results Now book “Isolation: The Enemy of Improvement.” What do you think Schmoker means? What are some of the consequences of isolation?

20. 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.
Define each word of the phrase “Professional Learning Community”
Professional – this person is an individual who has not only pursued advanced training to enter the field, but who is also expected to remain current in its evolving knowledge base. The knowledge base of education has expanded dramatically in the past quarter century, both in terms of research and in terms of the articulation of recommended standards for the profession. Although many school personnel are unaware of or are inattentive to emerging research and standards, educators in a professional learning community make these findings the basis of their
collaborative investigation of how they can better achieve their goals.
Learning -“Learning” suggests ongoing action and perpetual curiosity. In Chinese, the term “learning” is represented by two characters: the first means “to study”, and the second means “to practice constantly.” Many schools operate as though their personnel know everything they will ever need to know the day they enter the
profession. The school that operates as a professional learning community recognizes that its members must engage in the ongoing study and constant practice that characterize an organization committed to continuous improvement.
Community - Much has been written about learning organizations, but we prefer the term “community.” An organization has been defined both as an “administrative and functional structure” (Webster’s Dictionary) and as “a systematic arrangement for a definite purpose” (Oxford Dictionary). In each case, the emphasis is on
structure and efficiency. In contrast, however, the term “community” suggests a group linked by common interests. As Corrine McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson
(1994) write:
Community means different things to different people. To some it is a safe haven where survival is assured through mutual cooperation. To others, it is a place of emotional support, with deep sharing and bonding with close
friends. Some see community as an intense crucible for personal growth. For others, it is simply a place to pioneer their dreams.

21. 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.

22. 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)
Schmoker, Mike. (2006) Results now: How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and learning. ASCD: Alexandria, Va.
Chapter 8 - Professional Learning Communities: The Surest, Fastest Path to Instructional Improvement
“Professional learning communities have emerged as arguably the best, most agreed-upon means by which to continuously improve instruction and student performance.”
“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…Effective team-based learning communities—not workshops—are the very best kind of professional development. Other countries learned this long ago…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 maximum impact on student learning.”
Effective team-based learning communities – not workshops –
are the very best kind of professional development!

23. 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.
This is critical part of the process for Science and Social Studies where the Ohio Achievement Tests are based upon grade-band skills and knowledge.

24. 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?
The common purpose of a grade-band team in social studies could be:
Ensuring student understanding of benchmark-level concepts;
Ensuring that content is taught across grade levels, reinforcing and building on content from year to year;
Sharing responsibility for teaching of the content and skills within the grade-band;
Planning thematic units;
Creating common assessments;
Reviewing and selecting resources.

25. 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)
What students should know and be able to do is delineated in the Ohio Academic Content Standards and local curricula.

26. 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)
DuFour and Eaker suggest these questions for team consideration.
One very simple protocol for student learning and PLC discussion.

27. Organized Abandonment: Deciding What NOT to Teach
Having a clear curriculum focus means that teachers in a learning community not only identify together what students should know and be able to do, they also decide what not to teach.
(DuFour and Eaker, 1998)
Discuss: Why is ‘deciding what NOT to teach’ so important for social studies teachers to discuss?
A large part of curriculum development is deciding what to and not to teach. Social Studies, as an integrated view of history, people in societies, geography, economics, government and citizenship, has the potential to include an overwhelming amount of content. Many teachers have their ‘favorite subjects’ and often plan extensive study into these topics. But, how much can one realistically ‘cover’ in a year? When should teachers favor depth over breadth?
Teams of teachers should plan to review their curriculum and instructional plans to determine where they are most closely aligned to the academic content standards and where the alignment may be tenuous. Some tough decisions then need to be made – what stays and what goes? What can we reasonably expect our students to learn during this school year or grade-band? Do our favorite activities really support student learning of the grade-level indicators and benchmarks?
Why is this particularly important in social studies?

28. Collaborative Curriculum Development
The benefits of collaborative curriculum development:
Enables teachers to be more focused in their planning;
Ensures attention to a common curriculum;
Results in the development of better tests;
Enables teachers to identify student weaknesses;
Provides teachers with useful feedback;
Motivates teachers to continually improve;
Ensures systematic collaboration.
(DuFour and Eaker, 1998)

29. 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)
From Dufour, et.al., 2006, p.95-96: “One of the ways in which organizations demonstrate their priorities is allocation of resources, and in schools, one of the most precious resources is time.”
DuFour, et.al., suggest:
Provide common preparation time: build the master schedule to provide daily common preparation time.
Use parallel scheduling: schedule common preparation time by assigning students to specialists at the same time across grade-levels or subject areas.
Adjust start and end times: start the morning for teachers early to allow for team meetings, students can be supervised by administrative staff. At the end of the day teachers may leave early while students attend other activities.
Share classes: plan for bi-monthly activities that would combine classes/grade-levels so as to free up teachers for team meetings. Activities like literacy buddies, peer tutoring, tutoring younger students, etc.
Schedule group activities, events, and testing: during non-instructional events students can be supervised in larger group by administrative staff, freeing up teachers for team meetings.
Bank time: extend the instructional day by a few minutes for a set amount of time to ‘bank’ time. After the desired amount of time is ‘banked’, an early student dismissal can be planned so the entire faculty has collaborative time available.
Use in-service and faculty meeting time wisely: schedule time for teacher teams to work together during staff development days. Use faculty meeting time for collaborative planning, rather than announcements and/or other items that can be distributed via or memos.
STOP DROP JOT – so what? What difference does this make in my planning?
Now what? What steps can I take to do the most with what I’ve heard?
Stop, Drop, and Jot!

30. 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?
Read “The Story of a Teacher on page vi in “A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams” SERVE 2005

31. Assessing your environment:
Shared and supportive leadership
Shared Values and Vision
Collective Learning and Application
Shared Personal Practice
Supportive Conditions and Capacities (Structures, Relationships)
Look at the PLC packet and have the participants choose one of the two instruments to rate their own buildings…
Then have the group action plan to create a learning community….

32. Building Collaborative Teams
Build a community of listeners
Developing effective dialogue through the use of protocols
Fun listening activity…. “The Wright Family”

33. 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
Protocols provide support, foundation so that teachers and administrators can do the hard work that they need to.
They keep professional conversations alive…. Tennis match example – a good game of tennis is when both players are hitting the ball back and forth. What would happen to the tennis match, if every time the opposite player received your volley, they caught the ball and set it down. Match dies… Same with conversations. You need to know the rules to keep the conversations going.. And winning!
See the Mike schmoker. Team Protocols/norms

34. Why use a protocol?
Makes is safe to ask challenging questions of each other
Makes the most of the time
A protocol creates a structure that makes it safe to ask challenging questions of each other; it also ensures that there is some equity and parity in terms of how each person's issues are attended to. The presenter has the opportunity not only to reflect on and describe an issue or a dilemma, but also to have interesting questions asked of him or her, AND to gain differing perspectives and new insights. Protocols build in a space for listening, and often give people a license to listen, without having to continuously respond.
In schools, many people say that time is of the essence, and time is the one resource that no one seems to have enough of. Protocols are a way to make the most of the time people do have.

35. 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.
Let’s practice! Looking at student work!

36. The 30 Minute Meeting:
A protocol created for short, focused meetings aimed at achieving real, measurable results based on an agreed-upon goal.
Getting from “intuition” to “fruition”
Briefly explain the idea of a 30 minute meeting. What does the group see as the value of this kind of protocol?
In order to make these ideas a part of our practice and to be able to determine if we really want to use these protocols, we have to actually do them.
So, we will practice:
Have the group split into small groups – to review the 30 minute model

37. 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.
By examining student we, the teachers and administrators, become assessment literate.
We can actually see all our initiatives and teaching and PD come to fruition in our students work.
The main problem with educational systems and corresponding innovation and policy making is that they are intrinsically, endemically, and inevitably overloaded and fragmented (Fullan 1999).
Therefore the main solutions have to be ones that contribute to “coherence making” and “connectedness.” One of those solutions is what we call assessment literacy (Hargreaves and Fullan 1998)
The capacity of teachers (individually, but especially together) to examine student achievement data and student work, and make critical sense of it.
The more difficult capacity of developing and implementing the classroom and school improvement plans arising from the data and designed to get better results
SO, we have to know the standards and criteria for success. Look at the Appendix A and B to get an idea of this student work we will review next.,

38. 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.
Looking at student work.
Show the first part of the video, Collaborating for high standards.
split into two, choose a facilitator, and examine the student work for setting performance standards.

39. 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

40. “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

41. The three surefire ways to kill your collaborative efforts
Ignore input
Use the collaborative processes in evaluation
Allow “planning time” to become a time for other things (like disseminating information that could be shared other ways)
Taken from:
Event Archive
Feedback

42. …and some advice on keeping it going
Time for “do the data” is essential
Share data in multiple formats – graphs as well as charts
Illuminate your successes, especially the small ones!
Taken from:
Event Archive
Feedback

43. 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).

44. 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).

45. 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.