Joel Zehring's Education Blog

Solution Tree lists no fewer than 16 books on transforming schools into collaborative communities. Building a Professional Learning Community at Work stands out as the most teacher-friendly explanation of PLCs that I’ve read.

It’s written by teachers with teachers in mind. This is not a standard PLC theory and research dump. Parry Graham and William Ferriter follow a fictional principal and his core team of teacher-leaders as they work to reform their building as a professional learning community. The scenes in their PLC story serve as the launch point for each chapter. Each scene is followed by clear, concise analysis, an explanation of the underlying research, and practical recommendations for school leaders moving forward.

If the scenes feel staged at times, it’s an easy flaw to forgive. Each line of dialog serves to illustrate a critical element of working in collaboration with others. While the story is fictional, it’s clear that the authors have lived through many of the meetings and conversations portrayed in the book.

Graham and Ferriter don’t shy away from the messy parts of teamwork, collaboration, and leadership. Sometimes teachers disagree. Sometimes they let each other down. Sometimes teachers hurt each other. More than once, I found myself cringing at the too-honest comments of teachers trying to figure out how to make collaboration work. If you’ve ever worked collaboratively with other teachers, you know that the results can be tremendous, but the process can get barbed and personal at times. In Building a PLC at Work, Graham and Ferriter point out common trouble spots in collaboration and share insights for overcoming the instances of friction in a collaborative team.

This book includes no shortage of research. These guys read a lot of really good books, and they apply fundamental principles from these books to education. If you’ve read and enjoyed books like Good to Great, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Here Comes Everybody, and Professional Learning Communities at Work, then Graham’s and Ferriter’s ideas will really resonate with you.

Reproducibles in every chapter help you to get started now. No need to wait for committees to form and surveys to be turned in. Building a PLC at Work includes sample meeting agendas and worksheets for every step of the process, from initiating informal conversations to reflecting on data conversations.

If you’ve been put off by the one-dimensional idealism of many PLC seminars or district workshops, Building a Professional Learning Community at Work will be a breath of fresh air. Graham and Ferriter unpack the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of reshaping a school as a professional learning community, and they cast a real-world vision for how schools can leverage collaboration to realize high achievement for every student.

A statement in a Deborah Meier post has stuck in my head recently: “Learning is unstoppable.” Brain science corroborates this truth. If a teacher or school promises to instill “life-long learning,” are they really promising anything that isn’t already guaranteed through biology?

That said, it’s plain to see that all brains are not used equally. As long as we’re living, we never stop using our minds. Some, however, never really grasp how to “use their minds well.”

In ancient agrarian cultures, peasants would follow after workers at harvest time, picking up any bits of the crop that were dropped or unharvested. This was gleaning. Perhaps the best example of gleaning can be found in the Biblical story of Ruth (Chapter 2, specifically).

Let’s move past life-long learning. For starters, let’s stop doing things that get in the way of learning. Next, we should set a goal to grow in our students the capacity for life-long gleaning.

Those who glean gather any time they can, in any situation, from any harvest. We glean by picking out the valuable information, knowledge, and wisdom from failure and success. We glean from personal experience, and we glean by observing the experiences of others. Learners wait passively for  lessons and teachable moments. Gleaners initiate valuable experiences by taking risks and seeking out other risk-takers from which to gather knowledge and wisdom.

At the very least, let’s make promises that matter. Let’s add value rather than taking credit for a naturally occurring process.

My Google Apps Education Edition presentation went over really well. It helped that several people on the district technology advisory committee have used Google Apps in their personal time, or have heard about it through the educational grapevine.

The best part had to be a comment from the director of technology for our district. He indicated that his department hopes to provide teachers at different levels with options for student collaboration online. No “one-size-fits-all” decision-making. This is the kind of thinking that makes my district one of the most desirable places in Tucson to work. From my follow-up email:

There are plenty of questions that I didn’t cover or couldn’t answer in my presentation. There’s a good chance that you can find answers to these questions here: Google Apps Education Edition – Common Questions. I wanted to follow up with a few comments and questions that were raised at the meeting:

Administrative Control: The security and safety of our students are critical when considering any information system. Google knows this, and has some tools that help district-level administrators to manage accounts and monitor activity efficiently. Check out the following links to get a better idea of the administrative features of Google Apps.

• Deployment
• Admin Basics
• Your Control Panel
• Fix a Problem
• Managing Services
• Using Services

A special note to district technology managers: Postini Message Security from Google adds extra security and administrative features. It’s free for schools that sign up by July 2010. In the name of comparative shopping, Gaggle.net is a third-party filtering and security service that can supplement Google Apps.

Professional Development: Training and support for uses must be considered when adopting any new tool. The following interactive guides from Google are a good resource for self-paced training. Warning: animation with sound will play automatically.

• Introduction
• Email
• Chat
• Start Page
• Calendar
• Web Pages
• Docs

Another valuable resource for teacher training is the Google Apps Lesson Plan page. Teachers can find ready-made lessons related to different apps to use with students.

Finally, I’m continually adding to my personal Google Apps support network through Twitter. I’ve created a list of educators on Twitter using Google Apps in their classrooms, schools, and districts. Many of these educators contributed to this presentation via my online spreadsheet.

Two of our district-mandated professional development days happen on half-days at the very end of each semester. Here’s my crazy PD suggestion to make those days productive:

What if we asked staff members to plan PD sessions and presentations to share with the rest of the staff? Here’s what I imagine:

1. Staff members submit descriptions of sessions they would like to lead. Sessions can include lectures, discussions on books or articles, demonstrations, instruction labs, assessment labs, planning labs, etc.
2. Distribute the list of possible sessions to the staff (sans presenter names) and let teachers vote for the sessions they would be willing to attend.
3. Notify the approved presenters and carve out time for them to plan their sessions inside the normal school day. Perhaps the principal teaches a lesson to give a teacher time to plan. Perhaps special schedules get temporarily adjusted to afford presenters a larger block of planning time. Creative coverage is the key.
4. Open up official registration for sessions by releasing the list of sessions with presenter names and session descriptions to the staff. First come, first signed up.
5. PD day turns into a home-grown mini-conference. Presenter-teachers take ownership of the PD because they get to lead sessions that matter, and attendee-teachers get choice in their professional development.

Here are some ways to add structure:

• Prior to calling for session ideas, the whole staff votes on a theme they would like to explore. Examples of themes include “Student Learning and Achievement,” “Effective Communication,” and “Brain-Based Learning.”
• Enforce a minimum or maximum size for individual session attendance. Sessions with too few people get canceled, sessions with too many people get repeated.

What do you think? Any feedback or push back on the ideas or on the logistics would be much appreciated. I’d love to hear about any schools that already doing something like this.

Free public education doesn’t come without cost to families.

I’m not talking about tuition or tax dollars.

Students and families only have so much time and energy. Why should they spend these precious resources at your school? What explicit or implicit outcomes does your school promise?

If I send my son to your school for the first seven years of his education, I am investing in your school. Every year that my son attends your school is another year that he can’t attend a better school, presuming that one exists close by. What are you willing to promise us to offset our opportunity cost? Are you willing to put it in writing?

If you’re not able to put a promise in writing, why should I consider your school?

What would it take to get every employee in your organization to buy in to such a promise to the point that they will do everything in their power to deliver?

My district is shopping for a student email solution, and I think Google Apps Education Edition should be at the top of our list of possible tools. The following is an email draft that I’m planning to send to the members of our district technology advisory board prior to their next meeting, where I’ll give my Google Apps presentation. Cold-start meetings waste a ton of face-to-face time, so I’m hoping this email will give us some runway to launch into discussion about the best tool to meet the needs of our students and employees.

First, I’d like to frame the problem: We need a tool that engages students and employees in online collaboration. There’s a cost to using any tool, including time investment or financial investment. We need a tool that delivers extensive benefits to students and employees with minimal investment of time and money.

Next, the pitch: Google Apps Education Edition is the best solution I’ve seen for our problem. The suite includes applications for email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and website design. It’s all web-based, so users can access the full-featured tools from any computer with internet connection.

Google Apps are designed around collaboration, rather than just providing individual productivity. Conversations over email are threaded to show the back-and-forth dialog. Multiple users can edit a single document or spreadsheet simultaneously. Internal and public publishing is built in to every application for quick, secure sharing with a class, a school, the whole district, or the whole world. Best of all, Google regularly updates its applications with new features and improvements, so we know that we’re investing in a tool that will grow as our needs grow and change.

I’ve included a few links below if you would like to learn more before our meeting:

Information and examples:

• Google Apps for Education – Free email and apps for schools
• Google Message Security for K-12 Powered by Postini
• My class blog (created with Google Sites)
• IDEAL portal (Teachers can try Google Apps for free through Arizona’s Department of Education.)

Video links:

• Why Google Apps for Education? Overview of Gmail in Google Apps
• Share a Calendar Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Docs in Plain English

If I’ve missed anything, make sure to straighten me out in the comments.