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Shifting to Collaborative Core Instruction

Teaching matters! At a time in which successfully navigating our K–12 system of education is a mandatory prerequisite to leading a successful adult life, the greatest contributor to student success is the quality of instruction students receive each school day. Almost four decades of research into the characteristics of effective schools, such as that from Ron Edmonds (1979) and Larry Lezotte (1991), has proven that virtually all students can learn when provided with effective teaching. In his seminal work What Works in Schools, Robert Marzano (2003) demonstrates that highly effective schools produce results that almost entirely overcome the effects of student background. Additionally, Hattie’s (2009) comprehensive study of what most impacts student learning finds that education’s powerful leverage points hinge on features within the school, rather than outside factors like home, environmental, and economic conditions.

Teaching is also our job—the business of our career, the goal of our professional training, the criteria of our credentialing and evaluation process, the fundamental work of any school, and the very reason why most campus professionals are hired. While an unprecedented number of societal responsibilities are being thrust on educators today, one fact is undeniable: it is their responsibility to teach students the academic knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to succeed as adults.

Fortunately, teaching also represents the area over which educators have the greatest level of direct control. While schools must work within federal, state, and local regulations and contractual agreements, many teachers have significant autonomy every school day to determine the scope and sequence of their daily lesson plans, instructional practices, assessment decisions, and classroom procedures. The law considers teachers in loco parentis—in place of a parent—in the classroom. In most educational decisions, teachers have much greater authority than parents. Considering that the average student will spend seven years in elementary school, educators have both an incredible opportunity and an awesome responsibility to directly impact a student’s success in school and beyond.

Without question, more students will succeed in school if educators successfully fulfill their fundamental purpose. But how can we ensure that every student receives effective teaching every day? In this chapter, we examine how many of the state and national reform efforts have proven to be counterproductive to this goal.

Reviewing Past Efforts to Improve Core Instruction

The idea that better teaching improves student achievement is not new to education. Since the adoption of No Child Left Behind in 2001, myriad school-reform mandates have launched to improve teaching. Unfortunately, most efforts were doomed to fail because they advocated low-leverage practices—practices that have a limited impact on actual student learning.

To determine if a teaching practice has a high- or low-leverage effect on student learning, we look at the effect size, or a standardized measure of the strength of an intervention. Effect sizes above 0.40 are good, and the higher the better (Hattie, 2009). We recommend using a baseline of 0.40 standard deviation growth in student learning within a school year (Hattie, 2009). In his research, Hattie (2009) finds that the average student’s academic achievement will increase yearly by 0.10 standard deviations with no instruction at all, merely as a result of the student’s life experiences throughout the year. Hattie also finds that if that average student is randomly assigned a teacher for a particular grade or course, and if the teacher possesses an average level of teaching competence, the student’s academic achievement will increase by 0.30 standard deviations. Combine the two factors, and the average student will improve in learning by 0.40 deviations per year, simply by living a year and regularly attending the average school.

Hattie’s (2009) point is that if a school can achieve an average rate of 0.40 standard deviations in learning growth for students by doing nothing exceptional, it must specifically seek out practices proven to have a higher impact rate in order to intentionally improve student learning. Using this typical effect rate as our scale to judge good teaching, let’s assess the most prevalent efforts to improve teaching practices and educational outcomes.

Teacher training programs: Since the 1980s, there has been a significant increase in the collegiate coursework requirements necessary to earn a preliminary teaching credential. Beyond a subject-area degree, methods coursework, and practicum hours, most states require potential teachers to take additional classes in English language development, technology, cultural awareness, and techniques for teaching reading. Unfortunately, while teacher-preparation requirements have increased, student achievement has not. Hattie (2009) finds, in fact, that teacher-training programs have a low-leverage impact rate of 0.11 standard deviations in the annual growth of student learning—significantly lower than the 0.40 baseline of highly effective teaching strategies.

Step-and-column pay scales: Most school districts structure their teacher-compensation scale to encourage continuing education and advanced experience. Often referred to as step and column, this compensation scale offers teachers higher salaries for earning continuing-education credits and postgraduate degrees, as well as for completing more years of service under the premise that greater content knowledge and teaching experience will improve teacher effectiveness. In reality, these practices produce only minimal gains in student achievement—Hattie (2009) finds that postgraduate degrees, for example, have an impact rate of 0.09. Likewise, studies that have correlated years of experience and teacher effectiveness find that teachers show the greatest productivity gains during their first few years on the job, after which their performance tends to level off (Rice, 2010). While we are not suggesting that promoting continuing education and rewarding teacher experience are nonbeneficial, it is unlikely that these practices will significantly and sustainably improve core instruction.

Ability grouping: In the name of differentiation—in other words, in the attempt to adapt the core instructional program to meet the varying demands of individual student needs—some schools have stratified core instruction by grouping students according to their perceived ability. This practice, known as ability grouping, is justified with phrases such as, “We are differentiating by teaching students at their level.” In reality, ability grouping doesn’t represent instructional differentiation; instead, it is nothing more than student tracking, a practice that has been proven controversial among educators. Hattie (2009) finds that ability grouping, or tracking, has minimal effects on student learning (producing just a 0.12 standard deviation) and, at the same time, can have profoundly negative effects on equity, as the students perceived to have the lowest ability are most often minorities, English learners, and students from poverty.

Flexible grouping: Another common differentiation strategy involves the use of in-classroom flexible groupings to meet individual student needs. In this strategy, instead of grouping students by perceived ability, teachers flexibly group students within the classroom by skill. Commonly, these groups rotate through both self-guided stations and direct instruction with the teacher. Many teachers, claiming they know their students best and are in the best position to meet each student’s learning needs, advocate this strategy. Hattie’s (2009) meta-analysis of this practice determines an effectiveness impact of 0.18, which is hardly better than the deviation in learning improvements achieved through ability grouping (0.12)—or simply through living. (We describe using flexible grouping effectively in chapter 2, page 46.)

Class-size reduction: During the first decade of the 21st century, many states funded class-size reduction programs to improve classroom teaching. Proponents argued that reducing class size leads to more individualized instruction, more student-centered learning, increased teacher morale, fewer student misbehaviors, and higher student engagement—all factors that should improve classroom instruction (Hattie, 2009). However, Hattie’s meta-analysis of fourteen major studies on the impact of lowering class size identifies an overall impact rate of 0.21; therefore, lowering class size did not significantly impact student learning. Thus, the size of the class size itself is not as important as the quality of the instruction that takes place in it.

Teacher evaluation and merit pay: Many states are attempting to improve teaching through a more demanding teacher evaluation process, the use of merit pay to reward teachers who demonstrate above-average results, or both. In reality, there is no evidence that either incentive-laden or overly punitive teacher evaluation processes will significantly improve instruction. In actuality, teacher evaluations do not recognize good teaching, leave poor teaching unaddressed, and do not inform decision making in any meaningful way (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Additionally, three out of four teachers report that their evaluation process has virtually no impact on their classroom practice (Duffett, Farkas, Rotherham, & Silva, 2008). Likewise, research consistently concludes that merit pay does not improve student achievement or change teacher behavior in a positive way. It may actually contribute to declines in student learning, as it is typically abandoned within a few years of implementation (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006).

As you can see, each of these efforts to improve core instruction has failed to result in high-leverage education practices. There are two primary reasons for these failures. First, the reforms have focused on the wrong outcome—ultimately, the goal of education reform is not to improve teaching but to increase student learning. While this difference might sound like semantics to some, in reality, it represents a seismic shift in thinking, as the effectiveness of any given teaching strategy can only be determined by evidence of its impact on student learning (DuFour & Marzano, 2011). When the goal of education reform was to improve teaching, we could logically assume that instruction could improve if teachers were required to meet more rigorous credentials and evaluation expectations, utilize research-based textbook programs, differentiate instruction in their classroom, and expect to receive bonus pay when they achieved better-than-average results in their students’ learning outcomes. However, when compared to the criteria of increased student learning, all of these efforts to improve teaching fail miserably to hit the mark—wrong target, wrong result.

Second, these previous education reform efforts view teaching as primarily an individual act. That is, they assume that teaching is what each teacher does in his or her own classroom. When teaching is framed this way, then the perceived solution is to train, observe, evaluate, entice, bribe, reward, threaten, dictate, or coach each teacher into individually providing better performance—the basis of failed reform efforts previously described. We can assume that individuals with good intentions advocated, and often mandated, this litany of unsuccessful reform efforts. But as Jim Collins (2009) says in his book How the Mighty Fall, “Bad decisions made with good intentions are still bad decisions” (p. 148).

If coaching individual teachers into better performance has failed to significantly increase student achievement, then how does a school strengthen its core instructional program to ensure higher levels of student learning? What we will advocate for in this book, and describe in great detail, is that good teaching is not an individual act but instead a collaborative process. Good teaching is not “what I do for my students” but instead “what we do with our students.” The PLC at Work process will create the framework for teacher-to-teacher collaboration, and effective differentiated instruction will engage students to be partners in learning. A review of what we know about good teaching will prove these points.

Synthesizing What We Know About Good Teaching

Based on comprehensive meta-analyses of the research on effective teaching, as well as decades of site evidence on the effectiveness of previous reform efforts, the teaching profession has never had greater consensus on what constitutes good teaching—and what does not. We know that effective teaching cannot be reduced to a single template, rubric, or checklist aligned to program fidelity, because there is no such thing as a universally effective teaching strategy, methodology, or textbook series (DuFour & Mattos, 2013). In fact, any approach that assumes such universality fails to provide teachers with the professional autonomy inherent in the art of teaching. Furthermore, requiring teachers to implement a lockstep core instructional program often restricts their flexibility, making it extremely difficult to differentiate curriculum, instruction, and assessments to meet individual student needs in the classroom.

Yet, allowing the instructional pendulum to swing completely the opposite direction, by giving teachers complete autonomy over their instructional decisions, is an equally ineffective approach to improve core instruction. As Hattie (2009) notes, “Not all teachers are effective, not all teachers are experts, and not all teachers have powerful effects on students” (p. 34). There are instructional practices that are proven to be highly effective and many that are not. Any school dedicated to ensuring that all students learn at high levels cannot assume that each faculty member has the knowledge, skill, or inclination to consistently use these proven practices in his or her classroom.

Based on these facts, we know that effective instruction requires an expectation that all teachers use practices proven to have the greatest impact on student learning, while simultaneously infusing their own style and offering differentiated instruction for individual student needs. The key to achieving this outcome lies in identifying and leveraging the right practices—the best practices for the kind of instruction that all students must receive, regardless of what teachers they are assigned to for core instruction. To this end, the research is abundantly clear: good teaching requires a collaborative effort. Teachers must work in collaborative teams and take collective responsibility for their students’ learning. Lastly, teachers must work collaboratively with their students to engage everyone in the learning process.

Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Teams

Organizations get better results when people work collaboratively. This universal truth certainly applies to schools and the collaborative approach to good teaching. In his study of factors that most impact student learning, Hattie’s (2009) first recommendation for increasing student achievement is for teachers to work collaboratively instead of in isolation. Hattie’s recommendation recognizes—and experience and common sense confirm—that there is no way an individual teacher has all the time, all the skills, and all the knowledge necessary to meet every student’s individual needs. The only way a school staff can achieve the mission of enabling the highest level of learning for all students is by leveraging their combined skills (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010).

If improved student learning requires a collective effort, then collaborative teacher teams are the engines that drive effective core instruction. By team, we do not mean loosely connected groups that assemble for traditional grade-level, department, faculty, or parent-conference meetings. Instead, to be effective, educators in teaching teams must work collaboratively to achieve the common goal of shared essential student learning outcomes. Ronald Gallimore and his colleagues find that “to be successful, teams need to set and share goals to work on that are immediately applicable to their classrooms. Without such goals, teams will drift toward superficial discussions and truncated efforts” (Gallimore, Ermeling, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2009, p. 548). Subsequently, collaborative teams share essential student learning outcomes. Their structure could include grade-level, subject- or course-specific, vertical, or interdisciplinary teams. These common learning goals are what unite and focus the work of each teacher team.

While forming the right teacher teams is the first step in improving student achievement, just having teachers meet together does not create the collaborative effort necessary for improved teaching and learning. Teacher teams must focus their collective efforts on the instructional practices proven to best increase student achievement. This right work can be captured in the four critical questions of the PLC at Work process (DuFour et al., 2010).

1. What do we want our students to learn?

2. How will we know if our students are learning?

3. How will we respond when students don’t learn?

4. How will we respond when they do?

Let’s examine these critical questions and the role their answers play in efforts to promote the practices of good teaching.

What Do We Want Our Students to Learn?

Effective teaching begins with teacher teams collectively determining just what they want their students to learn. There is, perhaps, no greater obstacle to effective teaching than the overwhelmingly and inappropriately large number of standards that dictate what curriculum content students are to master in school. The elements of these mandatory curricula are so numerous, in fact, that teachers cannot even adequately cover them, let alone effectively teach them (Buffum et al., 2012).

The research supporting the need for teacher teams to collectively prioritize, analyze, and unpack the curriculum is conclusive. In their work on RTI, Buffum et al. (2012) refer to this process of analysis and prioritization as concentrated instruction: “a systematic process of identifying essential knowledge and skills that all students must master to learn at high levels, and determining the specific learning needs for each child to get there” (p. 10). Marzano (2003) describes this same process of instruction as offering a guaranteed, viable curriculum—one in which every student has access to the same essential learning targets and every student will receive instruction on those targets in a way that will enable him or her to master them within the allotted time.

Buffum et al. (2012) and Marzano (2003) aren’t alone in addressing the need for instructional processes that focus on an agreed-on set of essential learning standards. Douglas Reeves (2002) also describes the critical importance of teacher teams identifying essential learning outcomes in Making Standards Work, Larry Ainsworth (2003a, 2003b) details these efforts in Power Standards and “Unwrapping” the Standards, and Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) powerfully and comprehensively outline this essential work in Understanding by Design. Proponents don’t claim that these essential standards represent everything the curriculum will cover in the year. Instead, the standards merely identify the most essential learning outcomes that all students must master for a higher likelihood of success in the next unit, course, or grade level. (In chapter 4, page 81, we examine more deeply the process of setting and applying these standards.) Any school dedicated to creating an effective core instructional program and a targeted system of interventions must have absolute clarity on exactly what all students must learn in each subject, course, and grade level.

Beyond just identifying essential standards, teacher teams must also understand what it looks and sounds like when students demonstrate mastery of each standard and collaboratively sequence these standards to represent a guaranteed and viable curriculum (Marzano, 2003). Finally, teachers must explicitly, clearly, and consistently model mastery. When teacher teams determine a limited number of rigorous essential learning outcomes that all students must master, and agree to how students will demonstrate mastery of each, the impact rate is 0.56—a rate much higher than the baseline of 0.40 for highly effective teaching (Hattie, 2009).

How Will We Know If Our Students Are Learning?

While the strategies for teaching a specific learning target might vary from teacher to teacher, each teacher team must commit to collectively assessing student learning at predetermined times during core instruction. This method of gauging student mastery of essential outcomes, convergent assessment, is “an ongoing process of collectively analyzing targeted evidence to determine the specific learning needs of each child and the effectiveness of the instruction the child receives in meeting these needs” (Buffum et al., 2012, p. 10).

Convergent assessment leverages two extremely powerful instructional practices: common assessments and formative assessments. Common assessments are any assessment two or more instructors give with the intention of collaboratively examining the results to assess shared learning, to guide instructional planning for individual students, and to shape instructional modifications (Erkens & Twadell, 2012). When teachers give common assessments aligned to essential standards, they are able to compare results to determine which initial instructional practices are producing the best results. Formative assessments are classroom and curriculum evaluations teachers use to monitor student progress toward learning outcomes and to inform instructional decision making. Rather than considering these as assessments of learning, assessment expert Rick Stiggins (2007) calls them assessments for learning, because they inform both teachers and students. Teachers embed formative assessments in the current unit of instruction and use them to diagnose where students are in their learning.

It is important to note that not all formative assessments have to be given in common, and not all common assessments need to be formative. But when teachers combine these two powerful assessment processes, Hattie (2009) finds that common formative assessments have the astonishing impact rate of 0.90. (In chapter 6, page 147, we take a closer and more detailed look at the assessment process.) Any school committed to a highly effective core instructional program would ensure that teacher-created common formative assessments, designed to guide both teachers and students in their next steps, would be the foundation of assessment practices.

How Will We Respond When Students Don’t and Do Learn?

How do educators respond when students struggle to achieve their essential learning targets? Furthermore, how do they respond when students succeed in achieving those learning outcomes? The purpose of RTI is to answer these two questions. Tier 1 core instruction creates the instructional focus and ongoing assessment processes necessary to effectively respond when students need additional support.

Now, consider for a moment the prerequisite conditions necessary for a school to successfully provide supplemental and intensive interventions for students who require additional support and extended learning for those who are ready to master grade-level curriculum. Asking an individual teacher to meet all these needs in his or her classroom would be unrealistic. Educators who have formed the collaborative teams of a PLC can respond collectively when students need additional time for remediation or extended learning. Yet, teachers on the same team could not collectively provide these supports unless they first agreed on essential learning outcomes and the kind of ongoing common and formative assessment information necessary to identify both student needs and the effectiveness of initial instruction. Creating a guaranteed and viable curriculum and ongoing common formative assessment processes are the foundational building blocks of an effective Tier 1 core instructional program. They are also practices that drive and depend on frequent, job-embedded teacher collaboration. These practices do not reduce teachers to the role of instructional facilitators but instead empower teacher teams to make critical decisions regarding curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Equally important, these PLC practices don’t cripple an individual teacher’s ability to practice the art of teaching. They give educators the freedom to determine how they will initially teach essential standards.

Leveraging the Power of Student Collaboration

As important as teacher collaboration is to good instruction, teacher-to-student and student-to-student collaboration are equally essential to the learning process. As we discuss in chapter 2, the neuroscience of learning confirms that the brain seeks social interaction, relevance, and meaning. Students are best able to develop these attributes when they are engaged in the learning process, rather than being mere idle spectators in the classroom. Student engagement begins when teachers carefully create a classroom environment that provides safety and order but also promotes student participation in the instructional process. Equally important, teachers must provide students the opportunity to answer the four critical PLC questions from their own perspective. Then, those questions become:

1. What do I need to learn?

2. How will I know if I am learning it?

3. What must I do when I am not learning?

4. What can I do to extend my learning?

Having students answer these questions can help them develop what Hattie (2009) identifies as the most powerful leverage of learning at our disposal—self-grading. Students can successfully self-grade (become assessment-capable learners) when they:

Clearly understand what they must learn

Clearly know what they must be able to do to demonstrate proficiency

Know how to self-assess their progress

Have strategies to successfully respond when their efforts fall short

Students cannot master these outcomes through passive observation. When students develop the ability to self-grade, the impact rate is 1.44—the highest impact rate Hattie (2009) reports in his initial study. Beyond offering self-assessments of their performance, students also benefit from playing an active role in the creation and implementation of strategies to improve their performance—practices that we will describe in detail throughout this book. Unless teachers can see students successfully demonstrate what they taught, then they have no evidence that learning has taken place. Furthermore, teachers cannot observe this when students are passive participants in the learning process. Learning requires teachers working with their students and students working with each other to transform instruction into application and action.

In this chapter, we’ve explored the big picture of good teaching and how the PLC process is essential to an effective core instructional program. We’ve also taken a brief look at some of the previous attempts to improve core instruction and why those efforts failed. While all of these powerful ideas are worthy of deep and ongoing discussion, this book isn’t just a collection of ideas—or guiding principles and general concepts. Instead, it offers specific recommendations and proven tools to achieve these outcomes. In the next chapter, we do just that, as we dig deeper into the process of creating a brain-friendly classroom environment and explaining how that environment contributes to the successful implementation of best practices at Tier 1.

Taking the Discussion Further

Following are some of the important ideas from this chapter that are worthy of further reflection and discussion. Educators in a PLC may want to read through this chapter with their collaborative teams and discuss each section, recording the issues related to each piece of information and considering classroom implications for students. Collaborative teams can reflect on the prompts to deepen understanding and set subsequent goals for improvement.

What are some of the past efforts to improve core instruction? Why didn’t they work?

Revisit Hattie’s (2009) quote, “Not all teachers are effective, not all teachers are experts, and not all teachers have powerful effects on students” (p. 34). Discuss its implications for your classroom and school and the core curriculum.

What are the two characteristics of good teaching? How do your teams illustrate these?

Revisit the quote “Good teaching is not ‘what I do for my students’ but instead ‘what we do with our students.’” How is collaboration part of your instruction?

How can you use the four critical questions of a PLC in your collaborative teams to further student learning? How can students answer these questions?

What are the benefits of common assessments? How do your teams use them to plan further instruction?