Facilitating Teacher Teams and Authentic PLCs: The Human Side of Leading People, Protocols, and Practices

The Human Side of Leading People, Protocols, and Practices

Daniel R. Venables

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781416625247
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Berufliche Weiterbildung

As professional learning communities become more widespread, educators have learned that they can't simply form grade-level or subject-area teams and call it a day. To profoundly affect teacher practice and student learning, PLCs need strong and knowledgeable leadership.

In Facilitating Teacher Teams and Authentic PLCs, Daniel R. Venables draws on his extensive experience helping schools and districts implement effective PLCs to explore this crucial but often-overlooked need. Taking a two-pronged approach to PLC facilitation, Venables offers targeted guidance both for leading the people in teacher teams and for facilitating their work. This practical resource provides

• Strategies for facilitating interactions among colleagues in PLCs and building trust and buy-in.
• Field-tested, user-friendly protocols to focus and deepen team discussions around texts, data, teacher and student work, teacher dilemmas, and collaborative planning time.
• Tips for anticipating and addressing interpersonal conflicts and obstacles that commonly arise during use of protocols.

• Current and prospective PLC facilitators at every grade level will find this book an essential guide to navigating the challenging and rewarding endeavor of leading authentic PLCs. Build your skills, and help your team rise to the next level.
  
  

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Part 1. The Human Side of Facilitating Teachers and Teacher Teams

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When it comes down to it, facilitating our fellow teachers is an essentially human endeavor. In most cases, teachers who have been asked (or who have volunteered) to facilitate their teacher teams are colleagues, not administrators. Because they occupy the same position on the totem pole as the rest of the teachers in the PLC and have no special supervisory powers, their effectiveness as facilitators depends significantly on their relationships with their fellow team members. In fact, their leadership in the team is based on these relationships; they have no leverage other than this. Thus, the health of these relationships is paramount. Part 1 of this book accordingly addresses the essentials of facilitating colleagues, building trust and buy-in, and dealing with interpersonal obstacles.

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Chapter 1

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Facilitation Essentials

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Human and Social Capital

Schools used to pour all of their professional development dollars into building their human capital—that is, improving the quality, knowledge, and skill sets of individual teachers. The rationale was that teachers who attended conferences or participated in other professional development opportunities would return to their schools brimming with knowledge and pass their learning on to their colleagues. In many cases, however, this simply didn't happen, so the funds invested in sending a single teacher to a conference yielded relatively small returns—which led to little improvement in classroom instruction on any scale.

Today, thanks in large part to the research of Dr. Carrie Leana of the University of Pittsburgh and others, we are learning that building social capital is a more effective professional development strategy. In contrast to human capital, social capital refers to the quality of the interactions among teachers in a department or school. Schools with high social capital show significantly higher gains in student learning than do schools with low social capital—even when those schools have moderately low human capital. Leana writes,

When the relationships among teachers in a school are characterized by high trust and frequent interaction—that is, when social capital is strong—student achievement scores improve…. We also found that even low-ability teachers can perform as well as teachers of average ability if they have strong social capital. Strong social capital can go a long way toward offsetting any disadvantages students face when their teachers have low human capital. (2011, pp. 33, 34)

This is not to say that schools should never bother improving their human capital; incorporating both forms of teacher professional development is ideal (Figure 1.1 offers examples of actions that promote both types of capital). If schools want to get the most bang for their professional development buck, however, they should invest heavily in developing the social capital of their teachers and teacher teams. A great way to spike the social capital of a school is to focus priority on the school's PLCs. If the quality of teacher interactions in a school's PLCs improves, there is likely to be a commensurate gain in student learning.

