Joel Zehring

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.

Democracy is a brutally efficient system for stamping out less-than-popular ideas. It’s far less useful for making wise decisions that perpetuate improvement and renewal.

For a professional learning community, consensus beats democracy left and right. Here’s what I mean by consensus: if one member of the community can’t live with a choice and it’s consequences, then we don’t move forward. We take more time to listen, discuss, and persuade, or we find an alternate option that everyone can approve.

Consensus-rule values all members equally, all the time. There is no majority and minority. There are no winners and losers. No one gets left behind.

Through consensus, every member is consulted, and every member enjoys veto power. We don’t move forward unless “we” includes every single member. Bonus: later on, when things get tough, no one can say “I never wanted to do this in the first place,” because each member had a chance to stop the train before it left the station.

Consensus honors the spirit of Galileo in the community. At some point, the future of the community may depend on a lone voice of reason among the choruses of “we’ve always done it this way” and “trust us, this many people can’t be wrong.” How many times in history has the pivotal realization been championed by a single person or small collective of dissidents? How many times in history has the ruling faction actually worked to suppress sanity and reason to preserve the status quo?

If my first allegiance is to the community, and my community is committed to consensus, then the best and most sane answer will almost always win out. It just might take a lot longer than the five minute slot on the staff meeting agenda.

I’ve just finished the book that started it all; the PLC Bible, if you will. Professional Learning Communities at Work feels like the education version of Good to Great. It’s not quite up to par with Jim Collins’s canonical business success book, but PLCs at Work is very good. Some points that stood out to me:

• A school is a PLC (p.23). Previously, I was informed that collaborative teams and teachers in grade levels were PLCs. Calling a collaborative team a PLC is a like saying Arizona is the entire United States.
• “Shaping culture is not a task to complete; rather it is an ongoing commitment” (p. 148).
• Professional development should develop organizational capacity, not just individual teacher skills (p. 261).
• PLC is a passionate, non-linear, persistent process.

I wonder what percentage of teachers and admins currently working on PLC roll outs have read this book? How many educators have received the Good News of PLCs second-hand, from a well-intentioned district leader or a one-day-wonder inservice speaker?

I don’t see why this book shouldn’t be the subject of the first book study that any school staff completes as they begin to develop a PLC. I know I would have jumped on the PLC bandwagon a long time ago if someone would have just handed me this book.

When it comes to promoting the beliefs of professional learning community, what you say is important. How you say it is even more important.

Despite the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan’s words, administrators and district leaders continue to promote community through staff meetings, prescribed agendas, assigned readings, and mass emails. It’s no wonder teachers are hesitant to buy in to the PLC model. Just before the principal touts it, the teachers find out that they are losing their prep periods to a district in-service meeting.

To teachers on the receiving end of this kind of corporate propagandizing, professional learning community is simply another item to check off the list, rather than a powerful framework for redefining school in the twenty-first century. Schedules, agendas, tasks, and assignments are not necessarily bad things, but they are not sufficient for building vibrant professional learning community.

Community, even among professional learners, is organic and human and messy. It does not always fit nicely in a bullet point on an agenda, nor does it stop when a meeting is concluded.

The PLC message must be proclaimed through the media of community. Community is forged through questions, conversations, laughter, conflict, forgiveness, vulnerability, and patience. It is born out of proximity, permanence, shared history, and shared vision. Community requires more than passive attendance. Professional learning community demands passionate engagement from every member, and long-suffering empathy from every leader.

Planting and nurturing a healthy professional learning community requires that every teacher (and employee) in a building arrive at three conclusions:

1. I am a professional. My mission is to ensure learning at high levels for every student, measurable by objective evidence.
2. I learn and I help others learn. My students learn more when I collaborate and learn with other teachers, sharing strategies and comparing evidence.
3. My school is a community, greater than the sum of its parts. It is built out of collaborative teams and disciplined professionals that share and learn from their failures and successes.

It’s not enough to adopt two out of the three conclusions. It’s all or nothing.

Because these conclusions aren’t just benign, buzzword statements, adoption can be pretty arduous. Teachers need time and patience to hash through the implications of these terms with other teachers.

Teachers need time to air their concerns, fears, and insecurities before they really assimilate these beliefs.

Teachers need time to struggle and even fight through the process of letting go of longer-standing beliefs that conflict with these conclusions, without feeling like they’re forfeiting their souls and their individuality.

For leaders, the whole process is less like building a tract house, and more like planting and growing a forest. It takes strategy and experience, nurturing and pruning, and time.