The PLC Stall-out

Recently, I have had the privilege of having conversations with several different leaders in education.  It is always so helpful for me to discuss some of the questions that guide their work and ultimately mine. Collaborative conversations have consistently brought clarity for me, I think its a part of my extrovert personality. One of the most consistent questions that surfaces is focused on the reality of how professional learning communities are actually functioning.

• Is it possible for a school to form, maintain and truly benefit from PLCs if there is little or no district support? 
• How can Q-comp (or similar programs) co-exist? 
• What can be done with a team that is really "off track"
• Why do some teams take longer than others to "get on board?"
• What are some of the most common factors that contribute to unhealthy PLCs? 

There are a few school culture pieces that I consistently see causing problems and unhealthy collaborative teams, but I don't always think that the reason is complicated. As I led a workshop this week with an elementary staff I found myself needing to say out loud that they are not alone in feeling like PLCs started but haven't "lived" very long. I heard myself acknowledging that sometimes the hardest part of getting into the collaborative groove of things is pushing through the tough phase by choosing to use student achievement as the shared goal that anchors us. 

As I listened to Brene Brown's Rising Strong on my recent road trip...I heard this thought actually correlated to research about group work. Brown referenced Bruce Tuckman's (1965) work about group and team dynamics in a section of her book about working with others. The stages Tuckman shared are labeled: FORM, STORM, NORM, PERFORM. The elementary teacher in me is drawn to the rhyming (of course) and I think this graphic is helpful in supporting the explanation. 

As soon as I began to read the descriptions, the correlations to PLCs were even more obvious than I thought. Sometimes when a district or school decides to organize their teachers into professional learning communities there is time and even money invested in training some (in rare cases all) teachers to understand the why behind what was about to happen. There are even stories of places that "launch" this work in really  pumped-up welcome back sessions with t-shirts and keynote speeches delivered by PLC gurus themselves. Regardless, it tends to start with some level of excitement. This stage of a new group or team is called FORM and is generally full of positive energy. 

   The next stage is the one that appealed to me most; STORM. As I read about the normalcy of turbulence between members of a new group, I was actually encouraged. One of the things that was the most significant in some of the descriptions was the fact that this stormy stage is absolutely necessarily. No team or group can skip this step, it is always present no matter how short it's existence and I think this is where we get stuck. There are so many emotions that teachers bring to an interaction where they know they are supposed to "grow" and "share data"...whatever that means. So it shouldn't surprise us when unsupported/unmonitored professional learning communities fizzle out. Leaders need to be ready to push through this phase, hold their PLCs to high standards and consistently remind their teachers that this is about THE KIDS!!! But what I have seen is a so much frustration during this phase, mostly getting hung up on interpersonal adult issues that the work can't even get done, we don't even get to the next phase; NORM. 

If you've been a part of any level of PLC work I hope that the idea of NORMS is not new to you. It is named as one of the essential process pieces for new PLCs to establish and then review at each meeting. Those shared and collective agreements are supposed to keep us on track as we discuss essential learning and authentic evidence, but in this model it goes beyond just a list of agreements. The description for the NORM phase is more about a natural rhythm of function for a team. This phase is meant to describe the time when work is actually being done. So naturally, it would quickly lead into the last phase...PERFORM. Now if you are a teacher of young ones, or disengaged older ones, you may feel like a part of your job is to actually put on a show as you teach...but that's not what we mean here. This stage is really describing the place of being able to fulfill or perform the duties assigned to you...to accomplish something. In our case, the something is effective teaching. 

This model answers some questions that have persisted, but even a brief study of the phases raises even more questions for me as someone who is sometimes coaching PLCs off a ledge. In the end though, any system made by humans, for humans will be imperfect. What matters most is that we acknowledge the truth of what is happening in our teams and stay so focused on student learning that we are willing to do whatever must be done in order to increase achievement for all. Take a moment to reflect on the stages and see if you can determine where your collaborative team might be right now.