Focus 3 Second Edition Workbook Answer Key
Skye Severy
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The fourth edition of this comprehensive action guide provides new strategies for leveraging PLC for a highly effective multitiered system of supports, expert-led guidance on school culture, and a deeper discussion on connecting school improvement to the mission of helping all students succeed.
25 years on, the PLC at Work process continues to produce results across the United States and worldwide. In this fourth edition of the bestseller Learning by Doing, the authors use updated research and time-tested knowledge to address current education challenges, from learning gaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic to the need to drive a highly effective multitiered system of supports.
Since 1998, we have published many books and videos with the same two goals in mind: (1) to persuade educators that the most promising strategy for meeting the challenge of helping all students learn at high levels is to develop their capacity to function as a professional learning community and (2) to offer specific strategies and structures to help them transform their own schools and districts into PLCs.
Other educators have claimed they are members of a PLC because they engage in dialogue based on common readings. The entire staff reads the same book or article, and then members meet to share their individual impressions of what they have read. But a PLC is more than a book club. Although collective study and dialogue are crucial ele-ments of the PLC process, the process requires people to act on the new information.
There are three big ideas that drive the work of the PLC process. The progress a district or school experiences on the PLC journey will largely depend on the extent to which these ideas are considered, understood, and ultimately embraced by its members.
The first (and the biggest) of the big ideas is based on the premise that the fundamen-tal purpose of the school is to ensure that all students learn at high levels (grade level or higher). This focus on and commitment to the learning of each student is the very essence of a learning community.
A corollary assumption is that if the organization is to become more effective in helping all students learn, the adults in the organization must also be continually learning. Therefore, structures are created to ensure staff members engage in job-embedded learning as part of their routine work practices.
The second big idea driving the PLC process is that in order to ensure all students learn at high levels, educators must work collaboratively and take collective responsibility for the success of each student. Working collaboratively is not optional, but instead is an expectation and requirement of employment. Consequently, the fundamental structure of a PLC is the collaborative teams of educators whose members work interdependently to achieve common goals for which members are mutually accountable. These common goals are directly linked to the purpose of learning for all. The team is the engine that drives the PLC effort and the primary building block of the organization.
Working together to build shared knowledge on the best way to achieve goals and meet the needs of those they serve is exactly what professionals in any field are expected to do, whether they are curing patients, winning lawsuits, or helping all students learn. Members of a professional learning community are expected to work and learn together.
This focus on results leads each team to develop and pursue measurable improvement goals for learning that align with school and district goals. It also drives teams to create a series of common formative assessments that are administered to students multiple times throughout the year to gather ongoing evidence of student learning. Team members review the results of these assessments to identify and address program concerns (areas of learning where many students are experiencing difficulty). They also examine the results to discover strengths and weaknesses in their individual teaching in order to learn from one another. Very importantly, the assessments are used to identify students who need additional time and support for learning. We will make the case that frequent common formative assessments represent one of the most powerful tools in the PLC arsenal.
The PLC process empowers educators to make important decisions and encourages their creativity and innovation in the pursuit of improving student and adult learning. As you read through this text, you will discover that when a school functions as a PLC, teachers collectively make many of the important decisions, including the following.
The debate that has raged about whether school improvement should be top-down and driven by administrative mandates or bottom-up and left to the discre-tion of individuals or groups of teachers has been resolved. Neither top-down nor bottom-up works. Top-down fails to generate either the deep understanding of or the commitment to the improvement initiative that is necessary to sustain it. The laissez-faire bottom-up approach eliminates the press for change and is actually associated with a decrease in student achievement (Marzano & Waters, 2009). High-performing PLCs avoid the too-tight/too-loose trap by engaging educators in an improvement process that empowers them to make decisions at the same time that they demand adherence to core elements of the process (DuFour & Fullan, 2013). We will reference this simultaneously loose and tight culture throughout this book.
One way leaders communicate their priorities is by what they pay attention to (Kouzes & Posner, 2003; Peters & Austin, 1985). Subsequent chapters provide spe-cific examples of leaders communicating what is valued by creating systems and struc-tures to promote priorities, monitoring what is essential, reallocating time, asking the right questions, responding to conflict in strategic ways, and celebrating evidence of collective commitments moving their school closer to its vision.
Learning by Doing is intended to help educators close the knowing-doing gap by transforming their schools into PLCs. It reveals purposeful, realistic, actionable steps educators can take to develop their capacity to function as a PLC. It is designed to accomplish the following five objectives.
Americans have always been critical of their public schools. But since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, the media and politicians have seemed to be waging an increasingly aggressive war not just on the public school system but also on the educators within it. This legacy has continued into the second decade of the 21st cen-tury. A 2023 Gallup poll found that just 36 percent of American citizens have a favor-able view of the American public school system.
We reject the notion that American schools are failing and that educators are the cause of that failure. In the first two decades of the 2000s, educators achieved some of the best results in U.S. history. Consider the following.
So while we reject the idea that American schools are terrible and getting worse, we also acknowledge the moral imperative for improving schools so that all students are prepared for postsecondary learning. American educators must view every student as if they were their own child and provide the same education they would want for their own (DuFour, 2015). We also acknowledge the added challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have placed educators in an unprecedented dilemma that requires unprec-edented urgency. PLC at Work is more important now than in any other period in American history.
Even when teachers and administrators make a good-faith effort to assess their schools, they face significant obstacles. All schools have cultures: the assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and habits that constitute the norm for a school and guide the work of the educators within it. Perhaps it is more accurate, however, to say that educa-tors do not have school cultures but rather that the school cultures have them. Teachers and administrators are typically so immersed in their traditional ways of doing things that they find it difficult to step outside those traditions to examine conventional prac-tices from a fresh, critical perspective. Therefore, this handbook, and particularly the continua presented throughout, is designed not only to offer specific examples of PLC practices but also to help educators frankly assess the current conditions in their schools.
As we have worked in our own schools and assisted many hundreds of others, we have found that providing the right tools, templates, protocols, and sample products can help make the complex simpler and increase the self-efficacy of educators. We have attempted to gather these useful instruments in one place so that readers can access what they need at different points in the process. We hope that they are helpful, but they are not carved in stone. Feel free to adapt and modify them to make them fit your unique situations.
Our greatest hope in developing this handbook is that it will help educators take immediate and specific steps to close the knowing-doing gap in education by imple-menting the PLC process in their own schools and districts. There has never been greater consensus regarding what educators can do to improve their schools. As a profession, we know with certainty that more students learn at higher levels when:
Conversely, there is simply no credible evidence that schools are more effective when educators work in isolation and the questions of what students learn, how they are assessed, and what happens when they struggle are left to the randomness of the indi-vidual teacher to whom they have been assigned.
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