Recently I saw a state department of education media post shouting out a school district for their student academic growth. When asked what contributed to their success, the district said it was a direct result of teacher collaboration.

 

I wondered specifically what types of collaboration moves the district was using. Were they vertically planning together in PLCs? Doing cycles of inquiry? Were co-teaching partners planning instruction together? 

 

“Teacher collaboration” can have many different meanings and is usually implemented differently across schools or districts. Time spent working with colleagues to improve student learning is an incredibly important use of time, so it’s no wonder that the school mentioned above attributed gains to their strategic work together. But successful use of collaboration time isn’t always the norm. In fact, many collaborative planning sessions can be a source of frustration for those required to attend as well as the people who have to design and lead them.

 

The Problems with PLCs

Collaborative planning sessions (often referred to as PLCs, or Professional Learning Communities) have evolved through the decades to mean different things or function through different structures– there really is no “one right way” to run a collaborative planning session. However, no matter how they are designed, there are some common issues that may make these sessions ineffective or present more challenges than they solve:

• They are usually held during teachers’ planning time. Which actually takes time away from…planning. When will teachers have time to plan their lessons and analyze student work?

• Planning out collaborative sessions for multiple grade levels and subjects can be time-consuming and exhausting for those who lead the sessions.

• Sometimes the sessions can add more to a teacher’s to-do list than take something away. 

• Sessions are not always seen as relevant and meaningful, and it has nothing to do with the teachers’ attitudes. It has everything to do with what is the most pressing work on a teacher’s mind- upcoming lessons, knowing who is on track and who isn’t, and responding to student needs.

So how do we address the problems if teachers also say that collaboration time is important? And if the most valuable resource in a school setting is time, how can these sessions best be utilized if planning periods are the only option?

 

Set the Collaborative Planning Compass

The key to making collaborative planning sessions both efficient and effective for everyone involved is to have a clear plan that all stems from a “north star,” or an anchor point from which you are operating. Let’s look at three different options for designing collaborative planning.

 

Design your collaborative planning sessions around a school or subject-specific instructional goal.

 

This move is an extremely powerful one because it leverages the asset of time to focus on actually making progress toward goals. For example, do you have a school instructional goal of increasing student proficiency in math by a certain date or benchmark? Do you students need to improve their skills in written expression in ELA? Try designing your grade-level collaborative planning sessions around those specific targets. Sessions can be structured to address specific needs and answer questions along the way:

• How can the curricular resources you are using this week help us with our goal? What is still missing? 

• How will we check for understanding during critical lessons?

• What student work products will we review together to see if students are making progress? 

• Based on student work results, how will we respond to needs?

 Collaboratively planning around instructional goals addresses some of the challenges mentioned earlier by both setting a relevant purpose for meeting and allowing teachers to intentionally plan and utilize student work to adjust instruction. And, most importantly, it keeps the instructional goals from becoming something that we put on an action plan at the beginning of the year, throw lots of things at each semester, and just “hoping for the best.”

 

Design your collaborative planning sessions around subject-specific instructional content or curriculum.

 

What if– hang with me here for a second– we actually use planning time to get planning done? But not in the generalized write-the-chapter, page, or handout way. Instead, really analyze upcoming lessons, identify critical content, anticipate student misconceptions, and determine student success criteria. Using curriculum or subject-specific content in your collaborative design is a really strategic way to guide instructional planning in a way that meets the needs of your teachers while not adding anything new to their already overflowing plates. This can be tailored to your teaching teams, whether they are new to a curriculum or veterans of the content. Additionally, facilitators can design cycles of planning with content and reuse the structure when beginning a new unit of study. Having routines for planning content can eliminate hours of designing sessions!

 

Design your collaborative planning sessions based on observational and qualitative data.

 

One of the best examples I have seen with this type of design was in a school where the instructional coach identified that student engagement was a big area of need during some observations. However, teachers were reporting that they were struggling with lesson pacing and getting through their content. So, the coach designed her collaborative planning sessions in response to the data by focusing on two moves: 

1. Teachers identified the essential activities in upcoming lessons and determined where to spend the most time. 

2. Then, based on those essential activities, teachers planned strategic moves to eliminate student opt-out. They determined ways to have students engage in those important moments in the lesson by creating a verbal, written, or physical product.

The key to this example was that the coach used quantitative data that she collected during observations and the qualitative data that teachers shared about their experiences to design collaborative planning. And the results? Student engagement data improved significantly, and teachers reported not only being able to get through their content, but also asked to keep that planning structure. Being responsive in this way builds trust among teams and gives meaning to the precious minutes spent together to solve problems. 

 

No One-Size-Fits-All

Using instructional goals, content, and data are just three dynamic ways to maximize the use of collaborative planning time, but there is truly no one-size-fits-all approach. Nevertheless, the most effectively structured collaborative planning sessions are centered on a clearly communicated need, leverage teacher ownership, and allow teachers to do the work that matters most–  planning effective instruction for students.