Working in collaborative groups is working for Delaware teachers, according to survey results released by the Delaware Department of Education Monday.
Groups called professional learning communities (PLCs) were established in schools throughout the state as a part of Race to the Top plans. The voluntary federal grant funded PLCs with $8.2 million which mostly went to hiring data coaches meant to facilitate those groups and to train local teacher leaders to take over PLC facilitation themselves.
Delaware Department of Education hired Wireless Generation, based in Brooklyn, N.Y. to provide data coaches who would access and help interpret data for the PLCs. Data includes everything from test scores to behavior reports for groups of teachers who then collaborate on student plans. The 90-minute weekly collaborations are also meant as a time for teachers to get feedback from colleagues on next steps and best practices.
As the first year of PLCs wrapped up in June, DDOE sent surveys out to teachers. More than 4,500 teachers (about 53 percent) responded and those results were released Monday. Feedback was positive, with 63 percent of those teachers surveyed answered that PLCs “are helping them build useful skills around the collection and use of data.” 59 percent indicated they "feel more confident in making instructional decisions based on data because of their PLCs."
Donna Mitchell, deputy officer for the Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Unit at DDOE, said the department was pleased with the feedback and impressed with the percentage of teachers who responded at such a busy time of year.
Seventy-three percent of elementary school teachers, 72 percent of middle school teachers and 63 percent of high school teachers rated their data coaches “good” to “excellent.” While the positive feedback was in the majority, Mitchell said the figures will be used to find out what makes for the most effective coaches moving forward.
“This is a program that has to work within the culture of a school and a district. Using data to drive your instructional practice, it really needs to be part of what’s going on or it won’t work. So, we have to make sure that we acclimate this project to the culture of a school and move them from where they are to being better able to use data,” she said.
In the second and final year of RTTT funding for the PLCs and data coaches, schools will transition to have in-house teacher leaders serving as coaches, phasing out the Wireless Generation employees.
Mitchell said schools are transitioning to using teacher leaders even faster than the department had anticipated and she believes the program will be fully sustainable without RTTT funding for it next year.
Frederika Jenner, president of the Delaware State Education Association, said Monday she began reviewing the survey results from DDOE and while she saw the positive aspects of the report, there were concerns as well.
She said she was meeting with school unit presidents next week and asked those leaders to bring their own feedback on how PLCs are working in their buildings.
“I think concerns are primarily centered around the control of the PLCs,” Jenner said. If the meetings are facilitated by a single person every week, Jenner said the meetings can become stale. She said she would like to see a more “organic” development of the PLCs’ agendas within the groups.
Jenner said she has also received feedback from teachers that PLC “regrouping” might also make for more useful collaboration. As a science teacher for 39 years, Jenner said she would have liked to meet not only with fellow “team members” who taught the same students in other core subjects, but also other science teachers or special education teachers who also had contact with her students. The changes or rotations of PLCs could also help to keep those weekly meetings fresh.
The 90-minute sessions each week have also, since their inception, caused concerns with teachers that important planning sessions would be lost as one more requirement was added to their day. Jenner said those planning periods are crucial and written into teacher contracts to keep them in place.
Mitchell, who was both a teacher and building administrator before going to DDOE, said administrators know the time constraints teachers face.
“We really need to offer more support from the state level in developing master schedules for schools that are conducive to both PLCs and planning periods,” she said. “Many teachers are seeing this really is planning, not taking it away, and individual planning periods outside the PLC are even reducing.
“(Teachers are) finding a lot more value in working in teams not just for learning units, but for full years.”
Mitchell said she commended both the teachers and the administrators who have worked hard to make PLCs work and to give feedback to the DDOE. “It’s hard work,” she said. “It wouldn’t be reform if it wasn’t hard work.”