EICHELBERGER: Good afternoon. WOMAN: Good afternoon, Jilly. EICHELBERGER: Hey, y all. Uh-huh. See, I can say, hey, y all. WOMAN: Hey, y all. EICHELBERGER: Yeah. WOMAN: Y all. EICHELBERGER: I m Jill Eichelberger, and I have the pleasure this evening of presenting Dr. Anne Jolly to you. As I came in the room, I reminded her that I ve heard you before. I know what you do, and I know how you do it. So when I say that it s a pleasure, it s a pleasure to introduce her. Dr. Jolly is currently working as an Educational Consultant to establish professional learning communities in schools and in districts. But she s taught middle school, she s worked with SERVE, which is a regional educational laboratory, and she worked with them until June of 2008. She has served with numerous groups as a consultant, including the STEM Initiative, writing units, connecting math, and science, and engineering. She s an author and a curriculum developer, and she has just done it. And so, we are very happy this afternoon to welcome someone who has worked in areas where we have worked and are currently working. She is the founder of a new LLC, PLTWorks. I love that name. And so, I bring to you this afternoon, especially those of you, how many of you downloaded your material? Look at that, Dr. Jolly. JOLLY: It s Anne. EICHELBERGER: I m sorry, Anne. Thank you so much for doing that, because I know that Anne s presentation was built around those handouts. And so, she has a little reservation because she s had to dance in preparing for the last crowd that did not download their handouts. But y all, get ready. She s good, and she s going to provide some information and tools that you can use in establishing professional learning communities. Dr. Anne Jolly. JOLLY: Actually, I do have to correct that. It s not Doctor. It really is not. EICHELBERGER:... JOLLY: Okay, in the back there. Am I good to go? Can you hear me? MAN:... JOLLY: All right. Now I want to tell you, this is my New England brogue, okay. I can talk Southern, but I m really trying really hard to make this kind of fit in where I am. I m 1
so excited to be up here. I was so excited that I drove up here. Well, my husband drove. I looked at the scenery, because I hadn t, the only time I ve ever been into Pennsylvania before, I ve flown. And I thought, you know, I really want to see this state. It s beautiful. It s really beautiful. WOMAN: Thank you. JOLLY: You re welcome. Now the question that interests me the most, how many of you did not run off the handouts? This is not a bad or a good statement. I just need to see. You did not? Oh, my goodness. All right. How many of you are not sitting somewhere where you can see a set of handouts? Is there anybody that you cannot see a set of that, really, I mean, the presentation is seriously built around a set of tools that I m going to introduce you to. Now what I did in the last group, instead of showing the PowerPoints, I just, you have the PowerPoints. I just showed the tools, and I can do that in this. So we re going to vote, because I want this to fit what you need me. I can either show the PowerPoints, which you, the copies of the latest ones which you have right here, or I ll show the tools, which were the handouts that were on the Internet. Everybody who wants me to show the PowerPoints, hold up your hand. You don t like PowerPoints, do you? Who would like for me to show the tools? Okay, you got it. Now I m going to show a couple of the PowerPoint slides, but they re not in, it s, we ll go back and forth a little bit. But I ll show mostly the tools, and then that will work fine. So we ll work it that way. All right. The first thing that I want to go over with you, actually, I do need to go to the PowerPoints for this, if you ran off the PowerPoints, I m not sure you have this set. When I found out that I did not have a group of 60 people all day around tables, it necessitated a change in my presentation. So I changed the PowerPoints, and I added some additional tools, can I see this just a minute, which are online. But I did run off, you know, the additional too, because I was afraid, oh, goodness. You know, you may not know, you may have run them off already and may not know that these, you know, there were some different ones up there. So all that to say, if you find that you need something, there are ladies here that will deliver to you a set of PowerPoint handouts, if you didn t get the ones that were on the Web now and/or a set of tools. Does anyone need either one of those? Okay. If you don t have this picture in your handouts, then you probably don t have the right one. Well, if you don t have that one. If you don t have that as slide number six, you ve got the wrong set of handouts, my fault, and you can have a copy of the new ones. And the new ones are also posted online. Okay. What I d like to get clear right up front is what I mean when I m talking about professional learning teams. And I want to tell you, this is something I believe in so deeply. When we take a look, how many of you are high school people? All right. Did you know that your ninth-graders today, you don t know right now what jobs are going to be available in the workforce when those leave. Your kids have to learn to read, and write, and compute, but they ve got to learn to learn. That s the biggest thing. They have to know how to access resources and information. They have to know how to identify and solve problems. They have to know how to work in teams, to 2
do that. They have to know what kind of, how to keep learning the new skills and things that they need in a digital society for ever-changing occupations. There are a lot of things that we need to prepare our kids for. And the interesting thing is, we don t know what those things are. So the best we can do is prepare them to be able to learn and address these kinds of things. So that really begs the need for teacher ongoing, continuing learning. And that s what these teams that I m talking today are all about. Now I call these professional learning teams because, in my paradigm, here s what that looks like. The teams were the small groups of teachers in a school who met together regularly to study and to learn. And all together, all of those teams formed a professional learning community. Now let me ask you this. What would you call that? WOMAN: A special learning group. WOMAN:... team. JOLLY: I would call it a special learning team, except I worked at a school, I worked at this school, and they called them impact teams. So I called them impact teams. If you call this professional learning community in your school with us, you used that language. The first thing I want to prepare you to do today is, how do you approach, you know, this initiative? Use the language that your schools that you re working with are using. Now how many of you are classroom teachers? Yea, rah, make the world go round. How many of you are administrators? And what else could you possibly be? WOMAN: Consultants. JOLLY: What? WOMAN:... consult... JOLLY: What? WOMAN: Consultants. JOLLY: Oh, consultants. Okay, great. Great. WOMAN: Also PD... JOLLY: Professional development. All right, good. Okay. So what I want to show you today is, I ve switched, what I m going to model for you today is not the hands-on modeling that you will do with your students. It s going to be how to work with a group of people sitting theater-style to help you understand how to get this initiative up and moving in your schools. Let me tell you what this presentation is going to consist of. By the way, here s another non-negotiable with me, and I think it should be with all professional learning 3
communities. The focus is always on student achievement through the education and learning of adults. That s the key. These teams work with the adult learning, so that s a real key. And I thought this was pretty good. We start out with a group of teachers, and we want them to go from being, you know, isolated teachers to being a team and be real happy about it. And the only way we know to do that now is that a miracle occurs somewhere and it happens. So what I want to go over with you today is this, that I want to give you some tips, and tools, and information, and all these tools are online, so just keep that in mind, for planning and implementing the teams, for guiding successful meetings, for sustaining the progress over time, for monitoring the teams and their work, and, going backwards, because I skipped the first part, no, I didn t. It just wasn t there. Okay. I m sorry. The slides are not missing in your handouts. But basically, what we re going to talk about is this. How do you get them up and going? You ve got a set of teachers that you re going to say to, guess what? We re going to implement professional learning teams. And they re going to go, oh, yea. We ve been waiting for this moment all our lives. WOMAN: Yeah, right. JOLLY: Yeah, right. So, no, they re not going to do that. So how do you build, how do you start gradually building this idea in with them? Then, how do you kick it off? How do you introduce what the teams do to them? How do you organize for these teams? Then, after you organize, they have to get together, and they have to make some sort of plans about, what are we going to do in these teams? How do we set goals? What are our goals going to be like? What are we going to plan around? And how are we going to determine what kind of behaviors that we re going to use as we work together? And then you will be guiding successful team meetings. How do we teach these teachers to sustain progress over time, and to monitor teams and the work that they do? So with that in mind, let me see now if I can switch, oh, and assess team progress. There we go. Let s go back to the handouts. Okay. Handouts, beautiful front cover. And let s see how big I can make them and still get them on there. Okay. It started off, the first step is always to build a foundation for what you want to do. And following that, I gave you three tools that you could use to do that. And I can, the first one I ll just have to talk you through, is a pre-post survey. You re going to need some way to collect data on this. We ve been talking about data in a lot of ways. Now this is very subjective, it s not scientific, but it s important. You want to know where your teachers are when they start, you want to know where they are when they get, you know, a quarter into this, and so forth, and you want them to know. None of this data is secret from the teachers. But you give them this, and this is just a little ten point yes, you know, survey scale, with questions, such as, I m familiar with the reasons for teachers collaborating on classroom instruction. If you get a majority of your teachers that say no on that, then you know where to start. You ve got to start with the rationale. 4
And I need to tell you this. If you re teaching high school or if you re an administrator in high school, high school teachers, I was a secondary teacher, and high school teachers tend to want more of a research-based rationale. They re a little more skeptical. And so, what I would do, I would e-mail ajolly@bellsouth.net, that s all over your things, and say, send jigsaw. Okay, I ve got a lit review that s chopped up into four sections like a jigsaw. And what this will do for your high school teachers is give them an opportunity to look at some literature, get back together, and then tell each other why these are important. Because, you know, in a jigsaw, you share information with one another. So go ahead. It was too long to keep including in the handouts. The handouts were getting excessively long. So if you want that, you may e-mail me for it. In the meantime, you ll notice that the rest of these deal somewhat with feelings, how they feel now about professional learning teams. And it s really interesting. Sometimes these are a little higher initially than they are a month into it, and then they start growing again. But this will let you know sort of where your teachers are at this point. And above all, I want you to keep this in mind. Wherever they are, if you ve got somebody that prefers to work alone in isolation, that s not bad, that s not good. That s just information for you, okay. So keep it all objective. Don t assign value to those kinds of things at this point. Now when you walked in, some of you did this, and I just needed a few of you to do it. This is what I would have on the wall, whenever you re training somebody to do this, when they walk in the door. That is, this teacher needs. It goes through a list of research-based outcomes for professional learning teams. Everything on that list in your handouts is a research-based outcome. The only thing I changed was this from the originals. Number 12, I put down, we need a realistic way to work together to meet the needs of special education students. And I did that because of your conference folks and because it is research-based. Lots of research done around special education kids and teacher collaboration. So here s a point I d like to make. When you do this in your or when you re leading workshops, feel free to make it fit the situation. This is not a set of materials that will absolutely work in every situation. You re going to need to look at your schools and see what it is that you need to change about the handouts. So for that reason, I don t know what s going to happen when you download them from Google docs. Somebody that did it, is it in a Word format or what format is it in? When you downloaded it, it prints it out. But suppose you wanted to put it on your computer and change it? WOMAN: It s a PDF. WOMAN: PDF, yeah. JOLLY: Is it a PDF? All right. You can t change a PDF. WOMAN: Yeah. 5
