We received a question from a high school administrator who asked which group of students the school should focus on in order to improve the school’s achievement on the high-stakes tests administered by the state. He wrote, “We have received conflicting information about which levels to give the most attention. For example, should we concentrate more of our efforts on students moving from far below basic to below basic, from below basic to basic, or from basic to proficient?” We know that many schools are attempting to determine the best strategies for improving achievement on state tests, and so the question is not unique to this school.

Here is my response:

I received your question about which quartile you should focus on in your efforts to improve student achievement on the state tests your students must take. The answer is, you must focus on each and every student who demonstrates he or she is not learning. How you respond will be different, but your goal should be to give any student who struggles additional time and support for learning in a way that is timely, directive, and systematic.

For example, what is your plan for the students who are far below basic? At our high school, we adjusted their schedule so that they would have a double dose of language arts, with one period devoted to intensive reading instruction. We also built at least one hour per day into their schedule for intensive small-group instruction or individualized tutoring, even if the tutoring came from a member of the National Honor Society who was fulfilling a service requirement. Our plan was that by the end of two years, we would have the student achieving at grade level.

That didn’t mean we were inattentive to other students who were struggling to grasp a skill or concept in a particular course. Our goal was to monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis (every three weeks), and as soon as the student experienced difficulty that put him or her in danger of failing, we required the student to devote extra time to learning the concept in a way that never removed the student from new, direct instruction in the regular classroom. Again, this meant we had to create a schedule that gave us access to kids during the school day who needed extra support.

Your commitment must be to help all kids learn at the highest levels. You don’t pick and choose. Education is not a zero sum game. Helping one group of students learn does not take learning away from other students. A rising tide raises all boats. In our latest book, Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap, we looked at student achievement in 38 different schools that were using the PLC process (including a purposeful, systematic plan for intervention for any student who struggled). In every case, student achievement rose dramatically in each quartile. Students who had failed to demonstrate proficiency in the past became proficient. Students who were proficient in the past became advanced proficient.

Your question seems to suggest you are attempting to beat the state test, to game the system. That is very understandable given the emphasis put on state testing. But I encourage you to take another approach. Embrace the idea that in your school, collaborative teams of teachers will work together to ensure clarity on what students must learn, unit by unit, in each course taught. Teams will monitor each student’s learning on a regular and timely basis through a series of team-developed common formative assessments. Members of teams will use the results to inform and improve their own teaching by learning from one another. Finally, use the results from those assessments to provide any student who is struggling with additional time and support for learning, in a way that that is timely, directive (not invitational), and systematic (a schoolwide plan of intervention, rather than leaving the problem for each teacher to address). If you work at this approach, state test scores will take care of themselves.

Becky and I recently participated in a VoiceThread hosted by our talented colleague Bill Ferriter. Educators from around the country asked questions and shared their experiences with implementing the PLC concept (you can hear the conversation here). One of the most frequently raised topics dealt with the challenges of working with colleagues. One participant expressed frustration because his teammates didn’t agree with him, and he wondered if he should retreat to working in isolation and do what he felt was best for his students. Another participant asked why educators are typically so unwilling to challenge the beliefs and behaviors of colleagues. Yet another argued that such challenges are detrimental to a team and would be viewed as an attempt to impose our view on others.

So let me ask which if any of the following scenarios you would feel compelled to question or challenge a teammate:

• A colleague suggests student achievement can’t be improved in your school because of the increase in students who live in the trailer park.

• A colleague opposes a SMART goal of increasing the number of female students in higher level math classes because girls generally don’t do well in math.

• On the third day of school, a kindergarten teacher recommends a student for special education because he is far behind the other students and his older siblings were all in special education.

• A colleague gives students the option of not completing assignments the team has deemed essential. He gives those students a zero and argues that by allowing a student to be irresponsible (not doing the work), he is teaching the student to be responsible.

