The journey to a high-performing professional learning community.

King, William B.

Valley Career and Technical Center in Fishersville, Virginia, is a regional career and technical education (CTE) facility that serves the cities of Staunton and Waynesboro, as well as Augusta County, in the central Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia. Five hundred students from seven area high schools participate in 25 different CTE programs. These programs vary in length from semester-long introductory courses designed for ninth and tenth graders, to one- and two-year completer programs for high school juniors and seniors.

Professional learning communities (PLCs) are an internationally endorsed system of school reform aimed at "dramatically improving the overall performance of schools, the engagement of students, and the sense of efficacy and job satisfaction of educators" (Dufour & Fullan, 2013).

According to their leading proponents, the six characteristics of high-performing PLCs are:

1. Shared mission (purpose), vision (clear direction), values (collective commitments) and goals (indicators, timetables and targets), which are all focused on student learning.

2. Collaborative focus on learning.

3. Collective inquiry into best practices vs. a school's current reality.

4. Action orientation or learning by doing.

5. Commitment to continuous improvement.

6. Results orientation. (Dufour, Dufour, Eaker, & Many, 2010)

These collaborative teams usually consist of four to six members who meet regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) to discuss gaps in student learning and to conduct action research on the implementation of research-based best practice instructional strategies. PLCs are usually composed of grade-level teams in elementary schools and subject-area teams in secondary schools that have a common curriculum and often share the same students.

However, in comprehensive high schools, CTE teachers, who are usually the sole instructors (or singletons) in their particular disciplines, are often put together in a single PLC so that they will not be left out of the process. Many of these teachers struggle to find common ground for instructional collaboration. One technologically driven response to the problem of creating a cohesive PLC out of groups of singletons has been to virtually link teachers of the same or similar CTE disciplines across a school district or region by forming virtual PLCs (Grams, Hebert-Giffen, & Meeder, 2013).

While not exactly rejecting the idea of pursuing virtual PLCs, the leadership team at Valley Tech has maintained that despite the many differences in learning targets among our teachers' various state-mandated course competency lists, there were still sufficient similarities in our CTE course designs, instructional techniques and assessment practices to allow for constructive PLC collaboration. Since the 2010-2011 school year, we have been working toward that end.

Need Analysis

Because they are so often singletons, CTE teachers are far more likely to work in isolation from their colleagues than their academic peers. Furthermore, because they often act independently, getting them to collaborate in an instructionally meaningful way with their CTE colleagues can be a real challenge. Adding to that challenge is the reality that many CTE teachers are career switchers who entered the education profession through alternative licensure routes. In many CTE regional centers like ours that have a heavy emphasis on Trade and Industrial programs, such as construction, machining, welding and transportation mechanics, many teachers have not been exposed to traditional teacher preparation programs (except for a few required courses), and many have not had any formal education past high school graduation.

At Valley Tech, this cohort makes up 64 percent of our faculty. This statistic is perhaps why CTE teachers may be somewhat defensive about their pedagogical backgrounds and reluctant to discuss curricular and instructional topics with their peers. For these teachers, technical competence and practical experience were far more important to their survival and success in the classroom than any academic preparation. But that landscape is rapidly changing.

Each reauthorization of the federal Perkins legislation that helps to fund CTE places more emphasis on the integration of academic fundamentals with CTE job-skills instruction. College- and career-readiness are now the watchwords for evaluating the rigor and relevance of all aspects of a secondary education, including CTE. In addition, industry-based credentialing programs that are tied to high-stakes examinations are becoming increasingly important, both as a valued outcome for students, and as an accountability indicator for CTE programming. All these factors contribute to the necessity of CTE teachers becoming more effective in the classroom and to the need for job-embedded professional development in CTE schools.

Traditional Approaches to Professional Development

Traditionally, the professional development offered to CTE instructors came in one of two forms. One form is an annual teacher's conference sponsored by a state branch of one of the CTE professional organizations, such as the National Association Teachers of Family and Consumer Sciences, the National Business Education Association, the National Association of Agricultural Educators, the Association for Skilled and Technical Sciences or the Marketing Education Association. Another form is through periodic "sage on the stage" motivational speakers presented as a back-to-school keynote experience.

A 2009 study published by researchers at Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council stated that "... sustained and intensive professional learning for teachers is related to student achievement gains" (Darling-Hammond, Chung, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). That same study also argued that limited, one-shot presentations or workshops had little effect on increasing student learning, but the study strongly advocated the positive correlation between high-functioning PLCs and increased student achievement.