JOLLY: ajolly@bellsouth.net, okay. I ll send you the Word docs, okay. All right. Now the reason that you would use this when teachers came in is because, you know, we have a consensus a little bit over here that here and here, around number one, which says, we need a way to increase student achievement. Okay. No matter what they come up with, number five was a biggie over here. We need a way to sustain changes over time and so forth. Whatever the faculty comes up with, then you say to them, okay. Professional learning teams or learning communities or whatever your terminology is is the way that we re going to get there, because this is a research-based outcome. So you can already start setting the stage in their heads for the fact that these teams are going to be valuable. Now let me tell you, that alone won t do it, okay. But that s the way that you can start working with that, that and the jigsaw. And I used to know how to use a mouse. Here we go. Now one that seems to be of interest to most teams and it works well to get teachers engaged with the idea of professional learning teams is an activity that I gave you in your handouts, and I break it into two cards. One is a professional design team, and the other is a professional sabotage team. And I put the teachers at, you know, part of them I give one and part I give the other, and I don t even tell them I m giving them different cards. And take a look, just a minute. I don t know if you can see this or not, but let me ask you to just jot down a couple of ideas. If you would want to be on the professional design team, then what you need to do is think of some things that will facilitate and help teachers, and support teachers, as they work together, you know, in collaboration. Or if you want to be on the sabotage team, then you would work together to undermine that initiative. How can we prevent people from working together? How could we design that? So sometimes that looks like pretty well what you ve got, you know, in schools at times. All right. Now imagine yourself in these two teams, all right, and your own chart paper, and you re mapping this out with your teams. And then you start sharing and they look bizarre, because one doesn t know that the other had, but what you ve had the teachers do is this. You re having them identify ways to make these teams successful already. They re already thinking about it or they may be thinking about things that could happen that would make these teams unsuccessful, if you wanted to sabotage. If you re working with administrators, I would leave this particular terminology here just like it is. It says, put conditions and procedures in place. That would make this not work. However, if you re working with teachers, here s what I would do. I would say, put conditions, and I would change this word to behaviors, in place that would make this not work. And what teachers will wind up doing is thinking, oh, gosh, we do that already, you know. So this is going to engage them a little bit in thinking about these teams, what might make them work, how could they work, what are they, what needs are they going to meet, and should help you lay the groundwork for this. Any questions about that part? It is after lunch. This is my, you are my fifth period class. That was when I was on a seven-period day, and it was like, so I would like to say this. If you feel like getting up and walking out or around, please do it. The mind will absorb what the seat can endure. You ve already been in a session most of 6
the morning. You know, and it will not bother me if you just get up and stand up. You just make yourself, whatever you need to do to stay alive, okay. All right. Now the second thing that you need to do then, the teachers really need to know what this is going to look like. So what I ve done, I recommend a skit at this point, which you re going to see in just a minute. And it doesn t matter what the subject area of the skit is because you re looking at what s going on in the team meeting itself. So think about this. Okay, you ve got a set of teachers here. First thing I would have them do is say, okay, what do you do in your team meetings now, in your department meetings? Make a list. And so, everybody at the table makes a list, even if they re not in the same department. They make a list of what goes on in department meetings, and they put it on the board. Your idea is that you want to tie as much good stuff that they do to these team meetings as you can. And I also point out how they re different from the regular department meetings. So after they do that, then I would use this skit. Now the one I brought today has to do with reading in the content area. And that s okay, I ve got them on math and all kinds of things, but it doesn t matter what the subject is because you re not listening for how they re doing the reading. You re watching the team interactions. If you have your handouts, then you can look at this tool right here. What do you hear and see? And you can make some notes. It says here, for a copy of the skit, e-mail Anne. Actually, I ve already put this skit on the Web for you. I had second thoughts, went back up with a second set of tools, and I put it up there, so you can find it up there now. If you want one on another subject area, history, math, something like that, you can e-mail me for that and adapt it as you want to. Okay. I need some people. I need four people to read a skit. There are not but 100 in here. One, two, three, four, and one of you ladies is going to be named John, okay. WOMAN:... John. JOLLY: Come on up... a hand, yes. One, two, three, and four. Never go to a meeting without coffee. I m going to let these, I also put the coffee cups up there for you online. So if you do this, I didn t want you to do it without coffee cups, so these are online too. So you can choose a coffee cup. The faces represent the teachers that you ll normally see at a meeting. And I got left for this one, okay. All right. Now these teachers are, just for the purposes of this skit only, these teachers are middle school teachers. They each teach a different subject area, and that s okay. You know, you can set them up so that they can all teach the same subject area. I m not recommending that, I just had to set it up. Okay, so they all teach a different subject area. And, John, hello. This is John, okay. All right. And let me see, Sue, and Kris, and Maria. Now Maria has also volunteered today to keep the log, because you will need one of those in each of your team meetings. I have a microphone back here somewhere. And, guys, I forget which one works, so tell me if this works or not? Does this work? MAN: Press and hold it. 7