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Figure 1.1. Actions That Boost Social and Human Capital

Actions That Boost Social Capital

• Learning together by reading articles, watching videos, and discussing findings
• Training PLC facilitators to understand and deal with interpersonal team dynamics
• Holding teams responsible for setting their own goals
• Holding teams responsible for identifying and solving their own problems
• Building PLC meeting time into the daily schedule
• Instituting regular, consistent peer observations
• Reflecting on goals and progress toward goals on a regular basis and celebrating successes
• Fostering team dependence
• Planning instruction together

Actions That Boost Human Capital

• Sending individual teachers to professional conferences
• Inviting a speaker or trainer to address the faculty
• Setting individualized professional goals
• Depending on individual teacher action plans to support low-performing teachers
• Setting up mentor teacher programs
• Conducting administrative classroom observations
• Holding one-on-one teacher-administrator conferences
• Fostering principal dependence
• Having instructional coaches

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Why Are PLC Facilitators Indispensable?

Although PLCs are an effective way to build social capital, not all PLCs are created equal. More specifically, ensuring effective facilitation of PLCs is key; simply assembling teams and sending them on their way is inadequate. As someone who works with schools throughout the United States developing authentic PLCs and training facilitators, I firmly believe that every PLC should have a person designated as the facilitator.

There are PLC models available that don't call for a facilitator. The thinking behind such models is that "we're all in this together," and their structure is based on a model of shared leadership. In theory, a teacher team that is able to facilitate itself sounds great, but I have rarely seen this model work in practice. Usually, shared leadership in this context means no leadership at all. Discussions veer off track, time is wasted, and the focus shifts from teaching and learning to matters only tangentially, if at all, related to student learning. As a result, the growth of such a team is very slow, and anything meaningful the team achieves could have been accomplished by a facilitator-led PLC in half the time. Slow progress and a lack of focus aren't the only drawbacks of this model; more serious is what happens when interpersonal conflicts or other obstacles arise and there's no well-trained facilitator to guide the group to a resolution.

The Role of the Facilitator

A PLC facilitator's primary role is to increase and maintain the social capital in his or her teacher team. If team members are engaging in quality interactions focused on teaching and learning, then their students' achievement will improve. This job comes with many other responsibilities, including

• Guiding the team through the steps of protocols.
• Asking thought-provoking questions that challenge conventional thinking and push the discussion to a deeper level.
• Promoting and modeling honesty and respect in discussions.
• Ensuring that all voices are heard.
• Maintaining team members' emotional safety during discussions.
• Keeping the team focused and moving it forward when it's stuck.
• Mediating disagreements and helping the team navigate the sometimes-turbulent waters of interpersonal dynamics.
• Being able to step back, particularly when being emotionally drawn into a problematic group dynamic.
• Working for the good of the team.

The last bullet point touches on one of the most important responsibilities of a PLC facilitator. In 1985, when dozens of the biggest names in music came together to record the charity single "We Are the World," a sign posted outside the studio admonished the artists to "Please check your egos at the door." This sign served to remind participants that the goal of the project was to help others—not to boost egos or careers. Similarly, the Code of Ethics I share in The Practice of Authentic PLCs includes the credo "Leave your ego at the door, but bring your brains inside" (Venables, 2011, p. 146) to remind PLC facilitators and members alike to put aside self-interest and call their brains to the fore so that they can think deeply about the important work at hand. Our decisions, actions, and priorities must not be tainted by what serves our own egos but instead be guided by what is best for student learning.

Most of the PLC facilitator's responsibilities just listed will fall into place as long as he or she strives to keep the team's interactions at a high level. The remainder of this chapter explores what I refer to as facilitation essentials: balancing content and process, figuring out appropriate facilitation styles for different tasks, building an effective team before you need one, empowering the team, honing nonverbal communication skills, and using protocols.

Balancing Content and Process

One of the biggest challenges PLC facilitators face is balancing content and process. To illustrate, guiding a PLC through the steps of a protocol requires the facilitator to move team members through each segment, announcing what is supposed to happen and why and refereeing the discussion as team members make contributions. The facilitator may also make contributions to the discussion, as she is a full-fledged member of the PLC and, like any member of the team, may have valuable insights related to the topic. These are all concerns of content.

At the same time, the PLC facilitator must observe how the protocol is going, asking herself questions like Are all members contributing? Is the discussion superficial or shallow? Is the body language of any member communicating discomfort with what is being said? Is the conversation straying off topic? Is any member dominating air time? Is the current segment of the protocol running over time? If so, should I allow the conversation to continue or move on to the next piece? Is the discussion helping teacher X, who has put his work on the table for all to review? These are all concerns of process.

