Let’s start with a history lesson about Collaboration Time.  Where did the idea for Collaboration Time come from?  In October 2009, the Board of Education asked how they could be more supportive of the work to close achievement gaps in our district.  We took that question to the District Leadership Team which includes all of the school- and district-based leaders.  They discussed and researched it and decided that there were four ways the Board of Education could support our work:  Early Childhood Education, Extended Time for Student Learning, Teacher and Principal Evaluation and Instructional Support and Professional Development Time and Accountability.  We shared those four initiatives with the board in a work session on March 16, 2010 and then presented them formally at the board meeting on May 11, 2010.  At that time when we framed professional development in the form of Collaboration Time beyond the student instructional day, the board said, “Just do it!”

 

Here is the proposal that was submitted to the Board of Education regarding professional development.

 

Definition of Time in this Proposal: Consistent, district-wide embedded professional development during the school day designed for collaboration.  Collaboration “represents a systematic process in which teachers work together interdependently in order to impact their classroom practice in ways that will lead to better results for their students, for their team, and for their school.” (DuFour and Eaker, 1998.)

Definition of Accountability in this Proposal: “Quality teaching in all classrooms necessitates skillful leadership at the community, district, school, and classroom levels. Ambitious learning goals for students and educators require significant changes in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and leadership practices.  Leaders at all levels recognize quality professional development as the key strategy for supporting significant improvements.  They are able to articulate the critical link between improved student learning and the professional learning of teachers.  Staff development leaders come from all ranks of the organization.  They include community representatives, school board trustees, administrators, teachers, and support staff.” (National Staff Development Council, 2003)

Background Rationale:

In 2007, a Professional Development Survey was administered to teachers and administrators across the Boulder Valley School District.  The purpose of this survey was to gather baseline data on staff perception of professional development and its alignment to research-based practices; staff perception on effective schedules, topics, and design for professional development; and to provide recommendations for improving the professional development program.  Some of the findings of that survey, directly related to this topic, were as follows:

• The most effective strategies for professional development focused on the relevance to the daily work of teachers—examining student work, lesson study, teacher-directed collaboration, and peer observation

• Top needs as identified by participants include meeting the needs of special populations (special needs, second language learners, struggling readers); student behavior; content area; student motivation; family involvement; and common assessments

• Professional development at the high school remains challenging with high school ratings consistently lower than the district average on all standards

• Collaboration received one of the lowest ratings with time for working together as well as the skill set to collaborate of high concern for teachers.

 

A year following the survey, the District Improvement Plan was developed to meet district-wide goals for Achievement, Equity and Climate in order to close our achievement gap.  Included in the plan is professional development designed to “build the capacity of building administrators and teachers” for collaborative work around each of our strategies.  Effective professional development through collaboration is critical to our work in closing the achievement gap. 

Recently, in response to the board’s question of “what can we do to help the schools close the achievement gap”, the District Leadership Team prioritized time for collaboration, and accountability, in terms of high quality professional development and participation of all teachers and administrators as a high leverage strategy. 

 

 

The research is deep on the importance of quality professional development time and collaboration.  The following table, developed by Shirley M. Hord and William A. Sommers, in their book, “Leading Professional Learning Communities, Voices from Research and Practice”, (2008) clearly identifies the components of a collaborative community:

 

Shared Beliefs, Values and Vision:  The staff consistently focuses on students’ learning, which is strengthened by the staff’s own continuous learning-hence, professional learning community. 

 

Shared and Supportive Leadership:  Administrators and faculty hold shared power and authority for making decisions.  

 

Collective Learning and its Application: What the community determines to learn and how they will learn it in order to address students’ learning needs is the bottom line. 

 

Supportive Conditions: Structural factors provide the physical requirements: time, place to meet for community work, resources and policies, etc. to support collaboration. Relational factors support the community’s human and interpersonal development, openness, truth telling, and focusing on attitudes of respect and caring among the members. 

 

Shared Personal Practice: Community members give and receive feedback that supports their individual improvement and that of the organization.