JOLLY: Press and hold? MAN:... JOLLY: Does that work? WOMAN: Yes. JOLLY: All right. All right, pass it on down to Sue. Okay. Now what I m going to do is give you an example of this. And on the overheads you have a copy of, you will see a slide that says, this is a highly contrived skit. It is. No learning team meeting would actually go like this. What I ve done is try to put the different components of the meeting into this skit. And what I want you to do as you listen to it is to go through and identify the different team components that you see that you think are making this meeting successful or maybe that stand out as being a little different, okay. All right. Sue is today s leader. This team has met about three times already, and they re focusing on reading in the content area as a cross-middle school curricular thing. Okay, Sue, you get started. SUE: Several weeks ago, we kicked off our learning team by analyzing several types of data for our students. The data verify what we already know, our students need help in reading comprehension. Many of them don t read their textbook assignments. Even when they do, some of them struggle and don t understand what they read. So we decided to learn how to help our kids understand what they read in their subject area text. We re going to start by using a book that has some research-based ideas that may work for us. This week, we all read the chapter on how to diagnose students reading needs. What is it, exactly, that they can t do? Kris, you volunteered to lead today s discussion. KRIS: Well, as I started looking at all the things that good readers do, I was amazed. I m a good reader, but I didn t realize I was doing all of these things. Take a look at page 17. JOLLY: All right. For the next 15 minutes now, they discuss the research-based information that they ve come across and talk about what they ve learned. Then Maria, the math teacher, comments. MARIA: This is really helpful. A lot of my students can t handle reading problems in math. This gives me a way to diagnose when their comprehension is breaking down, and it gives me ideas for specific strategies for helping them conquer those problems. KRIS: I feel the same way, but I do have a question. While we re in the process of diagnosing our students individual reading problems, should we go ahead and start using some of these reading strategies in our classrooms? 8
JOHN: I say, yes, we should definitely do that. I ve scanned the book, and there are several strategies that I think would help all of my students. SUE: So exactly which of these strategies are we going to work with first? JOLLY: Now team members discuss the various strategies that they could use with their students, and they agree to begin by using pre-reading strategies. JOHN: Okay, so what now? Do you want me to look for more information on pre-reading strategies before our next meeting and come up with additional suggestions for how to use these in our classrooms? KRIS: Sounds good to me. In the meantime, I ll use the information in this chapter to draft the checklist we might use for diagnosing our students reading difficulties. That will help us target our reading strategies better. SUE: Hey, I just got another idea. One of our teachers, Miss Duke, conducts workshops on reading comprehension strategies for secondary students. Why don t I invite her to one of our team meetings to give us all some tips? JOLLY: So the team members like that idea, the idea of inviting a fellow teacher to come in and be a resource for them throughout the year. SUE: Okay, let s review where we are. We ve decided to start by learning how to diagnose our students reading problems. While we are doing that, we will also learn some other ways of helping them to get ready to read a selection from their textbooks. JOHN: You nailed it. But are we moving fast enough with this? I mean, what are we going to do in our classrooms this week? What if the principal comes in and says, hey, John, what are you doing to help your kids with reading? MARIA: That s one reason we have this log. It gives us a record of when we re meeting and when we re learning. Hey, did you guys read the copy of last week s log that we e-mailed to the principal? She really read it. Did you see the message she e-mailed back to us? KRIS: Yeah, those logs really come in handy. The principal doesn t have to sit in here and meet with us, you know, and see what s going on. JOLLY: The team members agree that sharing logs is a good way to build a sense of community within the faculty, and to share ideas and teaching expertise. JOHN: Am I going to skip... JOLLY: It goes back to Maria. 9
JOHN: Back up? And it gives us a way to communicate regularly with her. She really does seem to like what we re doing. Hey. WOMAN:... JOHN: It s okay. Hey, speaking of communicating, did you see that several teachers from other learning teams replied to the log we e-mailed? The science team even asked us to share some ideas with them for helping their students understand science textbooks. MARIA: Here s something else we need to think about. How are we going to know that the strategies we use really help our students understand what they read? What kind of evidence are we going to collect during the year? JOLLY: The team discusses different kinds of evidence that they could collect, and John volunteers to call the reading specialist for some additional ideas and bring them back to the next team meeting. JOHN: You know, I could put together a webpage, where we could post information about reading strategies and assignments, and examples of what our kids are doing. SUE: What a great idea. Want to post our team logs there also? Then our students and parents can all see what we re doing. The kids can see that we believe learning is important because we re learning too. JOLLY: The team agrees that a webpage would be a valuable resource and that continual learning is an important concept that they can model for their students. SUE: Okay, now let s recap what we ve done. We re going to focus on two areas, diagnosing specific reading difficulties our students have and working together on some pre-reading strategies. John is going to get some more information on pre-reading strategies before our next meeting. Kris will draft a checklist to help us get started with assessing our students difficulties. I will ask Miss Duke to meet with our team, and I ll also see if I can observe her using some pre-reading strategies. Maria will talk to the reading specialist and get some ideas on how to tell if we re making a difference for students. John will also start developing a webpage. Now who wants to be the team leader next week? MARIA: What does the leader do? SUE: Well, as this week s team leader, I checked with all of you to be sure you remembered this meeting. I reminded Kris that she was going to lead today s book discussion. I also asked the office folks not to interrupt us during the meeting. And basically, I just try to keep the meeting on everybody s front burner. Once we got here, I tried to keep us on track. 10