Valley Tech's PLC Journey

At Valley Tech, our four-year journey toward creating and sustaining high-performing PLCs began by forming small groups of teachers organized, as far possible, around the 16 Career Clusters.* This initial phase of collaboration encouraged collegial conversations on school-related topics in order to build trust within the groups and to break down the sense of isolation within the staff as a whole. Group members were encouraged (supported by administrators) to visit each other's classrooms armed with targeted "look-fors" intended to inspire such conversations.

The feedback given at this early stage of development was almost universally positive, and it centered on aspects of classroom management, rather than on instructional planning or delivery. When the enthusiasm for the classroom walk-throughs waned and the group conversations devolved into gripe sessions, it was time to make a change.

In 2012, we started the year by working with our teacher leaders (or Center Leadership Team (CLT)) to take on the role of facilitating the process of transforming our still-not-quite-collaborative groups into true PLCs. The idea that the PLCs would focus exclusively on promoting student achievement by improving curriculum design and instructional delivery (and not as a vehicle to complain about school management) was met with pockets of resistance. We were assisted in our efforts to establish a PLC culture by our supervising school division (one of the three entities that sends us the largest group of students and provides the greatest source of our funding), which started a district-wide exploratory investigation of collaborative group formation.

Ultimately, this effort was not sustained by the school division, but the staff felt reassured when the trainers that were brought in by the district introduced a collaborative approach to improving student achievement that substantiated, word for word, what they had been learning about in their PLCs since 2011.

Another external driver of our reform efforts was the adoption of a new teacher evaluation process. Like so many other teacher evaluations adopted across the country at that time, Augusta County's included a data-driven student growth measurement. Preparing for the implementation of this new system necessitated the development of new (pre- and post-test) assessment procedures, an elementary understanding of descriptive statistics and an investigation of instructional methodologies highlighted by the new evaluation's benchmarks--all of which were perfect grist for the PLC collaborative mill. In other words, our PLCs played a substantial role in preparing our teachers to meet these new challenges.

In 2013, because of a rather substantial change in our CLT membership, our PLC efforts again focused on building these teacher leaders' capacity to act as facilitators of their respective groups. Our efforts also included moving our PLCs to undertake action research of group implementation of an instructional strategy endorsed by the work of educational researcher and reformer Robert Marzano, author of many books and articles on instruction, assessment and learning standards. Although the results of these efforts were mixed, there was enough observable progress in that a majority of our PLCs realized improved student achievement results. We ended the year with the sense that a truly collaborative culture was starting to take hold.

Going Forward

As we began the 2014-2015 school year, we reshuffled the PLC groups to break up pockets of resistors or non-participants, and the school leadership (the administration and the CLT together) presented the faculty with a challenge to move completely to competency-based grading by the fall of 2015. Although all CTE curricula are required to be competency-based, what that often means in practice is that teachers complete each student's competency assessment only at the end of the year as a summative evaluation, rather than using the competency lists to create daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly, etc., performance indicators to assess and communicate student progress.

Said another way, filling out student competency records in far too many cases became just one more year-end task to be completed before CTE teachers could leave for the summer, which created a document of dubious value. The process of "unpacking" the competencies to determine specifically what the standard requires a student to know or be able to do, as well as the information to be learned and the skills to be mastered in order to meet the demands of the competency, has been an arduous task for teachers in their PLCs. Our teachers have had to wrestle with not only making meaning of the often ambiguous competency statements, but also clearly expressing their expectations of student performance in writing proficiency scales for each unit of instruction they teach.

Another problem associated with the way competency-based learning is carried out in our high schools is the way grades are reported. In Virginia, the office of CTE has clearly stated that "Traditional letter grades do not provide adequate documentation of student achievement in competency-based education; therefore Virginia ... requires a recording and evaluation system that provides information about competencies achieved" (Virginia DOE, Office of Career and Technical Education, 2015).

The preceding statement notwith-standing, CTE courses are almost always required to report student progress by means of exactly the same letter grades and/or percentage-based numeric scores found to be inadequate and inappropriate for competency-based learning. Tire use of these traditional marks can dilute actual competency performance with attendance, behavior and class participation, or can be devastated by the assignment of zeros for absences or missing work. The use of such grades provides little information as to what skills a student actually possesses.