 

Additional research stressing the importance of collaborative teams within a broader view of professional development comes from leading educators and researchers in the field:

• Learning Communities: Staff development that improves the learning of all students organizes adults into learning communities whose goals are aligned with those of the school and district.  Staff development that has as its goal high levels of learning for all students, teachers, and administrators requires a form of professional learning that is quite different from the workshop-driven approach.  The most powerful forms of staff development occur in ongoing teams that meet on a regular basis, preferably several times a week, for the purposes of learning, joint lesson planning, and problem solving.  These teams, often called learning communities or communities of practice, operate with a commitment to the norms of continuous improvement and experimentation and engage their members in improving their daily work to advance the achievement of school district and school goals for student learning. (National Staff Development Council, 2003)

• Professional Learning Communities: The most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is developing the ability for school personnel to function as professional learning communities.  (DuFour & Eaker, 1998. p. xi)
• More on Learning Communities: Teachers in schools that function as professional learning communities:
• Are guided by a clear, commonly held, shared purposes for student learning;
• Feel a sense of collective responsibility for student learning; and
• Collaborate with one another to promote student learning.
(Newman and Wehlage, 1995)
• Lateral capacity building: Lateral capacity building is a powerful, high-yield strategy because it mobilizes commitment and new ideas on the ground. Lateral capacity building has the double advantage of accessing more ideas while increasing people’s identification with a larger piece of the system – again, system thinking in action (of course, it depends on the substance and depth of learning.) (Fullan, 2005) 
• Ongoing data-based professional development: Teachers in schools experiencing an achievement gap require continuous opportunities to develop expertise and renewal. Schools should build professional development into the school day and calendar and sustain it, align it with the content of curriculum, and focus it on improving instruction with activities centered on the classroom. The schools that are most successful in concentrating professional development resources and time match the needs of educators and students in each school, as determined by current data analysis, and engage teachers in learning about the materials they teach and the skills they need to improve classroom instruction (U.S. Department of Education, 1998), from the book, Closing the Achievement Gap, A vision for changing beliefs and practices, 2003, by Belinda Williams.
• Time: Teachers require time. This is, as logicians would say, is a priori condition. No matter how great the curriculum, program, assessment, or other intervention, when teachers lack the time to implement great ideas, then those ideas remain figments of a central office fantasy rather than daily realities in the classroom. The research in this book and elsewhere is clear: if we expect teachers to excel in literacy, math, data analysis, assessment, or any other endeavor, then the commitment of administrators to those goals is directly proportionate to their willingness to adjust the schedule and support those commitments with time.  (Reeves, 2009.)

 

Robert Marzano, in What Works in Schools, Translating Research into Action, shares several high leverage action steps necessary for instructional improvement in today’s schools.  One of his action steps is to “engage teachers in meaningful staff development activities.”  He quotes Judith Little, who notes that, “Much staff development or inservice communicates a relatively impoverished view of teachers, teaching, and teacher development.  Compared with the complexity, subtlety, and uncertainty of the classroom, professional development is often a remarkable low-intensity enterprise.  It requires little in the way of intellectual struggle or emotional engagement and takes only superficial account of teachers’ histories or circumstances.  Compared with the complexity and ambiguity of the most ambitious reforms, professional development is too often substantively weak and politically marginal… Professional development must be constructed in ways that deepen the discussion, open up the debates, and enrich the array of possibilities for action.” (Marzano, 2003.)

The benefits of creating a district-wide, consistent structure for professional development time and accountability are substantial. Teachers would be provided with the time, structure and knowledge during their school day to meet the instructional challenges that exist in our schools. This structure would be coupled with accountability and high expectations for all teachers and administrators. While some schools do find structured time for these conversations, they lack consistency and do not allow for lateral and vertical articulation within schools and/or feeder systems.

Our representative group from District Leadership Team requests that the Board support systemic change that creates the capacity to bring area schools and teachers together during the school day and builds professional learning communities for our professional staff. We ask for a system that allows flexibility to do whole and/or parts at the same time.  We are committed to honoring teachers as professionals by embedding collaboration into the school day.

 

 

 

 

Boulder Valley School District Professional Development Survey Results, 2007

DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional learning communities at work. Bloomington, IN: National Education Service.

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., Many, T.,(1998) Learning by Doing, A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Hord, S., & Sommers, W. (2008). Leading Professional Learning Communities, Voices from research and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Marzano, R. J. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Newmann, F., & Wehlage, G.  (1995). Successful school restructuring:  A report to the public and educators by the Center for restructuring Schools.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.

Reeves, D., Leading Change in Your School, How to conquer myths, build commitment, and get results. (2009) Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Roy, P., Hord, S., (2003). Moving NSDC’s Staff Development Standards into Practice: Innovations Configurations. Oxford, OH: National Staff Development Council.

Williams, B. (2003). Closing the Achievement Gap, A vision for changing beliefs and practices. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

 

To forward the recommendation by District Leadership Time (DLT) and to comply with the request of the board, Sandy Ripplinger convened a group of teachers from all levels for their advice about parameters for Collaboration Time earlier this year.  Since then, many groups have reflected on the teachers’ original ideas and now, with a few minor edits, those ideas below are being shared as the parameters we’ll use to guide schools in their design of Collaboration Time.

 

Any exceptions to the Collaboration Time parameters will need to be approved by the school’s Assistant Superintendent.