MARIA: I guess I can do that next week. SUE: Great. Thanks, Maria. Now does anyone have any concerns or recommendations about today s meeting? JOHN: I have to warn you, I m probably going to struggle with this. I m new to this kind of teaching. I just assume my students understand what they ve read in textbooks. If they don t get it, I ll just tell them what they need to know. I m glad I have you guys to help me as I muddle through this. MARIA: Hey, we re all going to muddle through this together. None of us alone can do as well as we can all do together. Uh-oh, it s time for the bell. JOLLY: So grabbing their now empty coffee cups, they head for their classrooms. Okay. Perfect. You did a great job. And I turn this off the same way I turned it on? That worked. I m going to become a techno expert. All right. One of the things I do with these cups, if I m working with groups of facilitators, teachers, whatever I m working with, since they have different expressions, you know, that teams and people are likely to have about the meetings, I keep them up front. And occasionally, I ll just pick up a cup and I ll say, now, you know, what, whoops, not that way, what do you think or, you know, this is the kind of response that you may get, like, what, you know. So you can just use these in a number of ways, but I like to use them with the skits. Just laminate them, make yourself a set. I forgot to put the pencil up there. If you really need the pencil, e-mail me. All right. Now having done that, now your teachers are going to have been thinking, what did we see in that meeting that went differently than in normal meetings? And what I d like for you to do is, we won t exhaust this topic because that would take too long. You would want to spend more time with it with your workshop people. But let me just get a few ideas of what your thinking is at this point. What did you see going on in this meeting that you think was different or that helped make it successful? And let s do the hand thing, so I can point to you, okay. WOMAN: There was a focus. JOLLY: Ah, they had a focus. Wow. Yep, a meeting without a focus is not a real good thing. And we ll talk more about how they determined that focus later, okay. WOMAN: They took on and they shared roles. JOLLY: They shared roles. At this point, you could possibly say to your teachers, in your regular meetings, do you share things, you know. And maybe you could get them to say yes. In other words, you want, remember the meetings that you had on, you know, right, think about. You want them to make some connections with those, so that they won t think they re entirely adrift in something new, but not enough connections that they do these meetings just like them, okay. Yes? 11
WOMAN: They had data. JOLLY: They had data. They looked at data, okay. Yes? MAN: Discussion increased... JOLLY: It was research-based. Now that doesn t mean that teachers can never say, here s what I do and it works. Certainly, they can share their own ideas too, but that can t be all they do. Looking at research and seeing what s working and then trying those strategies is important. What else did you see happening? Okay. WOMAN: They had, you know, a couple of... what they were going to do. JOLLY: Okay, the focus. And the focus was limited to something that was doable. Okay. Yes? WOMAN: There was support there. JOLLY: There was... WOMAN: The one teacher commented, I m going to have difficulty with this. The other commented, we ll muddle with this together. So the support was evidenced from the team members. JOLLY: Right. The idea was that there s support there from other team members, and there was a layer of trust. MAN:... JOLLY: And that, actually, does develop. I ve got some amazing examples of the kinds of trust that teachers began to have school-wide with one another as this, yes, in the back? WOMAN: It wasn t administrator-driven. JOLLY: It was not administrator-driven. Where was the principal? Actually, behind the scenes, guys, you know it is. But what you re trying to do here is build teams that have the capacity to do this themselves. You don t want to be in every meeting they have. And if you walk in that meeting, who owns that meeting? WOMAN: You do. JOLLY: You, yeah. So you don t want to do that. Another one? Yes? 12
WOMAN: Collaboration within their, I mean, you saw different disciplines working together on the same problem. JOLLY: Right. You could see different disciplines working around on the same focus, and that s probably collaboration. That s probably one of the best examples of collaboration, when you get people that think they have nothing in common, and, all of a sudden, they ve got the kids in common, and they ve got some database needs, and they decided, we ll all look at how to do this in our classes. Okay? WOMAN: Even though the administrator wasn t there, there was a sense of accountability. JOLLY: Ah. And what was the accountability thing here? WOMAN: The log. JOLLY: The log. Now I would like to say something real quickly about that, and we ll come back to it. The log is going to be one of the most important things that happens here. It s not minutes. And actually, how many of you are principals? I m about to set you up with one of the best ways to provide instructional feedback to your whole faculty that you ever had. Because they re going to be giving, you re going to see these logs, and you re going to see what they ve done. And in these logs, at first, they re going to have the names of the whole team, so that when you hit reply all, it will go to the whole team, your first reply. So you re going to get to say to them, you know, good job, nice, I