Regular members of the Building Confident Learners website won’t be surprised to find out that I am a firm believer that the best strategy to improve learning in schools is to pair teachers together on collaborative teams and give them the knowledge and skills necessary to study the efficacy of their instruction.
That’s an important reminder: Building confident learners INCLUDES both students and teachers.
Or stated more simply, the best way to improve learning experiences for STUDENTS is to improve the learning experiences that we offer to TEACHERS.
#atplc4life
This week, I got an interesting question about meaningful teacher collaboration from an elementary school teacher that I thought you might want to hear the answer to.
She said, “Bill, I believe in PLCs. I really do. But what should teams collaborate around if they don’t share curriculum with one another? For example, in our building, teachers are working on vertical teams — so they all teach the same subject but to different grade levels of students. Doesn’t that put us at a disadvantage?”
Great question, right?
I bet there’s a few other folks out there that would love to know the answer to that question.
And my response might catch you by surprise: I actually believe that teachers who are collaborating on vertical teams — particularly in elementary schools, where basic literacy and numeracy skills form the foundation of the essential curriculum — are luckier than teachers who are collaborating with peers who teach the same grade level and subject area.
Here’s why: Teachers who are collaborating vertically CAN’T study their specific grade level curriculum together easily because they don’t share one. That forces the team to focus on things that go beyond the specific grade level curriculum — and that opens up TONS of new and meaningful collaborative opportunities.
For example, a vertical team of consisting of a kindergarten, first grade and second grade teacher could spend their collaborative time studying the development of a specific reading skill over time. Together, they could develop proficiency scales or rubrics that show what students should be able to do with that skill at different grade levels — and then, they could study the progression of instruction required to move students from one level on the proficiency scale to the next.
Sometimes, teachers push back against vertical teams, arguing that teachers at other grade levels don’t really have any idea what mastery looks like in THEIR grade levels.
“What advice can they really offer?” I hear from skeptics. “They teach first grade and third grade. They haven’t ever taught second grade before.”
But here’s the thing: If vertical teams in elementary schools are studying a skill that spirals vertically over time, the advice you can get from teachers above and below you is INCREDIBLY valuable. They understand both the prerequisites that students should have mastered and the next steps that students should be ready to take FAR better than a colleague who has taught the same grade level as you for their entire career.
Of course, each teacher on a vertical team would be responsible for implementing instruction appropriate for their individual grade level and for administering an assessment to gather evidence of student learning, but the conversations about how to scaffold learning around that skill from one grade level to the next and what “mastery” looked like at each level of performance on a proficiency scale or a rubric would be INCREDIBLY beneficial to every teacher on the vertical team.
After all, the strategies being used to teach grade level curriculum in one classroom could be the intervention or extension strategies used in other classrooms. By having vertical conversations about how individual skills develop over time, the instructional capacity of classroom teachers to provide targeted support to students in need of intervention or extension increases exponentially.
What’s more, teachers on vertical teams have a vested interest in the success of students in the grade levels before them. If students come to your classroom having mastered the prerequisite skills that you expect them to have mastered, your job is ten thousand times easier, right? Well, if you are working on a vertical team, you can have a direct impact on the mastery of students in the grade levels beneath you because you can provide guidance, advice and support to the teachers who feed students to you.
Finally, vertical teaming provides ALL KINDS of benefits to students.
Here’s just one example: When teachers are aware of how a particular concept is being taught in other grade levels, they can build on that work in their own classrooms. Conversations with students like, “I know that you learned how to do ______ when you were in second grade. Do you remember doing _____? Well, we are going to take that strategy a little further today” are entirely possible in buildings with vertical teams and are infrequent at best in buildings using other teaming structures.
What’s the moral of this story?
Sometimes, pairing teachers on collaborative teams with peers who share a curriculum and a grade level isn’t possible in a school building. That means vertical teams — or interdisciplinary teams, or teams studying essential academic skills and dispositions — is the only option available to teachers in a school.
And sometimes, teachers and school leaders see that as a problem.
But I would argue that it is an incredible opportunity worth embracing!
If you need help figuring out how to make vertical teaming more meaningful to you, reach out. I’m always willing to lend a hand.
