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CHAPTER 1

Collaboration, Learning, and Results

On the surface, it may seem like a relatively easy task to get your English department colleagues on board with the idea of supporting students’ literacy growth, but remember that while some literature teachers may have natural abilities in teaching literacy skills, we find this is not something that teacher-prep programs extensively cover. Just like any other content-area team, a collaborative ELA team needs to ask difficult questions about its curriculum and teaching practices, even ones that question the practices that the team has believed are tried-and-true methods or curriculum components. ELA teachers are a busy bunch—the sheer amount of grading alone can be completely overwhelming when papers stack up! However, identifying common concerns as a department will almost always lead to an opportunity to determine a solution-focused literacy need, such as students not reading assigned texts, failing to complete homework, and declining writing trends. Here is your opportunity to begin the collaborative process.

Collaboration plays a crucial role in the success of any school dedicated to building effective teams in a PLC culture. When experts collaborate, innovative ideas emerge in ways that support student learning and generate positive results. When a team uses collaborative time wisely—when the action steps of a team are clearly designed, intentional, and focused—it is possible to make great progress in student learning. Across North America, schools are making a commitment to this core principle, they are tackling long-standing concerns in education by bringing together teacher teams to make stronger curricular and instructional choices, and they are getting better and better at making use of assessment practices that support the formative development of all students.

This chapter helps you identify how to initiate collaboration by applying PLC fundamentals and build teacher teams within your school to support meaningful collaboration that leads to student growth and reflective teaching practices. We offer guidance for leaders and examine how to approach meeting logistics before delving into the details of the work teams carry out in collaborative meetings, including analyzing standards and setting goals, identifying students’ existing literacy skills and needs, and finding connections between the ELA curriculum and imparted literacy skills.

Collaboration Within a PLC

PLCs are a pivotal force for progress in schools, as they are all focused on three big ideas: (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture, and (3) a results orientation (DuFour et al., 2016). Within our literacy work with disciplinary teachers, we kept these three big ideas at the core of our work, and we directed our commitment to literacy in all disciplines by continuously addressing the four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016).

1. What do we want students to learn?

2. How will we know when they have learned it?

3. What do we do if they haven’t learned it yet?

4. How do we extend learning for those who are already proficient?

We recognize that teams are configured in varying ways depending on the school. For instance, you might have curriculum teams, grade-level teams, content-focused teams, or teams that are singletons (teams of one). No matter how your teams are currently structured, when working toward integrating literacy-based strategies, we hope your teams will begin collaborating with a literacy expert in your building—an expert who can provide insight into varying and supportive literacy strategies that your teams can integrate into their instructional practices. But as we wrote in the introduction to this book, if your building does not have a dedicated literacy expert, we designed this book also to function as a thoughtful, collaborative substitute. As an ELA teacher who may have colleagues coming to you for literacy-related advice and guidance, you can also use this book to help you in providing those supports.

While the size and scope of work in a PLC can differ greatly from one PLC to the next, the initial focus of teams often starts with a specific, discrete task that later evolves into more layered tasks and discussion topics. By simple definition, a team is a group of professionals working interdependently to achieve a common goal. PLC architect Richard DuFour (2004) notes successful teams:

▶ Have common time for collaboration on a regular basis

▶ Build buy-in toward a discrete and overarching common goal

▶ Build a sense of community

▶ Engage in long-term work that continues from year to year

▶ Grow—but do not completely change—membership each year

In addition to these characteristics, in our experience, it is helpful to have a team leader or point person who creates agendas and monitors discussion (this can be a rotating role); it is also important to encourage open, honest, discussion-based dialogue in order to respect and include all ideas concerning student learning, and we recommend that the core membership find opportunities to reach out and include other colleagues. Remember, collaborative team meetings work better when they are focused on actionable items that will serve to extend the professional learning of the teachers. The following sections go into more detail on the configuration of teams, the role of leaders within a team, and the logistics for team meetings.

Team Configuration

At this point, we want to make a few explicit recommendations for configuring teams effectively when working on literacy-based strategies. There are a number of different approaches to establishing a team, and in many schools, resources vary—for instance, at many schools, there might not be dedicated literacy experts trained in the value and capacity of literacy strategies. Sometimes we need to think of teams differently if we are thinking about how to make changes happen. Here are four considerations when building teams focused on literacy.

1. Ideally, incorporate a literacy expert on a curriculum or a content-focused team to serve as an informed thought partner. An individual with literacy expertise can help support instructional changes with a greater variety of approaches and can also help in selecting strategies that are better aligned to the course outcomes. For purposes of the ELA classroom, the literacy expert can help to adapt strategies that are focused on decoding text, summarizing text, making inferences, and exploring text extensions and connections.

2. Some teams work horizontally, meaning they work within their specific grade level or within a particular content-based course with many sections and many teachers. Some teams work vertically, where they meet with teachers from different grade levels to ensure curricula are interconnected and working to build learning year to year. When considering literacy-based strategies, consider how your teams are constructed and the purposes of your teams’ goals for integrating literacy-based strategies. Why and how should the strategies be applied to support students throughout a particular grade level or within an ELA course that many teachers instruct? When and why should a team use a strategy? If working vertically, how and why might a team teach and reteach strategies year after year? How do these strategies become habits over the sequence of courses and throughout grade levels?

3. Some teams will not have a literacy expert. In these cases, consider what other resources can serve as a strong, literacy-informed, and reflective collaborative partner. Consider the expertise that might come from within your own ELA department. Is there a teacher with experience teaching reading coursework available to come to your team meetings? If not in your building, is there a literacy expert in a building within your district—an expert in an elementary, middle, or high school building who might be able to help? Is there expertise in the special education department with a background in the area of literacy? Seek to use the resources available to you.

4. Consider how your team might make collaborative use of this book in more directed ways. Or, if you are a singleton team (a team of one), how might this book be a resource to help you reflect on your current teaching practices and help you to grow in your own learning as you seek out collaborators perhaps outside of your department or school? To improve, teams often need to seek outside resources that do not currently exist within the schools they are working in. In these cases, widen your definition of a team and consider the larger community of educators who are willing and ready to help other teachers learn. Reach out to professional organizations or attend conferences that can help connect your team to discussions that will influence positive changes.

Leaders’ Roles

Collaboration is at the crux of literacy work and is truly an essential component of professional growth. While this may seem obvious, achieving authentic collaboration can be a challenge for several reasons. We commonly hear “there isn’t time” as a primary roadblock. Consequently, the first step in the collaboration process takes place between literacy leaders and administration.

Your past experiences with using immediate strategies to address students’ most critical literacy needs provide an opportunity to approach your administrators and create a long-term plan for schoolwide literacy. The following chapters provide information and examples of how to begin this process, but here are some starting points to consider when communicating with administration and when engaging with the following chapters in this book.

▶ Identify the immediate problem and show the evidence of the problem with data.

▶ Identify your ultimate goal for the students in your classroom. Know what you want to change.

▶ Provide a list of strategies you have tried in your classroom. Identify the ways you and your team have worked to build change.

▶ Provide suggestions for resources or ideas that can help you and your team accomplish your goals and get your students to a more successful place. Collaborate with your administrators over how these goals can be accomplished with the right action steps and the right supports in place.

Teachers must be committed to the challenging work of moving students’ literacy competencies in the right direction, and leadership must support and respect this collaboration. Responding to your school’s literacy needs cannot occur through an occasional meeting or a purchased program—everyone must be in on the collaboration and be open to their own education and professional growth.

Having said that, we want to offer a few tips for literacy leaders engaged in this work. If you are the literacy leader in your school, consider yourself a host to other teaching teams. You want this team collaboration with you to be as positive as possible so everyone can be an effective participant. Often as a leader in literacy, you will need to serve as the glue that holds the pieces together. You will need to develop the agendas and send out the invites and reminders. Your personal goal is to keep this team moving forward and committed to literacy-based strategies. Be authentic: you are not the person with all the answers, and it is important that the tone is collaborative in nature and not hierarchical. The credit for the good work that comes from the focused collaborative team goes to the committee as a whole and not the literacy leader.

thinking BREAK

What additional questions or thoughts could you consider when approaching administrators about creating a schoolwide literacy program that can specifically assist in the ELA classroom?

Collaborative Meeting Logistics

Based on our experiences, there are four simple logistical action steps you can take that will help ensure fluid and timely collaboration.

1. Work creatively and collaboratively to carve out a common regular time and space for your team to meet: From our experiences, carving out common time is the first step to developing a high-functioning team in a PLC environment. While a progressive education model allows for consistent and regular professional collaboration during the school day, many schools do not have a schedule that reflects this due to the complex nature of the secondary school day. And while a regular weekly team block where students start school late or leave school early is often the ideal way to ensure teacher teams can meet in focused ways, we also recognize that many school districts are still working toward supporting structures that support PLC cultures. If your school has not yet set up a structured time for teacher teams to meet, we suggest planning ahead to ensure team meetings can be supported in ways that allow for collaboration around literacy. If you and your teacher colleagues are dedicated to literacy in your classrooms, you might need to work with an administrator who will help support the collaborative time necessary to innovate positive changes. Ask for the time you will need to collaborate and to innovate literacy strategies to use in your classrooms. For example, you might ask for release periods or release days throughout the year so you can accomplish your team’s goals.

2. Create a regular meeting schedule, and make sure everyone knows the plan: Collaborative teams must ensure they dedicate their meeting time to fostering the commitments of a continuously developing PLC. Early on, establishing norms that set focused, actionable goals helps teams achieve their purpose and helps to establish commitments. We suggest using SMART (specific and strategic, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound) goals as a good guiding tool (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014). By setting up SMART goals, your team will be more likely to stay focused, learning, and driven to succeed. As literacy coaches, we know that time is precious, and when our teacher teams meet with us, we know that our collaboration needs to have purposeful, specific outcomes. In building SMART goals toward literacy, we encourage taking the time to create an action-driven schedule that is paced, practical, and respectful of everyone’s many different commitments. What is realistic depends on your structure and your team’s purpose. From our personal experiences, we think that meeting less than every other week often means that team members will be unable to prioritize making changes in literacy. Team meetings that are too infrequent mainly consist of recapping what happened at the last meeting and miss the mark on cultivating productive collaboration that leads to changes to literacy practices in the classroom. To ensure all team members are aware of upcoming meetings, create electronic calendar invites, send out a paper copy of dates and plans that members can post at their desks, and send reminders. Always attach your agenda to encourage thoughtful preparation before the meeting.

3. Identify and use a consistent meeting location: We also encourage finding a consistent space for your team to meet. It is counterproductive when people are always searching for a changing location. Ideally, this space will be free of other distractions, comfortable, and well equipped for the work you will be doing (for example, have access to a whiteboard, projector, and an internet-connected device, such as a tablet, laptop, or computer).

4. Create digital files that capture agendas and notes: In addition to ensuring equipment is available in your meeting space, from the beginning, create an ongoing digital hub for agendas and notes—use tools like Slack, Google Docs with Google Drive, or Microsoft OneNote with Microsoft OneDrive. Ideally, you want something that allows all members to contribute independently and ensures full online access to your materials outside of your collaboration time.

thinking BREAK

Do you see any natural opportunities within your personal schedule for team time? Do you have a prep period in common with other colleagues?

Are there any predictable patterns you notice in your department or school’s master schedule that would allow for meeting time? Does your school periodically have an altered bell schedule for collaboration or other types of professional work?

Standards Analysis and Goal Setting

As we noted before, teams must build consensus about what they want all students to learn—the first critical question of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016). While your team may have a general overarching literacy goal right out of the gate, it must dedicate time to the specific development of discrete goals that identify what it wants students to learn. Often, it is necessary to do some research, a collective inquiry, to establish a goal. Before defining any sort of common goal for student learning, spend time examining your school’s ELA curriculum standards, and assess the current implementation of these standards with a productive and critical eye. Your team must unpack the ELA content standards and identify the literacy skills they require for mastery. Once you have unpacked them, you will need to set aside the complete content standards momentarily to focus purely on the skills, which serve as the vehicle to transport the learner from novice to skilled on the content-mastery continuum.

Investigating current practices and detailing desired outcomes requires your team of colleagues to have thoughtful conversations about the curriculum standards in your ELA department: what your team prioritizes, the skills your team will focus on, the expectations for student performance, and the criteria your team will use to evaluate and support student learning. This means you will need to unpack the wordy and lengthy verbiage of your ELA content standards and identify what matters most to your specific course or context. In other words, your team needs to prioritize your curriculum and identify what your team will emphasize.

It is helpful to detail your team’s understanding and the department’s approach to teaching the standard as well as the evidence of student learning you will be able to collect to demonstrate that students have achieved these skills. Use figure 1.1 to discuss with your team the content standards you are prioritizing and the evidence of student learning that you expect students to demonstrate. These are the first two critical questions teams should determine.

Figure 1.1: Content standard–analysis tool.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.

We urge you not to overlook the steps in the content standard–analysis tool. While it is true that content standards may shift, it is also critical that we continue to evolve curriculum alongside changing standards. Also, although it is very tempting to jump to identifying power standards, make sure that you don’t skip the unpacking of these standards first. Curriculum teams that have gone in this direction often fall into the trap of simply overstating core curriculum components—essentially saying, “We do all of this already.” This is a misstep, as it will not lead toward additional growth or foster a team mentality that is focused on problem solving.

Another way to think of content standards is to frame them as desired student outcomes—the concepts that you want your students to have mastered at various checkpoints throughout the year. Conversely, process standards will help your students get to this point—they are essentially the vehicle that helps students get to these learning outcomes. These should be composed of a variety of focused tasks that teachers support via carefully sequenced literacy strategies used during instruction.

Identification of Students’ Literacy Skills

In order to dive into disciplinary literacy, your team needs to have insight into your students’ literacy-skill strengths and weaknesses. Literacy-based inventories or assessments that might show up on a standardized test like the ACT or on a reading passage from the SAT will help you identify where students are in terms of literacy skills so that you can later determine the necessary strategies to navigate challenging text tasks.

Many schools using the response to intervention (RTI; Buffum, Mattos, & Malone, 2018) or multitiered system of supports (MTSS; National Center on Intensive Intervention, n.d.) frameworks already have literacy-benchmark assessments in place, although the data are not always shared among all departments in the school. These assessments typically hold a wealth of information pertaining to student strengths and weaknesses for teachers of all content areas. If your school has a reading specialist on staff, he or she would be a great colleague to approach to learn what data your school has already collected and what other resources might be available.

While working with a reading specialist, your team might want to design your own literacy-based inventories, employing the content area’s authentic texts and assessing the literacy skills most pertinent to the specific field of study. Studying these initial student data will be a key component to your team time and will help you identify which strategies scaffold student success and help you further develop and utilize a variety of assessment types, including formative and summative tools.

A great deal of confidentiality and professionalism is a necessity for a productive collaborative model. Getting to know your students better means looking at and sharing their data with your team. If you want data to help move students forward, then you must handle them with great care, and you must confront the literacy data you collect.

During team meetings, it is critical that no one makes sweeping statements or generalizations regarding teaching practices based on raw data. When viewing group data in a team discussion on progress, remove names or class cohort information. Start the data discussion by noting this information may reveal things the team has already considered. For example, rarely does a nationally normed assessment show that a star student is one of the most struggling readers. Begin the data conversation with the idea that the data will often confirm what you already know about your students, but these data may also shed more light on why students are struggling.

As your colleagues become more comfortable with data reviews, fears in sharing data among the team that might exist will gradually drop away, and the team will become more open to collaboration that is focused on student learning. If you are a leader on the team, start with yourself; don’t be afraid to show your own student data. Students have entire academic histories before meeting their current roster of teachers. There is no way that one week in Mr. Williams’s class dictates all aspects of a nationally normed score.

Although it is critical that teams view data in a supportive manner, make sure that your team’s analysis doesn’t look like a list of excuses. It is very easy to fall into the pit of “things we can’t control” when looking at less-than-optimistic numbers. Instead, look at what you can change; the discussion should focus on how you move students toward a goal, target, or outcome—and ultimately toward graduation, higher education or training, and a career.

Identification of the Content-Literacy Connections

ELA teachers frequently struggle with the reality that, despite the plethora of text in this content area, many students simply are not reading. They are not engaging with the text teachers assign and, consequently, are not at all prepared for the engaging discussions and extension activities planned for class time.

As a reminder of something we wrote in the preface to this book, it is critical to remember that when we say literacy, we mean the act of engaging, knowing, and ultimately being able to navigate new understandings of known and unknown nuances associated with defined content. With this said, we encourage you to bring your texts into the classroom. Rather than leave all reading as an out-of-class assigned task, build active reading into your class time as standard practice. This can and should be done with both short and long texts. We find that incorporating more short texts paired with in-class close reading of these texts helps students more fully develop their literacy skills and flex their comprehension muscle because they will be able to engage with all parts of a complete text as opposed to the reality of only some doing so with portions of a larger piece.

Yes, this sounds complex! But really, teaching literacy is often about breaking down an idea, only to build it back up again by scaffolding and modeling a process—just like teaching a child how to tie a shoe. Words are literally everywhere, and many literacy texts are multimodal. Formulating an inference from a reading is similar to formulating an inference from what someone might say, from a film, or from a dramatic performance. The literacy strategies we use to understand or to infer are often similar no matter what the modality might be.

After your team has established a solid common baseline knowledge of the concept of literacy, focus on your power standards to identify which literacy tasks are the most innate to your area of study. Here is where you will be able to identify your process standards and consequently outline the scaffolds that will support students’ literacy-skill development. Familiarizing yourself with the strategies that come later in this book will help you work through the process of finding your content-area literacy connections. Additionally, you will need to take a close look at your texts (solo, or as a team for common texts) to determine if they are appropriate for your readers and tasks. Gather all texts, and assess your collection as a whole, using the tool in figure 1.2 as a guide.

Wrapping Up

If a fully supported and committed team sounds like a far-fetched dream, that’s okay. All you need is one colleague to join you in your efforts and to formulate collaboration that leads to positive changes! As you are working collaboratively, be sure to share your journey and findings with your colleagues. Collaboration isn’t always as formal as a designated team time—it often starts with simply sharing what you are working on and trying to accomplish with your students. It involves a lot of give and take, with both students and colleagues, but by conducting a thorough analysis of your standards, texts, and students’ skills, you will be well on your way to creating a common understanding of where your students are, and you will be able to better determine how to move them toward disciplinary literacy.

Figure 1.2: Review tool to discern whether text tasks match complex disciplinary literacy demands.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Effective teams work together diligently and value all contributions in their quest to help students succeed. Building a productive team is essential to working collaboratively toward teaching literacy skills, rather than only the study of literature. To do this, collectively unpack the ELA reading, writing, and language standards; set appropriate goals for students; and develop tasks that foster student growth.

Collaborative Considerations for Teams

Who are colleagues you can approach to begin fostering collaborative teamwork?

What ELA literacy skills lend themselves to action research for a team? (Because there are so many, you will need to prioritize.)

If you already have an ELA or literacy-based team, how is it organized? Is there a PLC culture that supports dialogue and all ideas that might lead to improved student outcomes?

How can you use the resources in this chapter to develop your PLC culture?