like what you did here, had you thought about this-kind of thing? And that s providing, you re having personal contact with them about that. Later on, when they start to feel a little bit secure and they start sending their logs to the whole school, all the teachers, then when you hit reply all, guys, who are you replying to? WOMAN:... WOMAN: The whole school. JOLLY: Ah. And so, some of you may be in schools that are so large, you never even see every teacher every day. And if that s the case, you can at least have some conversation with them about instruction every day. And it provides accountability to all of them, because if one team sees that you thought this was a good idea with this team, you know, they re probably going to want to do it too. Somebody in the last session brought up the point that, if one team looks at another team s log and sees what they re doing, that s going to sort of be a motivator too. What I found is that those logs really do start to build a sense of community over time. It s really hard to get them started. Teachers don t want to do the logs, you know. That s like minutes or something. No, no, no, these are not minutes. I ll show you how to set the logs up in just a few minutes. 13
But you re going to enjoy, I think, having a way to communicate, teachers with principals, principals with teachers, and with anybody else in the school. I ve even had curriculum directors in the system in Scotland County, for example, that had all the logs sent to her, and she replied to every one. It must have been between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. I don t know when she had time to do that. But at all levels, it s good to have feedback and to make your work public, what you re doing. Anything else you saw? Yes? WOMAN: Monitoring and an assessment, showing what works and what didn t work, what might work to... JOLLY: Monitoring what was going on in the classroom. Okay, so monitoring and assessment was going on, sort of on an ongoing basis, actually. In one of these kind of models, you know, you try things in the classroom and you bring them back to the table at the team meeting, and did it work, and here s how I know it didn t work. And one of the best kind of assessments is to get your kids to tell you, you know, did it work? What did I learn from it? Do I like it? Okay, what else? WOMAN: They... to bring in outside resources... JOLLY: Right. And in this case, it was outside resources from inside the school. Okay, again, another community building-kind of niche there. What else? Somebody else? Yes? WOMAN: They recapped... JOLLY: Yeah, that s part of keeping that organized. And if you don t have anything to recap, then you know you re not doing well. And so, it s good to have that recap, sort of built in there, so you say, let s recap. We haven t done anything so far, you know. All right. Somebody over here had, okay? WOMAN:... JOLLY: Louder? WOMAN:... JOLLY: I m just going to put the word positive there. Of course, that happened entirely naturally, right? Wrong. Did you notice their interactions? They not only shared, everybody participated, they were positive. What was going on with that? Well, I m going to show you in a few minutes how to go about bringing that about, you know, so that setting the stage to help that happen. There are a lot of other things that I know that you noticed. We re not going to have time to go over them, but we ll talk about them a little bit as we go through. But what you want to do is have your teachers list just as many as they can, and then you 14
want to give them one of these. Every teacher team needs one on their table every time they meet. You got one of those, didn t you? WOMAN:... JOLLY: She loves it. God bless this woman. See, this is her second time she has sat through one of my presentations. But she got one of these last time, and this is our focus on teacher professional learning. If that is not what we re doing right now in this meeting, we are not accomplishing what we set out to do. So I have that tent card in your tools. I would remind your teachers every time, put that card out there, because that s one way to keep the meetings on track. Okay? Then I d give them that card in a workshop, put it on their tables, and then I would give them this. Now let s talk about learning teams and see what s appropriate for learning teams and what s not. And I usually put those in a little bag of multi-colored things. Now I don t have one out to show you, but I cut the strips apart and laminate them, and I, you know, bright-colored paper, and I have a thumbs up and a thumbs down signal. And I tell them at the table, just to sort them into thumbs up and thumbs down. And what they find out is there are several that you just can t sort because you ve got to, wait a minute, got to think about this. And that s all I m going to show you today, and we re not going to, I just want to give you the way I think about this. But that first one, keep the same team members all year during this process. All right. Let me see thumbs up and thumbs down. Do you think that s a thumbs up, yes, you do that, or a thumbs down, no, let s don t do that. Or you can do that. Well, the answer would probably be, the best look, if it fits what you re doing, is, yes, because they have time to get used to each other, they work together, they study, they dig into things, and they go deeply. However, that may not fit your needs. I mean, you have to really make this fit what you want it to do. Another scenario, high schools on block scheduling, and the learning teams are meeting during planning periods. Well, on a block schedule, you know, upheaval with planning periods, as soon as the block changes. So, you know, then the same teachers can t meet together. Sometimes the kind of things that they re studying, you would want to change them. So, you know, here s one thing I would do though. If you can possibly do this, all of the science teachers have been meeting together for four years in your school. Now they re going to work on an initiative of some sort. If it s a science initiative, logically, yeah, they keep meeting. But if you ve got as many as eight, big school, you know, divided them up into groups of four, instead of all of the meeting together. You won t keep these groups manageably small, so that everybody can really, really interact. If they re not in subject area teams, if you don t have to have them in subject area teams, don t let them work together with the same people they ve always been working with. WOMAN: Yeah... 15