• Your team attends a workshop to learn new strategies for assessing students. Your colleague ignores the presenter and works Sudoku puzzles all day.

• A colleague opts not to give the team’s common assessment.

Not one of the scenarios presented above is fiction. I am convinced that until educators are willing to question such behavior, to challenge the assumptions behind those behaviors, and to offer evidence to support their challenges, we will continue to be a profession characterized by isolation and fragmentation. Not all behavior is professional. Not all ideas are of equal value. If the very essence of a team is people working interdependently (rather than in isolation) to achieve common goals (rather than individual interests) for which members are mutually accountable (rather than every man for himself; e.g., “I need only concern myself with what happens in my classroom”), then we must have the courage to engage in crucial conversations with one another. The culture of every organization is determined to a large degree by the worst behavior people are willing to tolerate.

I understand that it will be difficult to initiate these conversations in a traditional school culture, but until we do, the culture will continue to support the status quo rather than the PLC concept. For tips on how to engage in a crucial conversation, I recommend you review the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson and his colleagues.

So, here are my questions: Do you feel any obligation to urge a colleague to question his or her behavior or assumptions when you believe he or she is not acting in the best interests of students or what you regard as the standards of the profession? Can you cite examples of when you have done so?

I want to share “the temporary soap box” that I got on last week when addressing a group of teachers and administrators about the term “professional learning community.” If we continue to use the term “PLC” in the way that it is being used in many quarters, then it truly has lost its original meaning and power.

This is the most promising school reform concept ever (not just my words, but the words of many highly respected experts—see On Common Ground and Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work™, among others), but if we continue to treat the term PLC as something we “have to do” as opposed to “how we do business,” then it is reduced to an add-on, a meeting, or a program. We don’t need or want any more unnecessary add-ons, programs, or meetings in our already busy school days.

Assistant Principal Dawn Hendrick and I are still learning as an administrative team, but we do buy into the PLC concept. When I was an assistant principal at Lemon Road Elementary School only six years ago, I was taught by Principal Carolyn Miller and former Assistant Superintendent Ellen Schoetzau about what a true PLC is. I observed and learned from Dr. Robyn Hooker and Shirley McCoy, two other wonderful principals who truly understand the PLC concept. By listening, watching, and studying the words, work, and wisdom of Richard and Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Lillie Jessie (principal of Elizabeth Vaughan Elementary School) and others, I immediately knew this model—or way of doing business—made sense. I also found out that some of us wanted a quick fix, a program, a meeting, or a silver bullet that would cure all of our educational ills. The PLC concept is not linear and it is messy, but when done in a collaboratively focused manner around the right things, it is immensely rewarding.

Educators work too hard and do too many wonderful things in our schools every single day to allow this model—or way of doing business—to be reduced to a meeting as opposed to a way of being. Please don’t allow our efforts and great work to be overlooked because of a lack of will to, as Robert Eaker says, go from knowing to doing to being. In a keynote address that I had the privilege to witness, Dr. Eaker said that the term PLC does not even need to be used if a school is a true PLC. If you hold to the three big ideas (learning, collaboration, and results), and if you use the critical questions of learning to drive your conversations, then I say don’t even use the term PLC during the day.

Once you get to the point of being, as soon as someone walks in the front door of your school they will know that something is different. What they will notice are the cultural shifts. A school that operates as a PLC has, as cited in the book Learning by Doing, shifted from:

• A focus on teaching to a focus on learning
• An emphasis on what was taught to a fixation on what students learned
• Infrequent summative assessments to frequent common formative assessments
• Individual teachers determining the appropriate response when students don’t learn or already know it to a systematic response that ensures support for every student no matter who the teacher may be
• Isolation to collaboration around the right things
• Each teacher clarifying what students must learn to collaborative teams building shared knowledge and understanding about essential learning
• An assumption that these are “my kids, those are your kids” to an assumption that these are “our kids”
• An external focus on issues outside the school to an internal focus on steps staff can take to improve the school
• Teachers gathering data from their individually constructed tests in order to assign grades to collaborative teams acquiring information from common assessments in order to (1) inform their individual and collective practices and (2) respond to students who need addition time and support
• Independence to interdependence
• A language of complaint to a language of commitment
• External training (workshops and courses) to job-embedded learning
• Assessing impact on the basis of teacher satisfaction (“Did you like it?”) to assessing impact on the basis of improved student learning
• Learning by listening to learning by doing
• Using inaccurate language to define a PLC and its relating concepts (e.g., the inaccurate term “PLC meeting”) to becoming students of PLCs and collectively understanding and embedding its meaning and all the concepts surrounding this way of doing business

The deep understanding of this way of doing business has got to come from the bottom up. It will only happen when we become students of the term PLC, and realize that it is a continuous learning journey with no end.

However, I would suggest that you get rid of the term PLC in your daily conversations and start to build common language around the kinds of collaborative team meetings that you have every day. A PLC is a school made up of collaborative teams. Collaborative teams are not PLCs.

If you are reading this, then it is highly likely that you are interested in becoming or are already a student of the term PLC as defined by Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour. You are also most likely an educator who deeply cares about making sure your staff, students, parents, and community members get the most accurate information possible.

If a parent or another educator came up to you and said, “I heard about this PLC thing. It sounds like a great way to do meetings,” what would you say? Would you go along to just get along and talk about it as if it was a meeting? Or, would you take the time to build shared knowledge with this individual to help deepen understanding around what a PLC is and what it is not? Better yet, if Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour came to your school and asked you to make the case for your school being a true PLC, would you start by talking about your “PLC meetings?” Remember, precision in language is critical!

Would we, as teachers, allow our students to continue to incorrectly define a term without giving them corrective feedback? Why do we allow each other as professional educators to change, misuse, and redefine terms without holding each other accountable? We are too good for that! If we want to be taken seriously, let’s at the very least do our homework to ensure that common language, common knowledge, and common expectations are at the core of how we do business in our schools and districts.

A good place to start may be to say, “It’s not a meeting; it’s a way of being!” Then ask that person if he or she would be interested in learning about PLCs with you by reading and discussing an article or a book or by visiting a school that is well on its journey.

What are you prepared to do?

The idea of merit pay for individual teachers has been touted as a way to improve student achievement. One state, for example, proposed a merit-pay system that would designate up to 25 percent of teachers in a district for a 5 percent merit-pay bonus on the basis of student achievement on the state assessments.

Let’s examine the rationale behind this proposal for merit pay.

1. Teachers are the key to improving student achievement.
2. Teachers are motivated by money and will work harder at improving student achievement if they are provided with the possibility of financial gain and the recognition that accompanies it.
3. If too many people are given this recognition it will diminish its impact and therefore no longer serve as a motivator. Therefore, merit pay must be limited to a select few.
4. We can determine the teachers who are most effective on the basis of a single test on a single day.
5. Because teaching is an isolated activity it is legitimate to award individual teachers who work independently of one another.

I agree with the first assumption, but I disagree with the next four. It is counterintuitive to argue that someone who has entered the profession of education is motivated primarily by money. It is illogical that someone who is not motivated to do his or her best for students for $50,000 will suddenly be inspired to go above and beyond the call of duty for the one in four chance to make $52,500. It is not plausible that a system designed to ensure that 75 percent of its members will fail each year promotes organizational success. Most of all, we have a century of evidence that demonstrates merit pay for teachers does not improve student achievement.

In The Knowing-Doing Gap, organizational theorists Pfeffer and Sutton use merit pay for teachers as a classic example of people continuing to promote proposals that have repeatedly been shown to fail—an illustration of the gap between what we know and what we do. As they write:

“You don’t have to read the evidence from literally decades of research to spot the problems with merit pay for schoolteachers. That evidence shows that merit-pay plans seldom last longer than five years and that merit pay consistently fails to improve student performance. The very logic of merit pay for teachers suggests that it won’t do what it is intended to do.” (p. 23).

