Regular Radical Readers know that I am a big believer in the Power of PLCs.
Heck, I can point to a dozen specific examples of places where my instructional practices were changed for the better by my colleagues. That’s reason enough to lean into the notion that collaborative work makes everyone better.
When you combine that with research from guys like John Hattie and Bob Marzano proving that NOTHING has a greater impact on student achievement than pairing teachers in collaborative groups and proving to them that they have the collective know-how to move every kid forward, leaning into collaborative work becomes a no-brainer.
But here’s the thing: Collaborative work isn’t ALWAYS successful.
For every teacher like me who has had great experiences learning alongside my peers, you can probably find another teacher who will tell you that collaboration has been nothing but a gigantic waste of time for them.
That’s not a surprise to those of us who believe in PLCs.
Heck, Rick DuFour used to say, “Working together doesn’t change outcomes for kids. Doing the RIGHT WORK together changes outcomes for kids.”
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of collaborative teams out there who aren’t doing the right work with one another — and that is contributing to the feelings of struggle and failure expressed by their members.
So what’s the solution?
In my experience, the solution is providing explicit structures that can guide the collaborative work of teacher teams. Wish your teams spent their weekly meetings focused on important questions? Want teams to identify essential learning outcomes? Need teams to start looking at assessment data by student and standard?
Then, give them a tool that walks them through the process step-by-step.
I speak from experience here, y’all. I’ve been working on collaborative learning teams for over a decade now. And in that time, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of explicit structures for team work. My most successful teams were deliberate about the work that we were doing with one another. My least successful teams pushed structure to the side — and wasted a ton of time spinning our wheels.
THAT’s why I share so many tools for teams here on the Radical.
All of them are informed by my own work as a member of a team — and all of them have been tested, either with teams that I am a member of or teams that I’ve worked with as an author and a consultant for Solution Tree.
And THAT’s why I’m so proud of my newest book:
The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams in a PLC at Work is EXACTLY what it sounds like: A book FILLED with practical tools that can provide structure for the common tasks tackled by collaborative teams.
Organized into chapters that follow the four key questions of learning in a PLC, The Big Book has tools that are designed to help teams set norms with one another, come to consensus around important decisions, identify essential v. non-essential outcomes in their curriculum, write common formative assessments, and develop activities for providing both remediation and enrichment to students.
There are also tools designed to help teams with more advanced collaborative practices like developing tiered lessons, engaging students in meaningful self-assessment, and studying the impact of their pedagogical decisions.
I’m not bold enough to claim that MY tools are the RIGHT tools for structuring the work of YOUR learning teams. But I am bold enough to claim that MY tools can serve as a starting point for conversations on your team about the kind of work that you are doing with each other.
You might see one of my tools and use it exactly as it is. You might see one of my tools and steal a part of it, merging it together with a tool that you already believe in. You might see one of my tools and hate the way that it is organized, but love the kinds of questions that it forces you to think about.
And in all three of those circumstances, the collective work of your team will get stronger.
I wrote this book for a simple reason: I believe in PLCs and it breaks my heart every time that I hear from teachers who have grown disenchanted with collaboration. Most of the time, that disenchantment comes because teams have never been taught about just what “the right work” looks like in action.
The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams is designed to help you start doing the right work with each other. I promise that if you give the tools inside of it a chance, they will help to make your team more effective and efficient.
Check it out here on Amazon or here on Solution Tree’s website. And get a sneak peek of some of the tools included in the text in the Related Reads section below.
Can you tell that I’m proud of it?
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Related Radical Reads:
