Plano Professional Practice Analysis Classroom Best Practice Implementation Tasks and Examples
Best Practice4: Collaborate in teams focused on curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Implementation Tasks / Examples from Best Practices ResearchAnalyze learning objectives as a team
- Determine if teachers regularly meet in grade-level or subject-area teams to thoroughly analyze the academic objectives in the district's written curriculum. If they (teachers) do not, these meetings should be initiated.
- Observe teacher teams as they engage in this activity. Consider the following:
•Do teachers study student exemplars of completed work and sample assessment items related to the objective? (Teachers often indicate one of the common problems they experienced before they engaged in this type of study was that instruction was not planned at the level required to enable students to successfully master more complex problems related to the objective. Sample assessment items and student exemplars helped them to understand what was needed.)
•Do teachers discuss or have access to information about the strategies and resources that have proven most effective for teaching the academic objective?
- Monitor to ensure that this practice becomes institutionalized in your school. Review team meeting agendas and participate in meetings regularly to ensure that studying the academic objectives is a regular and planned activity during team meetings.
Smith Elementary School (Clarksville-Montgomery County School System, TN)
Math teachers at Nathan Hale make collaboration an integral part of their practice. A teacher states, "We meet in course specific teams -- all the teachers in Integrated Math I or Math II -- to sit and talk about curriculum issues and try to be lockstep about what we're going to be doing." Although there is intense collaboration at the school, teachers who work together still allow for professional individualism. A social studies teacher states: "Because of our different styles of teaching, we may not be on the exact same page every day. My colleague may do PowerPoints; I may do more overheads and use the Socratic method. But kids get all the same goals."
Nathan Hale High School (Seattle Public Schools, WA)
Weekly staff bulletins include curricular thoughts that "frontload," in the principal's words, the material that the upcoming professional-development sessions will cover and clarify how the material fits into the larger plan to build teachers' knowledge and skills to better support the students. The bulletins encourage readers to use the professional-development materials they have read together in order to sharpen the questions they bring to their analysis of student work in upcoming faculty meetings. An example of the bulletin reads: "What is the student response going to be? What do I want students to show so I will know they have learned this? Last week, we read about a lesson study in relation to the design, implementation, and outcomes of developed lessons. With those elements in mind, this week we continue the conversation through an article that highlights the impact of well-designed lessons on continuous student improvement. Different than lesson planning, lesson study focuses on what students are expected to learn, rather than on what teachers plan to teach. The idea of looking at evidence in student work is not new to us! In fact, this is an area that we will be spending more time on in the coming months through our Student Work Protocols and analysis of grade-level release (day) meetings. As we move toward the end of the reporting period, continue to ask yourself about the evidence that you have that tells you about students' response to your lessons."
Garfield Elementary School (Long Beach Unified School District, CA)
Vertical and horizontal collaboration occurs regularly among principals in Aldine. District-wide, a principal "cabinet" meets every week and vertically, in addition to regular horizontal principal meetings. Collaboration also occurs among teachers at school sites. For example, meeting time at Stovall Middle School is provided every other day for vertical teacher "families" and weekly or biweekly for departments. Mathematics and language arts teachers sometimes meet daily to discuss common curricular calendars, lesson plans, interventions, and benchmarks.
Stovall Middle School (Aldine Independent School District, TX)
Develop, review, or refine lessons as a team
- Communicate that the best lesson planning involves all teachers who will be teaching the lesson.
- Set expectations that lesson planning is a collective and collaborative process in your school (i.e., rather than simply sharing lesson plans, this practice hinges on deep collaboration around the lesson-construction process).
- Have each grade-level or subject-area team identify a learning objective or academic standard in an upcoming unit. Be certain that school leaders participate in these meetings. Collaborate to construct the lesson plan for the identified objective, and then have each team member teach it. At the team's next meeting, have the teachers discuss what worked and what didn't work in each classroom. Revise the lesson plan, and bank it for future use.
- Further develop each team's skills by asking them to create a common assessment for a lesson, and have each team member administer it. Come back together to share students' results, and determine the root causes for any variation in the scores across classrooms. These are the activities of real learning teams.
Cleveland High School (Los Angeles Unified School District, CA)
All too often, collaboration at high schools is time faculty members spend absent-mindedly grading their students' work or passing notes to each other because the meetings do not hold value for them. Collaboration time at Selma High School offers another picture. It stays focused and scaffolded from one meeting to the next. All faculty members have a turn to lead and model a lesson that they have to teach that coming week: the "focus lesson" part of the class that focuses on one standard across classrooms. For thirty minutes each week, across departments, teachers learn how to teach the standard of choice for the upcoming week. Then, they break into department meetings. When asked what the critical ingredients are for fruitful collaboration, teachers point to the accountability to participate, the frequency of the meetings, and the common focus of the "focus meeting." The school-wide focus lessons are key instructional strategies that have been adopted from research-based professional development and foster school-wide focus and collaboration around data-based instruction.
Selma High School (Selma Unified School District, CA)
Teacher collaboration at Bonham Middle School is learning-focused and provides instructional support. One school leader observed that teacher collaboration is about "communication to help kids get better and stronger." During this time, teachers work to improve instruction through specific academic objectives that address the curriculum. Teachers also share effective strategies, discuss student needs, and plan lessons together to address such needs. After administering the state-released tests, teachers work together on the test problems and plan lessons for the following week to focus on state standards and objectives with which students are struggling. For teachers new to the school, collaboration effectively supplements support available through the district-wide mentor program and improves the new teachers' capacities. A science teacher expressed that, as a new teacher, "it really helped me to have a planning period with the science team because it gave me a chance to sit down and say, 'This is what I just did, this is why it worked, this is why it didn't, and what can I do?'"
Bonham Middle School (Temple Independent School District, TX)
Collegial collaboration provides teachers with needed support in their efforts to enhance student performance as well as their overall capacity as educators. Regarding using the collaboration time to develop lesson plans, teachers at Perry Middle School reported the advantage of learning from one another. A teacher shared: "Particularly when you come to a lesson that has never been taught, it's helpful to have that time to work together on how to teach it." In addition, at Perry Middle School, several teachers divide the lesson-planning work so that each of them can work on a unit, which the group later revises together. The focused and structured approach to collaboration time helps ensure that teachers meet their targeted goals for student achievement.
Perry Middle School (Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, TX)
Formal and informal teacher collaboration is a support mechanism at Damian Elementary School. Teachers at the same grade level share a common planning period, in which they discuss effective practices, good materials, student data issues, available library resources, and concerns. Generally, grade levels meet at least once each month, and informal discussions during conference periods also occur. Faculty meetings, staff-development days, and committee meetings provide opportunities for teachers to meet across grade levels to plan, share ideas, and address concerns. Teachers also meet informally to discuss effective and ineffective strategies and borrow materials, and informal meetings across grade levels give teachers opportunities to talk about the requisite skills students need when advancing to the next grade level. Dual-language teachers plan their lessons together during formal meetings, deciding on common thematic units or subjects. One teacher reports meeting daily with her dual-language teaching partner to discuss lessons and provide feedback, either before or after school, during conference time, or between classes.
Jose H. Damian Elementary School (Canutillo Independent School District, TX)
Study student work or assessment results as a team
- Determine the level to which grade-level or subject-area teams study both student work samples and common assessment results in team meetings. This study greatly accelerates knowledge sharing across classrooms.
- Ask to attend a team meeting where teachers will be studying student work samples relative to a common academic objective that has been taught recently. Each teacher should bring a sample of student work relative to the objective from a student in his/her classroom. Observe the meeting and determine both the quality of the discussion and how comfortable team members are engaging in it. The task as instructional leader is to increase both the quality of the discussion and teachers' comfort level with it. Higher quality and comfort levels are indicated by willingness among teachers to compare differences in results and to probe the potential source of such differences.
- Encourage teachers to create, administer, and study the results of common assessments. This type of study provides a wealth of information about best practices in your school. You can gauge the development of your team as a professional learning community by the comfort level among team members in discussing common assessment results. In strong professional learning communities, teachers are comfortable comparing results and then asking, "Why did your students do better on that objective than mine?" They become objective analysts searching for the factors that can increase effectiveness for all students.
- Monitor the ongoing development of teams to engage successfully in this work. Review team meeting agendas and participate in meetings regularly to ensure that studying student work is a regular and planned activity during team meetings.
The Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (Los Angeles Unified School District, CA)
Both the English and science departments enjoy a considerable degree of collaboration and joint planning. Teachers in the science department share their test results with one another to determine which of their colleagues have had better success teaching which standard and learn from them.
The Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (Los Angeles Unified School District, CA)
Teachers at Coolidge meet in grade-level teams to align instruction within their grade level. These meetings allow teachers to ensure that the district's written curriculum is taught at similarly high levels of rigor across classrooms. Explained a school administrator: "If one teacher's students are showing a high level of mastery of a particular state standard, but another teacher's students, at the same grade level, are not showing similar mastery, then the school leadership will make sure that those two teachers sit down together and have a conversation about how they are each teaching this standard. The goal is for the two teachers to get on the same page."
Coolidge Elementary School (Flint Community Schools, MI)
Teachers collaborate daily at Central Grade School, and that collaboration focuses on academics. Teachers credit their grade-level meetings for making sure they are all on the same page. One teacher says grade-level meetings are where they work out all of the kinks. Teachers work well together, sharing information, worksheets, and study guides. Teachers collaborate not only on what they are teaching but also on how they grade assignments in each classroom, as an A in one room should be equivalent to an A in another classroom. Classroom teachers also collaborate with and receive daily support from Title I teachers and teachers working with special education/learning disabled students.
Central Grade School (Effingham Community Unit School District 40, IL)
The district is committed to creating professional learning communities in each school. Teachers are required to collaborate, and the district has provided an hour of collaboration time per week. Teachers indicate that the collaboration has made a large impact on their teaching. For example, at Lewis & Clark High School, a teacher shares: "Our collaboration time is such a valuable hour that we spend together. We collaborated before but not in such a deliberate manner. We went through a hard time at first. This was not a group that was used to collaborating; it used to be a gripe session. Now it is great, and [we feel] there is not enough time." Another educator observes: "We have been given the freedom by our administration to decide how we want to use that hour of collaboration time. What we want in our collaborative time is teachers looking at student work, how they teach, and how they can do it better. The focus in our school is on literacy. We did a book study on how to teach middle and high school readers. Now our teachers have an understanding of the process of reading and have some nuts-and-bolts type things that can be infused into the curriculum."
Lewis & Clark High School (Spokane Public Schools, WA)
Collaborate with vertical teams
- Arrange meetings with teachers across grades and subjects to discuss students' level of preparation for each grade and subject. Teachers often report that students enter their classes unprepared to do grade-level work—even students from within their own school or district. However, these same teachers rarely indicate that they meet regularly with teachers across grades to seek remedies for this unacceptable learning system.
- Establish specific collaborative times for teachers of any given grade or subject immediately before and after theirs to discuss how well students are prepared to tackle grade-level work in the next grade or subject. These meetings should occur regularly—perhaps every six weeks or so—rather than sporadically or infrequently. For example, have Algebra teachers meet by unit with Geometry teachers to discuss if students had attained the necessary knowledge and skills in that unit to succeed at the next level.
- Structure the meetings to produce specific recommendations for improving student preparedness, and make sure the recommendations are acted upon.
Lawndale High School (Centinela Valley Union High School District , CA)
Teachers at Middle College High School have been meeting with staff from their feeder schools to develop and articulate curriculum, expectations, and instructional strategies in English Language Arts (ELA). Teachers from the school also participate in district-wide efforts to articulate curriculum and instruction across grade levels and schools. Their involvement in district committee for Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) has resulted in curriculum development and a vertical plan for implementing a scaffolded standards-based pre-Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum focused on higher order thinking skills in grades 6-12.
Middle College High School (West Contra Costa County Unified School District, CA)
Educators at Krop Senior High School practice constant collaboration. One teacher shared: "There is both horizontal and vertical teaming. The vertical teams go all the way down into the middle schools. Departments make common exams. Often it's informal collaboration: during lunch, in the hallways, after school. There's a great feeling of collegiality here." Regarding vertical collaboration, a school leader observed, "Through our vertical teaming with our middle school, we were able to convince them to adopt the same language arts textbook that we did, so that there would be some continuity for the students."
Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School (Miami-Dade County Public Schools, FL)
Collaboration and administrative support ensure a cohesive and consistent curriculum. A teacher explains that "strands that build the student from K-5" are well articulated and followed. Study habits such as "echo back," or restating the question in the answer, are purposely integrated from kindergarten on. Teachers attribute this cohesion to the opportunity to collaborate. An environment of constant and continual revision of curriculum is also fostered at the district and school levels.
George M. Davis Jr. Elementary School (New Rochelle City School District, NY)
To ensure a good academic foundation for incoming students, one administrator at Los Amigos High School shared: "There is good communication both ways [within our feeder pattern]. Intermediate school teachers have come to our school, and we have visited theirs; so we can see what the students are doing and what the transition has to be." Staff in each department meets with intermediate school instructors in the same subject area and collaborates on instructional implementation and strategies. For instance, to equip incoming students enrolling in Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) or honors English classes with the right expectations, Los Amigos educators explain reading logs and provide summer reading books. Administrators also maintain communication with their intermediate-level counterparts and meet with 8th-grade students and parents to explain college entrance requirements and plan a high school schedule.
Los Amigos High School (Garden Grove Unified School District, CA)
Share materials and instructionalstrategies as a team
Enter the campus designed action plan here
Discuss classroom difficulties andsolutions as a team
Enter the campus designed action plan here
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