JOLLY: Get them outside their comfort zone, put them with different people, and let them develop new relationships and begin working in a different way. It s very hard to start working in a different way when you work with the people that you ve been working one way with the whole time. It can happen. It does all the time. But there s nothing wrong with mixing it up, if it suits the focus and what the teachers are going to be working on. All right. Having spent way too long on that one, let s move right along. You, of course, know that it s not for disgusting department or grade level issues. Let me blow this up a little bit bigger. Okay. What about this one right here? Oh, what about this one right here? I want everybody s thumb to go, blech. No. You let them go there, you ve lost them. They will never get back to language arts or mathematic problem solving. They re gone. You know, I have tried this. I even had one team that begged me, we ll study research-based methods. All that came out of that was just a list of do s and don ts for kids, you know, at the end of that year. No. Keep it academic-focused. Academics is where the kids need help. Do they need these kinds of meetings? Oh, yes. And so, you tell them, yes, we need to talk about and work on classroom discipline and management, classroom management and discipline. However, and these are the four words you memorize, not at this meeting. Say it with me, not at this meeting. Okay, that is not what you do in a professional learning team meeting. It does not work. Having said that, that is, actually, a decision that s up to you. It doesn t work for improving student achievement in particular areas of, it doesn t work for increasing teacher learning in areas where students need to improve academically. That s the problem with that, okay. But they do need, you know, if this is a problem, then, yeah, they need the meeting, just not that one. Okay, include the principal or administrator as a team member. Not generally, because you re trying to build capacity. I had a group one time of eight, really, too large people that were a little bit fractious. And so the principal went in there and conducted the meetings for the first quarter and got them on track and then was able to bow out. So that s not a definite no. But I figure the principal has something better to do than to sit in on every team meeting. And principals, again, if you go in there, who owns the meeting? WOMAN: That s right. JOLLY: You do. It doesn t matter who s in charge, you own it. And it s very hard not to get off on issues, other than what the team is in there for. You have to be able to stay in touch with what s going on there. Drop in on the team meetings. Drop by. What are you doing, good job, how can I help you, and get out of there fast after you say that. Okay, all right. Now here s one, rotate leadership, actually. There was one that we didn t mention up here. I don t know how you feel about that. But if you re trying to build capacity in your team, rotating leadership is the way to do it, as long as the leader is not the one who is responsible for presenting the expert information. The whole team works around that. 16
Do you have some coaching models now that are going on? If you ve got some coaching models and these were your professional learning communities, okay, be cool about that. But you might make this suggestion. Just say to the coach, you know, why don t you start rotating the facilitation of the meeting? The coach may still be the content expert, but let the meeting be facilitated, you know, by other people. Somehow, start bringing the other team members in as equal partners in that. Then when the coach gets selected to be the superintendent for the next year, then, you know, your team won t fall apart because they know what to do. Okay. And I ve already said something about keeping the team size small. Study a book about instruction or do a book study. What do you think? WOMAN:... JOLLY: Mm-hmm, depends. Can be bad. Depends on how you re using the book. In the skit, they were using a book. But they were reading a chapter, and then they were applying it, and they were just working around that for a while. Then, when they got ready to move on, they would read another chapter. The book can be a source of research-based information, but just to sit down and do a book study, say, let s do chapter one. Okay, we re through with that. Now let s do chapter two. Okay. No, no, no. Not at this meeting, okay? All right. So after you get them through that part, now let me mention this. Those may not be the right strips for you. You may want to put some things on these up here that are not there or you may want to take off some. For example, if you intend to be at the meetings, then take off the one about, you know, principal. But this was just a way of engaging them in thinking through these meetings and giving them a good, clear picture of what kinds of things that they would do and how these meetings are different for the other ones. Now, at some point, you ve got to organize. As you might notice, these are not sequential. I have some facilitators that prefer to start with the skit, before they do anything else, and then go back to the, you know, trying to build a case for it. Some of this has to be done upfront here. So let s take a look and see, what is it that you re going to have to do to roll this sucker out and to make it... If you re an administrator or a teacher, either one, administrators pull teachers in to help you with this. You ve got to figure out four things. One, how much knowledge and skill does your faculty already have in this area? Two, what s the level of motivation right now? Three, what s the environment like? What support structures are in place? And, four, what incentives are in place for doing this? So let s take a look at these just a minute. Very briefly, if your teachers don t know, don t have basic skills in how to collaborate, what teamwork is, what the basic principles are, they need some help there. Okay, you know that. If they don t know what to do in a learning team, you can fix that. Learning how to manage conflict, that s a whole another ballgame, but there s some tools in here that will help the teams with that. And I say in here, like there s something there that s going to make it magic. 17