They go on to demonstrate that organizations that create zero-sum games—where in order for some of us to win others of us must lose—create internal competition that discourages cooperation and mutual assistance and works against organizational effectiveness. A competitive culture makes the sharing of information and the mutual development of skills very unlikely because it is so counter to individual self-interest. An organization that expects people to share information, learn from each other, and work collaboratively to enhance overall performance will not rely on a system of internal competition that actually discourages those behaviors.

Over 25 years ago, Peters and Waterman considered the impact of reward systems on organizational performance in their book In Search of Excellence. They discovered that organizations that established reward systems to ensure lots of losers (for example, 75 percent of you will lose) were consistently low performers. As they said, if year after year a few people are winners and everyone else is a loser, eventually the losers start to act like losers.

Of course, there are logistical obstacles to merit pay. How will counselors, art teachers, special education teachers, and teachers of noncore curriculum be included if performance on the state test is an important variable? There is also the issue of defining “top performing.” If I teach in a high SES school where students excel on the state test but demonstrate little growth during the year, am I a high performer? If I help my low SES students show two years of growth but they fall short on the state test, am I top performer?

But those are logistical obstacles. There are two bigger problems. First, it works against the interdependence, mutual accountability, and collaboration essential to professional learning communities that represent best practice in our profession. Why would I, as an individual teacher, share my effective strategies with colleagues if by doing so I risk no longer standing out as exemplary and thus will no longer qualify for merit pay? Why would I help students in another classroom become proficient if by doing so I am taking money out of my own pocket? If I am motivated by money, I will hoard my most effective practices and hope for dismal performances from my colleagues. The second problem with merit pay goes beyond philosophy or sharing of opinions: we have decades of research and evidence demonstrating that it will not help more students learn.

A school that claims to value the big ideas of the PLC concept—a commitment to higher levels of learning for all students, a collaborative culture and collective effort to support that learning, and the transparency of results essential to improved professional practice—will recognize that merit pay runs counter to everything they say they value.

Finally, here is my prediction for the states that adopt merit pay for teachers: The next time the state has a budget crisis, the merit-pay plan will be abolished as too costly in light of its failure to improve student achievement. Politicians will blame teachers and teacher unions for the failure of merit-pay programs and will accept no responsibility for pursuing a feckless strategy that has been repeatedly proven to be ineffective in promoting higher levels of learning for all students.

We received a question about goals from someone who wanted to know if district goals had to be established before school goals could be created, and if school goals were necessary before team goals could be developed. He also asked how to establish a goal that would address all teams if achievement at different grade levels or departments were very different. Here is our response:

There is nothing sacred about the sequence of the goals. In fact, we have worked in many districts where there were no district goals, and so schools were left to their own devices in establishing goals. On the other hand, if a district establishes a goal, there is no chance it will be achieved if the schools reject it and head off in pursuit of their own goals. Similarly, a school will not achieve its goals if teams are free to ignore it. Once a goal is established, the people who are crucial to achieving it must adopt it as part of their own goals.

I think the best goals at the district and school levels are broad. For example, the district goal could be “We will raise the bar and close the achievement gap in all of our schools.” Elementary school goals should typically focus on math and literacy because those areas should be priorities at every grade level. On the other hand, if middle and high schools limit goals to math and literacy, teaches of other courses may feel they are not responsible for contributing. So we encourage those levels to include goals that are more encompassing—reduce the failure rate or increase the percentage of students who earn credit in the most rigorous curriculum.