Rick Wormeli (2006), noted authority on assessment and grading, put it this way:

"A grade is supposed to provide an accurate, undiluted indicator of a
student's mastery of learning standards. That's it. It is not meant to
be a part of a reward, motivation or behavioral contract system. If a
grade is distorted by weaving in a student's personal behavior,
character and work habits, it cannot be used to successfully provide
feedback, document progress or inform our instructional decisions
regarding that student--the three reasons we grade."

But old practices are hard to break and bureaucratic barriers are hard to overcome. Change of this magnitude that challenges long-held beliefs and practices can expect serious pushback. Given the educational background of most of our staff members. Valley Tech's effort to be on the cutting edge of educational reform does little to mollify their skepticism of anything not already attributed to be tried and true, and which prompts the question, "Why are we doing this?"

At the other end of the resistance scale is the refrain, "But we're already doing this." When such proclamations are answered by requests for evidence that the claim is true, one hears the complaint that the change process robs teachers of valuable planning time and takes them away from vital time with their students. It takes patience and resilience on the part of the PLC facilitators to remain steadfast in the face of such "respectful" opposition.

The best answer to the critics of any change is observable success. In our PLC process at Valley Tech, we have tried to identify a group of interested "early adopters" to pilot our improvement initiatives before adopting any change universally. This has been the case with our new competency-based grading effort. We began over a year ago with exposing an interested few to some of the scholarly research on the topic, encouraging this group to begin the process on their own, and sharing their experiences only with each other. The pilot group had varying degrees of successful implementation, but they did experience enough positive results that they began to advocate for implementing competency-based grading school-wide.

Through PLC discussion and collaborative work on developing learning goals and proficiency scales, we are beginning to see the question change from "Aren't we already doing this?" to "Why haven't we been doing this?" and "How can I do this better?" We have arrived at the point where we are beginning to share the responsibility for achieving systematic school improvement through often frustrating and sometimes contentious face-to-face collaboration.

I believe that those who advocate for virtual PLCs in CTE are selling both our teachers and the potential of PLC collaboration short. In terms of getting results from the PLC process, it is much more probable that an individual will be held accountable to the group by someone sitting across the table, rather than by someone on the other side of the computer screen in another town, another county or even another state. And this shared accountability for improved achievement, despite our programmatic differences, is exactly what we at Valley Tech are trying to achieve for our students.

Year-end Progress Check

At the start of the 2014-2015 school year, our CLT set a goal of ending the year with 70 percent or more of our faculty feeling prepared to implement competency-based grading in August 2015. Through our PLCs, the faculty worked collaboratively with their peers to design at least one, and often as many as three, units of instruction with explicit learning goals and proficiency scales identified for each. In addition, the final task of the year was for teachers to develop an assessment that was aligned to both the learning goals and the proficiency scales for one selected unit.

With those goals accomplished, a faculty survey taken at the close of the year in May, with 71 percent of the faculty responding, revealed that 53 percent of the staff felt that their understanding of competency-based grading had changed "a lot" over the course of the year. Ninety-four percent of the teachers reported feeling either "somewhat prepared" or "fully prepared" to implement the program next school year. The survey also indicated that 23 percent of the faculty had not yet experimented with the new grading scheme in their classes.

During the current school year we plan to continue to stress the development of focused instructional units aligned to learning goals and student performance measured against proficiency scales. We also plan to investigate and implement procedures to track and communicate student progress on meeting those standards. Tech

By William B.King

William B. King, Ed.S., is the assistant principal for curriculum and instruction at Valley Career and Technical Center in Fishersville, Virginia. E-mail him at kingwb@valleytech.us.

REFERENCES

Darling-Hammond, L, Chung Wei, R., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009). Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad. Oxford, OH: National Staff Development. Council. Retrieved from http://learningforward.org/docs/pdf/nsdcstudy2009.pdf

DuFour, R" DuFour, R" Eaker, R., & Many, T. (2010). Learning by doing: A handbook for professional learning communities at work (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Dufour, R., & Fullan, M. (2013). Cultures built to last: Systemic PLCs at work. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Grams, J. Y., Hebert-Giffen, M., & Meeder, H. (2013). Virtual professional learning communities: Lessons learned from the field. Maryland: Meeder Consulting.

Virginia Department of Education, Office of Career and Technical Education. (2015). Guidelines for the use of student competency records; technical skills assessment, Perkins IV legislation.

Wormeli, R. (2006). Accountability: Teaching through assessment and feedback, not grading. American Secondary Education, 34(3). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41064580?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents