The East Union secondary teachers are working to improve instruction in the classrooms that will improve student achievement.

With the implementation of the 4X4 block schedule, an 85-minute planning time has been created for East Union staff to plan for instruction and collaboration with their peers. At the middle school, this allows for the teachers of the core subject areas (i.e., English, math, social studies, science, special education) to meet the last block of the day for planning and collaboration. The planning and collaboration groups are a little more diverse at the high school level due to the schedule. For example, a collaboration team might have a math teacher, a science teacher, a music teacher and a PE teacher.    

When the block schedule was first implemented, planning and collaboration took place every day during the 85-minute block. Teachers would do individual planning for 40 minutes and group collaboration would take place for the other 40 minutes. This time for collaboration was deemed effective. The time was short and did not allow teachers to go into a topic very deeply. Teachers and administrators discussed the procedure and decided that a change needed to be made.

At the start of this school year the structure of the planning and collaboration time was changed. Teachers now plan on Mondays and Wednesdays and collaborate on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays are rotated every other week between planning and collaboration. The collaboration on Fridays is reserved for teachers to discuss their curriculum maps and focus on the Iowa Core.   This schedule allows for planning and collaboration for a full 85 minutes, something that teachers felt they needed, not only to plan for instruction in their classrooms, but also to give collaboration more emphasis and meaning.

The administration recognized that the longer collaboration time needed to be more structured to assure consistency.   A book study was addressed by collaboration groups:  The Practice of Authentic PLCs, A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams written by Daniel R. Venables. As a result, the secondary staff has set norms for each of their collaboration groups and follows different protocols during their collaboration days. The protocols are used to create a structure where teachers could honestly and safely look at each others' work. Each collaboration group has a facilitator that ensures the protocol is followed. When the school year began, the emphasis in collaboration was on how the protocols would be used and learning more about the process. Once the process was established and each group was comfortable, the groups began the work of looking at student and teacher work. This is the strategy to improve student achievement.

According To David Allen and Joseph P. McDonald, authors of the Tuning Protocol, the protocols that our teachers are using in collaboration are:

• For teachers to engage one another in candid and in-depth discourse about what they are doing or what results their students have produced requires mechanisms that preserve the integrity of honest feedback while protecting the safety of the teacher presenting his/her work. Those mechanisms are protocols.

• A general discussion of a teacher's work by colleagues often found that well-intentioned and valid criticism (if offered at all) was often met with a degree of defensiveness on the part of the presenting teacher. As a result, valid points of question or concern were soon overcrowded by the discomfort of the critiquing teachers offering the feedback and by the inability of the presenting teacher to separate his/her work from his/her ego.

• The team of teachers involved in this process becomes more closely knit having been through the experience. Everyone in the group becomes to some extent a better teacher.

High School Principal, Mark Weis, attends nearly all of the collaboration groups; he shares, "I have to say that our staff has accepted the process and is working to improve themselves and their teaching from the feedback they receive from their peers." This process is another strategy to increase the achievement of students at East Union. This is not a strategy that is directly implemented in the classroom with students, but the learning that is happening in the collaboration groups will improve student achievement.

You may contact Mark Weis, East Union Secondary Principal, for more information.