Hills Elementary School in Hills, Iowa, and the Iowa City Community School District, has a large population of students who live in an impoverished trailer court. The school started a community center at the trailer court, offering a monthly Family Night dinner program that provides opportunities for parents, teachers, and students to work together on developing study and life skills.   

Hills Elementary School successfully instituted the Positive Behavior Supports program to improve school climate and behavioral disciplinary methods. The school also has mental-health promotion programs and focuses on reducing barriers to learning, like truancy. Hills Elementary School is a

Healthy School Communities site.  

Check out a video clip about their work and their success in developing healthy students.  

Creating an authentic professional learning community (PLC) requires breaking down the walls of isolation and collaborating to improve student learning through improving instruction. One resource that the North Polk Community School District has found to be very helpful is The Practice of Authentic PLCs by Daniel R. Venables because it provides a very practical guide on many aspects of PLCs. The Practice of Authentic PLCs presents straight-forward suggestions for getting started, what the author believes are the three essential tasks of authentic PLCs, and sharing useful strategies and suggestions for coaching PLCs. Throughout the book and as a separate section in the back are protocols for each activity or task.

Getting started with authentic PLCs means focusing on building relationships and trust among members of each PLC. Thus, several protocols for trust-building activities are presented for use by PLCs prior to crafting their group norms. After norms are created, the author suggests additional trust-building activities such as professional reading and 'unpacking' standards and benchmarks as a way to develop common understanding of the cognitive demands found in each standard and benchmark. Protocols are provided for both activities.

According to the author, the three essential tasks of PLCs are (1) looking at student and teacher work, (2) designing quality common formative assessments, and (3) reviewing and responding to data. Each task has it's own chapter, and the chapter includes background information about that task, examples from PLCs, additional supporting information, as well as protocols for engaging a PLC in accomplishing each task. The protocols are easy to follow. Several specific pieces that might be of interest within these chapters include a discussion on effective feedback (both warm and cool), asking probing or framing questions, determining essential learning outcomes, using rubrics, and standards-based test grades.

One interesting point made by the author is that each PLC should have a coach who also serves as the constant facilitator. These coaches should then have their own PLC in which they discuss upcoming meetings, practice using the protocols, and share challenges from their own PLC, brainstorm solutions and share successes.

Additionally, there are other useful tools including a section on trouble shooting common obstacles, a continuum for high functioning PLCs that can be used by PLCs to evaluate themselves and track growth, and a suggested first-year timeline. In conclusion, this book is very useful because the author presents practical information on getting PLCs up and running. At North Polk we are following the suggested first-year timeline and so far experiencing very positive results from all staff.

The Practice of Authentic PLCs, A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams by Daniel R. Venables, 2011, Corwin ISBN: 978-1-4129-8663-2

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery." (James Joyce)  Journalist and author Alina Tugendwrites that one of the goals that should be on everyone's list is to make a mistake. Why?  "Because we're raising a generation of children, primarily in affluent, high-achieving districts, who are terrified of blundering, of failing, or of even sitting with the discomfort of not knowing something for a few minutes.  If students are afraid of mistakes, then they're afraid of trying something new, of being creative, of thinking in a different way.  They're scared to raise their hands when they don't know the answer and their response to a difficult problem is to ask the teacher rather than try different solutions that might, gasp, be wrong. They're as one teacher told me, 'victims of excellence.'" (Edutopia, September 6, 2011)

Ms. Tugend states that success in school has too often been defined as high marks on tests. She says that if results are all that matter in education, then mistakes play no positive role. They are only helpful if we believe that the process of learning - which inevitably must include the process of erring - is just as, or more, important than getting to the correct answer.

Dr. Richard Elmore speaks about this in his work on school improvement. Students are generally not being asked to struggle against a high-level task for an entire class period. From his international research, he states that what separates a high-level system from a low-level system is when two things exist: 1) the teacher must present a higher-level task and 2) the task must be one where students are being allowed to struggle for a longer period of time - to think deeper and to extend their problem solving abilities. He states that this often makes educators uncomfortable and that we want to rush in and help to find or give students the answer sooner. Dr. Elmore says that providing higher-level tasks and continually challenging students is all about instructional improvement and our improvement as leaders. He poses the question to educators, "How do we design the system to allow this to happen?"

It seems apparent that the challenge to us as educators is to establish the conditions for students to be given the kinds of tasks that allow them to think, struggle, and make mistakes. Are we courageous enough to model this to our students and demonstrate that we are all learners through the mistakes and challenges that come to us daily?

Journalist Alina Tugend is the author of Better by Mistake:  The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, and writes the Short Cuts column for the New York Times business section.

Dr. Richard Elmore is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership Director 

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