Whereas all other team members can fully immerse themselves in the content of the PLC's work, the facilitator must necessarily concern herself with both content and process if she is to keep things moving smoothly, maximize the benefits of the discussion at hand, and maintain high-quality discourse. This dual responsibility of maintaining the social capital of her team while engaging as an active member herself can be exhausting—but it's crucial, ensuring that her team will get the most out of the experience and that student learning will improve as a result of the team's work. And isn't that why facilitators are there in the first place?

Figuring Out the Right Facilitation Style

As facilitators, we bring to the table our unique personalities, just as we do as classroom teachers. Early in my career, I was told by an administrator that 90 percent of good teaching boils down to personality. I'm not sure that I would place the percentage quite so high, but I absolutely concur with the sentiment of her claim and suspect a similar conjecture could be made about PLC facilitators.

Some PLC coaches are soft-spoken and emit a warm, caring persona; others who are more "Type A" feel driven to get things done and check items off the meeting's agenda; still others are no-nonsense but exhibit a permeating sense of humor as they lead the team through various tasks. All of these styles, and many others, can make for effective facilitation. But facilitators must also bear in mind that, independent of their particular style, there are some PLC tasks or protocols that require stronger (or tighter) facilitation and others that call for softer (or looser) facilitation. The decision to facilitate in a tight or loose way should be dictated more by the task at hand than by a facilitator's preferences or style.

For example, a PLC coach would do well to loosely facilitate a discussion about updating the team's existing set of norms but tightly facilitate a text-based discussion. If he is too loose in his facilitation of the latter task, the conversation will quickly veer off course and may turn into autobiographical recitations from one or two particularly vocal team members. When this happens, it is immensely difficult to draw the PLC back to the text.

Many considerations go into a facilitator's decision of how loosely or tightly to run particular parts of a meeting. Factors such as PLC members' level of trust and buy-in, the facilitator's level of experience, the type of task at hand, and how seasoned the team is all contribute to the coach's choice of facilitation style. As such, there is no carved-in-stone list of which PLC tasks call for loose facilitation and which call for tight facilitation, although I do discuss facilitation pointers for various protocols in Part 2 of this book. For now, suffice it to say that PLC coaches—especially new ones—should err on the side of too tight rather than too loose. Like teachers who run an extra-tight ship at the beginning of the school year, they can always back off a bit and loosen their facilitation in time.

Building a Team Before You Need It

I am regularly asked by schools and school districts to do one of the following: (1) build authentic PLCs from the ground up or (2) retool existing PLCs that have floundered in their work, failed to improve student achievement, or morphed into little more than planning or teacher gripe sessions. Personally, I would always rather create a school's PLCs from scratch than save the established but ineffective ones. Unluckily for me, more schools are in the second camp than in the first.

My first step in improving a school's ineffective PLCs is to find out the reasons for their lack of success. I discuss some of these reasons in detail in Chapter 2, but here I will focus on the most common reason for a PLC's failure: the team has neglected to build a foundation of collaboration among its members. Often, the members of such a team have plunged into the work and begun to set agendas and norms, examine data, and look at teacher work right away without taking time to establish themselves as a strong team. This well-intentioned but misguided way of working usually stems from an ill-trained facilitator who did not realize the importance of engaging the team in experiences that lay a strong initial foundation of collaboration and trust. As a result, the norms set by the team were likely dictated by a few vocal members, and teacher work brought to the table was probably cursorily reviewed and mostly celebrated—no matter how good or bad it was—because the teachers in the PLC didn't know how to pose questions about or challenge a colleague's work. Worse yet, the team may have brought up questions or dilemmas in too harsh a way, or the feedback may have been received too defensively, leaving all members with a bad taste in their mouths and feeling ill disposed toward presenting their work again—or engaging in any protocols at all.

The damage done in such a scenario is significant—all because the PLC was more an ill-le...