And then when it comes down to motivation, you can really ask one question and find out how motivated, do you see value in this? If they don t see value in this, they re not motivated at this time. Is that bad? Is that good? That s information only. That s just information. You know where it needs to go. Okay, that s fine that they re not motivated at this point. They haven t really participated or seen it. So, at this point, you don t really expect people to be gung-ho about a new initiative. If this is a new initiative and if this is a continuing initiative for you, this is really going to help you pump some new life into it by just doing something different with it that time. You can still use some of these same things. Go back and look at these. Here you go, principals, policies and procedures at your school. Do they facilitate time for professional learning and growth? And, if not, how creative can you be, given the strictures under which you are placed? We ll talk a little more about that later. Incentives, this tells the teachers what you value or what the school culture values. And I remember I used to get, every teacher workday I d get an apple, I mean, you know, a special day, recognition, I d get an apple, and a pencil, and a ruler, and stuff like that in my box, you know, and we really appreciate you. What about, and that was great, I loved the apple, and the rulers, and the pencils I gave to the kids when they needed them or didn t have one. But wouldn t that be great if you went with the, it s like, can you do things like give your teachers professional memberships in organizations? Give them professional journals. You want them to be professional, you see, so here s the mindset you re trying to get them to create. Workshop attendance as teams or groups. If there were a group of administrators here today all from the same school and you were planning to implement this, wouldn t it be easier if you were all here, looking at it, and could discuss it, were around a table where you could discuss it there, okay? That would be much better. Now let s take a look at the celebrations, all that kind of stuff, frequent feedback. Okay. This is, I ve got things. I m not sure if it s in your handouts or not. If it s not, I need to give you the tool that helps you know what kind of feedback to provide and how for the teams. If you are e-mailing a response to a team from a log and you give criticism or feedback that can even be interpreted as critical, that s going to kill the trust on the part of the initiative. So providing feedback is critical, both in the necessity for doing that and in the fact that you have to do it right if it s public feedback, and a lot of this is. There s some tools for that. Okay, team logistics. Three to five is ideal. Critical mass of positive people, if possible. You don t want to put all, I ve only had one school that put all the negative people together, and it was one group of people that were so negative, they could just kill anything, you know. So they put all of them in one team. All right. Meeting during the school day, it s a good thing. Now here s something I want you to take note of. Comfortable surroundings, away from speakers, away from interruptions. You know what kind of interruptions, if they re meeting in classrooms, they have. You may not be able to provide that, but it s a goal to shoot for. I have, literally, sat in on team meetings, you know, going to observe team meetings, and had the cleaning lady come in and clean the floor during that time. That was her time to clean that floor, because it was that teacher s planning period, you know. 18
And, I mean, so somehow, principals, you ve got to provide some protection for these teams. When they re meeting, that s the most important thing that s going on for them that day. So where can they meet, where it s, oh, and they should be facing each other. Now I had them facing you, up here, in this team. Have you ever been to one of your team meetings and have your teachers sitting in desks, one behind the other-kind of thing, you know? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is a team meeting. They have to have eye-to-eye contact. Make them. Pull their desk around, if they re in classrooms. Eye-to-eye. Eye-to-eye the whole time, okay? So that s one of the things that you need to notice. And in terms of what resources they need to have, probably a computer, if they re going to type logs... minutes or, just tell them that you ll furnish every team a free laptop, and that will get them really motivated. Okay. And then these last three, just think about this. You need a process for communicating with other teams and the principal, and we ve already talked about the log as one of those processes, a process for checking on progress with teams between meetings, and this is, basically, for teachers. You know, the teachers need to be able to check on their progress and then a process for self-assessing progress periodically. And I ve got a ton of self-assessments in there that all lead them to remember different things about the learning team process. Now here s what I want you to do. You ve got everything in place, you ve given them the rah, rah, here s why you should do learning teams, you showed them what learning teams do, you ve got the logistics handled. And before we do, before I leave logistics, is there a burning question you have? If it s about time, let me mention this. You can Google time for professional development, and it pops up all over. The most successful models I ve seen involve using, I don t know what you call them here in Pennsylvania. Some places they re called resource teachers. But that s your PE, your art, your music, those kind of teachers, to take over classes while teachers meet. Or bringing in a team of rotating subs one day a week, bring in four subs or five subs, however many you d need, and they go to the different classes and release those teachers for an hour, and then they go to the next group of teachers and release them. An hour a week, minimum, is where you re going to see your most progress. The more, the better. But you get below an hour a week and the teachers get so far removed from what they re doing and from their previous conversations and where they were. And you think about how much water under a dam there is just in a week s time, you know, that it s hard for them to get back with it and be as productive. So try for at least an hour a week of time for the teachers. And I said during the school day, unless you re a title school. I worked with a high school that went to learning teams, and the principal asked them. He earmarked all of his professional development money for professional learning communities. So he told the teachers, he said, now we can make time during the day for you to meet, doing this kind of stuff, he said, or you can meet after school. They said, oh. He said, with pay. And they said, every day after school. So it depends on how you can 19