How Schools Thrive. Susan K. Sparks

never do for teams what teams can do themselves, but coaches can help teams identify what practices are most important, create routines that support those practices, and guide the development of habits around each team’s professional practice.

      The support teams receive is invaluable; however, when a principal or coach sets the team’s goals, analyzes their assessment data, or determines their next steps, they are not building the team’s capacity. In fact, when those who coach start doing the work instead of supporting the work, they actually diminish the team’s capacity.

      Coaches should also be careful not to impose their own personal or preferred routines on teams. People support that which they help create, and so coaching is much more effective when the coaching focuses on helping teams identify the specific tasks that lead to the creation of routines and ultimately become habits of professional practice.

The Best Habits for Stacking: The Fundamentals

      As in any athletic, artistic, or commercial endeavor, the PLC process can be broken down into a set of fundamentals that can be taught and improved upon with practice. Fundamentals are the basic, simplest, most important elements, ideas, or principles of what we are trying to accomplish. While it might seem like an oversimplification of the work we do to improve schools, it’s true: fundamentals are fundamental. If you find you or your staff struggling with some aspect of the PLC process, go back to the fundamentals.

      The good news is that educators have identified the fundamentals. There has never been a clearer consensus or greater agreement on what schools must do to positively impact student learning. The importance of a guaranteed and viable curriculum, common formative assessments, and systems of intervention are not up for debate. Neither is the idea that teachers should work together interdependently on collaborative teams. These are the fundamentals of high-achieving schools. Whatever teams are trying to accomplish, they must master the fundamentals to succeed.

      In the early stages of becoming a PLC, many teachers can name the fundamental elements of the PLC process. They know there are three big ideas, and they can recite the four critical questions. But from time to time, they will confuse or conflate the meaning or application of each element with other initiatives. As teams progress in implementation, teachers begin to identify the individual tasks associated with each of the fundamental elements, recognize what must be done, and describe how the work is accomplished. When teacher teams fully transition into a PLC, they incorporate the fundamentals into their daily routines and apply them when working with new students, new materials, and new situations. For these teams, the fundamentals become habits of professional practice.

      As an example of this progression, consider a focus on learning (the first of the big ideas). A focus on learning consists of four critical questions that teachers must respond to on a regular basis: What do we want students to know and be able to do? How do we know they have learned it? What do we do if they do not learn what is expected? What do we do if they do learn what is expected? In the early stages, most teachers can recite the four questions and may even be able to define the meaning of each, but principals should not assume that because teachers “know” these fundamentals of the PLC process they can do what it takes to be successful. This condition (consciously not doing what aligns with best practice) is what Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (2000) describe as the knowing-doing gap.