“Wait a minute,” George said as he scrolled back to review his class averages. “There were 30% of my students failing Integrated math in December. Now it’s only 20%.”
George sat across from Cindy, a teammate who balanced teaching high school Geometry while serving as her high school’s instructional coach.
When she looked up from her computer and smiled, our eyes met. It was a work day in April, and I was onsite coaching the development of high school math performance tasks aligned with success criteria.
George scrolled and returned to the shared Google doc we were all working on.
I looked up at Cindy. Her eyes were sparkling. She wore a huge smile. She had worked days, weeks, and months alongside George and his two teammates over the past few months.
“George,” I said, “That isn’t a little gain. It’s big.”
Without looking up, he mumbled, “Yah, it's ten percent. So?”
Cindy spoke up. “No, George, Chris is right. This is huge. 10% with this population in 9th-grade mathematics in such a short time is…a huge gain in learning.”
George looked up. He looked at Cindy and then at me. And then, his faint smile began to grow.
Noticing the “tick” in the “Needle of Learning”: In the noise of daily teaching, learning, and navigating the public school world, it is too easy for teachers and leaders to miss the tiny data movements of the "needle of learning" that indicate you nailed it with students. There is so much going on in the classroom to know what landed with your students on any given day.
It Takes a Team: Without teammates precisely aligned to an agreed upon set of improvement work with metrics, it’s easy to write off these little gains “lucky” or “I guess they were a good group of kids!” when in fact, that “tick” of the learning needle was the direct result of something you did differently - something about the instruction that landed with a student that day. Maybe it was how you used Algebra tiles this time for the students who still didn’t understand how to balance the equation. Perhaps the sentence stems you offered student dialoguing pairs allowed them to feel more eloquent and intelligent with each other. Whatever it was, it stuck with this kid (or all of them). They saw themselves getting good at something hard. Something they didn’t know they could do before you taught with this new technique. Whatever it was you offered that day, you see it too. That precise move you clumsily tried to use in your classroom (worring you aren't any good at it) until your teammates encouraged you to do it again, but when you do, add in this tiny word or this slight classroom position adjustment, or this switching from asking "who can tell me the answer?" to "what can you tell me about this question?". Whatever it was you changed today, it landed with students, it was celebrated by your teammates, and they did so because they knew how to look for it. Because of your commmitment to this learning you made together - you all own this success.
Shared Agreements: George's teammate Cindy knew what to look for, saw the tiny shift that was clearly empirically linked to his new practice, and pointed it out. She celebrated him before he had a chance to miss it. She knew how to spot it because the rest of the team was noticing it in their own data as well - students were getting clearer about what success looked like.
George, Cindy, and their two ninth grade teammates had agreed to focus on one thing across the past four or five months - improving student ownership of learning by ensuring students can clearly describe their next step in mastering the success criteria. Learning walk interviews with students in these classes showed a marked increases in student clarity about the success criteria: More students were engaged. More students could name their proficiency level describe what they needed to next. More students could accurately describe to observers what “success” in the next level of skill above theirs looks like.
An Unshakeable Team Focus: There were lots of things this team could have felt compelled to focus on this year - raising test scores, covering essential skills, preparing for the state test, addressing trauma and student behavior…the list is always endless. But this team took a leap of faith and believed if they could increase their own clarity for students, students would actually use the success criteria to monitor their own progress. They believed if they didn't get distracted from this simple goal, students with greater clarity about what success looks like will be more motivated, more curious, and learn and retain this content better. They were beginning to discover, for themselves, they were right. The achievement data was clearly going up.
Sparking an Ember and Nurturing A Flame: The “ticks” on the learning needle electrified this team. It's this moment you want for all teams: the first emergence of a sense of collective efficacy. That moment when everyone realizes how their agreed upon focus for skill development shows hard data that it is working. It is the moment in which everyone thinks recognized how such a tiny, new technique, uniformly agreed to and focused on, results in better learning. If something that focused worked for these students, maybe it would work again with a different skill?
Collective Teacher Efficacy: While researchers like John Hattie are right to point out that Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) is one of the biggest research-based influences on student achievement (an effect size of 1.57!), what they won’t tell you is how to nurture the tiniest hint of this emerging phenomena from a burning ember into a towering flame. You need to look no further than teams who develop this phenomena through learning to develop simple, collective agreements about what they will learn to do differently, and agree to monitor, support, practice, and try this skill over and over again with each other until they see the tiniest, positive changes in student performance. These teams have agreements about what they will look for and what to celebrate when they see it happen.
On that rainy work day, George owned this small step toward mastery of developing his teacher clarity. And on this day, this team realized they might have missed seeing this tiny step without each other. That was the giant leap.
- Chris Briggs-Hale, Certified Instructional and Leadership Coach
Want to learn (and get good at) engaging a PLC team to better collaborate with students to increase their Teacher Clarity? Curious to know how to nurture the ember of a sense of Collective Teacher Efficacy into a full-blown flame? We'll come to you, work right alongside you in your classrooms with your students, and show you how: https://Waterfalllearning.com
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