September 2010

As I walked through the school prior to the first day of classes, I had a teacher hold up a copy of Learning by Doing . He said, “Are we still doing this stuff this year?” The reply I wanted to give was that it was obvious that he was never really “doing” it to begin with if he thought it was just a program out of a book. What I actually said was, “Yes.” I know my response wasn't very profound. I should have said that good teachers have always been operating within a collaborative culture and that I don't advocate for a book, but I advocate for teachers to collaboratively analyze shared student achievement data. Instead I stared in disbelief. He looked at me with a resigned look, said “okay”, and put the book back on his shelf. I walked away thinking that there is still a great deal of work to be done.

I absolutely believe that every student can learn and be academically successful. I also believe that no individual teacher could ever meet all the various needs of every student in a single classroom. The traditional structure of teacher isolation ensures that some students fall through the cracks. If we continue with the traditional structure of isolation, then we either don't believe that every student can learn at high levels or we don't care whether they fail.

Historically, our school system has accepted and actually expected student failure. Many of us went through a school system or a class where everything was dependant on the traditional Bell Curve. The Bell Curve establishes winners and losers. Anyone who has experienced a class like this will remember the feeling of relief when someone bombed a test because that “loser” brought the curve down for all the average kids. I remember resenting the heck out my best friend in algebra who never studied and always pushed the high side of the curve to the ninety-eight percent mark or higher on every test. In the strictest definition of the Bell Curve distribution, there were guaranteed failures. Some teachers were even proud about the number of kids who failed their classes because it meant that they were demanding teachers—and everyone else was a pushover. Our jobs as educators are not to guarantee failures. The most important goal of any educator is to ensure learning at high levels.

I am not advocating that we water down our curriculum or that we do the work for our students. I am stating that it is no longer acceptable to simply let children fail. If we believe that all kids can learn, it is our job to exhaust every avenue available to us to ensure that every student receives the necessary instruction to be successful.

I have yet to find research that shows teaching in isolation ensures the learning of all students at high levels. The expectation for all of our educators is that we work in collaboration with other educators focusing on student learning. PLC isn't a program to go through. This isn't a lock and step program where if you do step 1 to step 10 you will have a perfect product. There is no clearly established manual that explains how to ensure that every student successfully learns the curriculum. However, if we keep an intense focus on what we want students to learn, operate in collaborative teams, and focus on continuous student improvement we will realize great achievements in our schools.

So, yes, we are still doing this PLC stuff…