An elementary school goal that says “We will increase the percentage of students who meet proficiency standards in reading on the district assessment or state assessment” is a goal that every grade level can address. If third grade had 84 percent proficient and first grade had 68 percent proficient, both know that their goal must be 84+ percent and 68+ percent. If the school establishes a more specific goal such as “We want to increase the overall percentage of students demonstrating proficiency to 80 percent,” third grade doesn’t have to improve and could even decline and still meet the goal. If a middle school says “We want to decrease the percentage of Fs,” a Physical Education team that had 4 percent Fs can contribute, but so can an Algebra team that had a 18 percent failure rate. If a high school says “We want more students demonstrating proficiency in our most rigorous curriculum,” the Spanish team can develop steps to encourage more students to pursue upper-level Spanish classes while the U.S. History team can create a plan to increase enrollment in AP U.S. History. The school and district goals can be general enough that every team can establish and contribute to more specific team goals.

I would not have teams pick and choose among goals because then the school does not have a coordinated effort. If I couldn’t have every team in an elementary school focus on both language arts and math, I would rather have the entire elementary school focus on math or language arts than have some teams focus on math and others on language arts. Similarly, I would want all teams to contribute to reducing the failure rate than some focus on that while others pursue different goals. There is power in collective learning.

Finally, two more cautions. Avoid esoteric goals that are impossible to measure such as “We want our students to be lifelong learners.” A goal is not a goal until you can establish the indicators you will track to measure progress. The pursuit of goals should provide us with the evidence we need to monitor, adjust, and improve our practice. Finally, avoid such narrow goals that you can accomplish the goal, but students actually learn less. A team that says “Our goal is to improve student achievement in capitalization” can achieve the goal even though student performance in language arts actually declines. A goal like that is fine as an interim goal for a specific unit, but not effective as a team goal for the year.

It’s still hard for me to believe that we’ll be spending four days in September (the 8th through the 11th) exploring the nuts and bolts of professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour.

At Elizabeth Vaughan Elementary School, the effectiveness of our bottom-up leadership depends on high-quality, top-down leadership direction and support. This past year, a series of unexpected challenges really put our bottom-up leadership to the test, and our teachers’ initiatives proved to be outstanding!

Medical absences at each grade level left us scrambling for subs, including one to replace one of my strongest veteran teachers. Resignations at two grade levels also put a pinch on school resources and staff sanity. In the meantime, school renovations and general lack-of-space issues forced us to combine a second-grade class and a third-grade class in the middle of the year.

This is when you find out if you have the interdependence Rick DuFour talks about so frequently. This is how our PLC used bottom-up leadership to pull through these challenges together:

Third grade—Staff initiated a plan to take the students of the person leaving into their classrooms and use the sub as a support person. The new teachers who eventually filled a more permanent role received extra support during a two-week transition time and enjoyed a supportive environment throughout the year.

Fourth grade—Staff created a different plan in which the sub taught science (nontested) and social studies, but the students floated to other classrooms for language arts and math (AYP content areas). All grade-level teachers and specialists worked with the students during testing.

Fifth Grade—Staff developed a plan to take the leaving teacher’s students for a few weeks. Then, they diligently stuck with these larger class sizes while the new teacher adjusted.

All staff came to my weekly meeting with a problem and a solution. At no point did I ask them to do this. I did find it necessary to step in and temporarily reposition one teacher, but that is part of the top-down leadership that is so necessary for this collaborative culture to exist.

As a result of this bottom-up leadership and collaboration, we received our highest scores ever! Overall, we made 91 percent student achievement with 40 percent pass advanced. Third grade is above 90 percent in most areas with 100 percent improvement in pass advance in science. Fourth grade dropped a bit because of a last-minute emergency, but only to 91 percent with an increase in proficiency percentages. Fifth grade was off the hook with 95 percent in writing, 97 percent in reading, and 98 percent in math. These are just our preliminary scores. We are expecting even higher scores when the adjustments take place!

As principal of a school with more than 80 percent student diversity and Title I status, I can say without a doubt that bottom-up leadership within the culture of a PLC works.