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ages. The teachers built a simple star rubric for assessing complete sentences, as shown on page 17. Teachers agreed that the learning target for a kindergartner was to produce a twostar sentence, while the target for a second grader was to produce multiple five-star sentences. The team established inter-rater reliability by grading student work together and gathering example anchor papers at each level. These success criteria were published for the students, along with time frames for when students should be able to perform at the identified levels.
Virtual teams can be composed of teachers who teach the same subject but who work in different schools, different districts, even different states. The teachers regularly assessed student progress and kept simple progress-monitoring charts for each student. The teachers then designed flexible interventions based on need, not grade level. The teacher who was best equipped to provide that level of intervention would provide it. The team engaged in rich discussions about strategies they were using, what was working, and what they still needed to learn to help students 18
AllThingsPLC Magazine/Summer 2016
improve their sentence writing skills. By repeating this process over time with other essential standards, the school became an amazing PLC success story. It dramatically improved student achievement and became a model for others to follow. Read more about Bluff Elementary’s story at www.allthingsplc .info under Evidence of Effectiveness. Although the vertical team in the scenario is an elementary school example, vertical teams at the secondary level can be powerful too. Imagine if the high school English department had common rubrics that described good writing in grades 9 through 12, even though the performance expectations on the rubric would be different for a ninth grader than for a twelfth grader. How powerful would that level of clarity and consistency be for students to track their progress over a four-year high school career instead of just jumping through the hoops of the current class? What about science? What if the high school science team chose to collaboratively work on the essential skill of critical thinking or applying the scientific method to problem solving and gave students clearly articulated learning targets each year for four straight years? What kind of effect would that have on students’ abilities as scientific thinkers? What if the math department worked collaboratively to improve problem solving in real-world situations and had a common scoring rubric for how students approach real-life problem solving? Even though the performance expectations on a common rubric would undoubtedly be different for a ninth grader in algebra than
for a twelfth grader in calculus, students and teachers could discover a common path that progressively moved toward the ultimate goal of being a problem solver.
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Go virtual! Think outside the building.
Welcome to the 21st century! By using technology readily accessible to almost anyone, singleton teachers can find others who do exactly what they do and meet virtually to do the work of a collaborative team, regardless of where they live. It just takes a little tech savvy, a strong commitment, and other people who are just as committed. However, prospective virtualists, beware, it isn’t as easy as you might think. Virtual teams typically comprise teachers who teach the same subject or grade level but aren’t in the same school. A virtual team could be composed of teachers working in the same district when the distances between schools are great or a virtual team could include teachers who teach the same subject but work in many different parts of the country or even just different parts of the same state. When Casey Rutherford, high school AP physics teacher in Shakopee, Minn., heard the expectation from his school leaders that the school was going to become a PLC, he was excited. However, it quickly became apparent that collaboration for him was going to be a challenge, since he was the only AP physics teacher in his building. Using his substantial