More than just our facility is changing.  New High School Exit Standards have become effective with this year’s freshman class (Class of 2010).  This class of students must demonstrate proficiency on five End-of-Course Assessments and complete a graduation project.  The State Department of Public Instruction is defining the standards for the graduation project but we have been told there will be four graded components:  the paper, the product, the presentation, and portfolio.  Stay tuned for additional information as it becomes available.

Four years ago teachers and administrators at Millbrook High School began asking big picture questions regarding teaching and learning and adopted the precepts of a Professional Learning Community. 

What is a Professional Learning Community?

A school which is organized as a professional learning community (PLC) is characterized by these essential elements:

• Self-managed teams of teachers organized around a common course and/or a common group of students.
• Team consensus around the essential curricular standards all students will learn, which creates a guaranteed, viable curriculum.
• Teacher-developed common assessments, administered frequently, to measure whether students have mastered the standards.
• Sharing of the results of those common assessments among team members.
• Team dialogue around lesson study and effective instructional strategies.
• A school-wide plan for providing extra time and support to students to ensure they are able to master the curricular standards.

In the last twenty years, schools have begun to apply work models from the business sector to ensure that the adults in a school or district building are able to operate in a system characterized by teams focused on reporting and improving results and on enhancing knowledge management.  These team members help each other and hold each other accountable for ensuring that all students learn the essential curriculum.  The history of schooling in America has been one of educators operating in isolation from each other for most of the day.  Each teacher was expected to analyze state curriculum guides, determine which items to emphasize instruction, decide which instructional strategies would work the best, create his/her own assessments of student learning, offer remedial help to students not learning well and assign a grade for the period.  All of this was done primarily in isolation from others except for the occasional department meeting.  In particular, the results of the teacher’s work were known primarily to him or her alone without an opportunity for benchmarking.  In spite of common complaints about too much testing in high schools, only about 25 percent of high school courses and teachers are validated or benchmarked through state or national assessments.  The other courses have no method of external validation.  Even the state and national results are limited utility for instructional improvement since the results come back after the students have taken the class.  Such data is often referred to as “autopsy data.”

The effect of PLC’s in schools is ensure that each section of a course has a common set of minimum learning outcomes and that the teachers of that subject work together to ensure that all the students achieve those outcomes.  Time is made available during the school day for a pyramid of interventions (developed by the entire faculty) to be provided to those students who have not mastered the objectives.  Since frequent common assessments are administered, students who are falling behind are identified promptly for these additional services.  This formative assessment process vs. our-end-of-year summative assessment model enables test data to be used for diagnosis and immediate remediation of students before failure “sets in”.

As teachers share their results on common assessments, the opportunity arises for them to learn from each other about effective instructional strategies.  All of this process occurs during common planning times provided for the teams.  This form of job-embedded staff development is much more effective than our episodic professional development practices of the past.  Teachers learn as they do their real work rather than participating in in-services activities that are not connected directly to instruction and are not coached or monitored in any way. 

According to Dr. Mike Schmoker, a leading author and consultant on education issues, writing in his book Results Now, “Professional Learning Communities have emerged as arguably the best, most agreed-upon means by which to continuously improve instruction and student performance.  For reasons that will become clear, they succeed where typical staff development and workshops fail.  The concurrence of the research community on this approach is quite remarkable…more stunning yet is how rare such learning communities are in our schools and districts.  Although this concept is now embraced in virtually every other industry and profession, we are way behind in instituting it in schools”.

One of the ways our staff wants to look at student learning is through a trial Plus Period.

In late October we will run a trial schedule that will resemble this:

            1st Block     7:25 –   8:47
            2nd Block     8:52 – 10:14
            PLUS               10:19 – 10:44
            3rd Block   10:49 – 12:53
            4th Block   12:58 –   2:20

The purpose of the PLUS Period is to provide students who are receiving C, D, or F’s additional time with their teachers during the school day to remediate.  Research on PLUS Periods also shows that enrollment in Honors and AP courses can increase by up to 40% because more students may feel like they can take academic risks if they have time during the day to work in groups, work on labs and meet with their Honors and AP teachers.  Students who have A’s and B’s can use this time to study, get ahead, or engage in other structured choices.

Millbrook does not engage in major schedule changes without a lot of research, study, and debate.  After a year of doing all three we are ready to run our trial PLUS Period.  All of the changes from facility to graduation requirements to PLUS Period are driven by the singular goal of increasing student success.  Changes won’t stop until all students experience success.