Studying Your Impact… Major Key for Professional Learning Communities and Collaborative Team Success

by Jon Yost, Solution Tree Associate

In the fall of 2003, Rick DuFour published an article, “Leading Edge: ‘Collaboration Lite’ Puts Student Achievement on a Starvation Diet.” In the article, he warns school leaders and teacher teams that they cannot settle for what he termed ‘collaboration lite’ (such as congeniality, coordination, and delegating responsibilities) and must define collaboration as the systematic process in which we work together to analyze and impact professional practices. John Hattie, in his ongoing and recent expansive “Visible Learning” research, recently published a paper titled, “Real Gold vs. Fool’s Gold: The Visible Learning Methodology for Finding What Works Best in Education.” Hattie, much like DuFour, also emphasizes the concept and importance of schools studying the impact of their professional practices.

DuFour wrote that the work of collaborative teams center around the four critical questions:

What do we want all students to learn?
How will we know when they have learned it?
How will we respond when they haven’t learned it?
How will we respond when they have learned it?

DuFour goes on to describe that the collaboration process around these four critical questions is designed be a catalyst for teams in changing their practices. Fostering powerful collaboration happens when teams of teachers engage together to clarify the essential knowledge and skills they want their students to learn, develop common formative assessments, and analyze the results to identify strengths and weaknesses in their instructional practices both individually and collectively. He points out teams cannot achieve the deep level of collaboration that actually impacts student learning without comparable student achievement data and collegial support.

Hattie also points to this analysis of professional practices. He states that combining teacher collective efficacy (teachers believing that by working together, they can have a significant positive impact on student achievement) and collaborative focus on teachers evaluating their impact can significantly increase their effectiveness. He states, “This relentless focus on impact, discussed regularly, is the real holy grail of Visible Learning research.”

Sharon Kramer and Sarah Schuhl in “School Improvement for All” outline the work and expectation of collaborative teams. The fourth essential element is teams using the results from common assessments to improve individual practice, build the team’s collective capacity, and intervene/extend student learning.

So, what does it mean to analyze and impact your professional practices, most importantly your instructional practices? Analyze means to examine methodically or closely, inspect, scrutinize, and study closely. As a team brings in comparative data, which should often include student work, they are connecting how they taught the skill or concepts with what they see in the student work. Both individually and collectively, the team looks for evidence where students were able to successfully demonstrate their learning and ask what led to this success. The team then examines the data and/or student work to determine the misconceptions, errors, or mistakes in their learning and ask the same questions…what in my or our instruction led to these misconceptions, errors, or mistakes? Through this methodical and close study, teams are determining their “impact.” By doing this collectively as a team, teachers can begin to learn from one another and immediately go back to their classrooms and change their instruction.

Periodically, a team will analyze student work and discover no one on their team had great success. When this happens, it is informing the team they need to learn more together. This could lead to connecting with other teachers or an instructional coach. This pursuit of determining their individual and collective impact is what drives the continuous learning for the team.

DuFour mentioned that teams not only need comparative data, but collegial support. One way to build collegial support is to set the purpose of examining data and establish data norms. Here are four data norms teams often adopt and review before looking at both data or student work together.

We compare data to learn from each other, not to judge!
We will use data to help each other and our team to get better.
We will use data to inform us what to do next.
We will not make excuses about what the data tells us.

Frequently, I see teachers in team meetings with data and/or student work in front of them trying to analyze the impact of their instruction, however, what they are missing are the artifacts of how they taught the lesson. A starting point is for each member of the team to bring in their lesson plans, but often those are too general to examine their practices closely. Below is a list of other artifacts which may help a team analyze their instructional practices at a deeper level.

Copy or picture of anchor charts
Worksheets, graphic organizers, or curriculum materials used
Work samples from specific lessons prior to the common formative assessment so they can see the progression of learning throughout a unit
Pictures of explanations or instruction from their whiteboard or electronic device
Short videos of their critical components of their lessons

If all students learned the same way and at the same rate, and walked into our classrooms with the same prior knowledge and skills, teaching would be much simpler. However, that is rarely ever the case. Know this, to meet the needs of all of our students and ensure all of our students learn at high levels, we will need to work in collaborative teams focusing on knowing their impact and learning together.

References

Learning by Doing, DuFour, Dufour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos, 2016, Solution Tree Press
- Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, Routledge. London
- School Improvement for All, Kramer, Schuhl, 2017, Solution Tree Press
- “Real Gold vs. Fool’s Gold: The VISIBLE LEARNINGTM Methodology for Finding What Works Best in Education” by John Hattie and Arran Hamilton. 2020 by Corwin Press, Inc.