Teacher Collaboration at York Middle School

Of all the changes at York Middle School during the last few years, one of the most significant is the culture of collaboration that has emerged among our staff.  Teachers are working together in ways they never have before.

Our team leaders are trained and skilled at facilitating team meetings and our new schedule provides teachers with daily common planning time so they can collaborate on an ongoing basis.  Many schools would call these meetings professional learning communities or PLCs.  Although we have not formally adopted the DuFour model of PLCs, there is no doubt that the model of professional learning currently in place at YMS is highly effective and impacts teaching and learning in a positive way.

The work we've done to transition to a standards-based instructional model could not have been accomplished without providing teachers with the time to collaborate and the training to make that time effective.  We radically redesigned our schedule so that all grade level teams meet on a daily basis to discuss curriculum, instruction, assessment, and of course, the individual needs of the students they teach.  These meeting are agenda driven and focused.

Creating time in a schedule for regular team meetings is certainly not enough.  I have visited many schools in which the team meeting time was poorly used and/or poorly facilitated.  In these schools, a negative staff or team culture can result in team meetings being monopolized by complaints, unfocused conversations and general confusion about how to use the time.

In recent months, YMS has had many visitors to our school that come to study our transition.  One piece they are always impressed with is our collaborative time.  They are not only impressed that we have a schedule that allows for it - they're impressed by how well the time is spent.  We are fortunate to have dedicated teachers that value the collaborative time and work hard to ensure the work is meaningful, goal oriented, and student-centered.  I enjoy sharing our work with educators from other school districts and from other states.  One of the pieces for which I am most proud is how effectively our common planning time is used on a school-wide basis.

The students and faculty at YMS have enjoyed many benefits of the common planning time that is built into our schedule.  Here is just a short list:

• Meaningful school-wide discussions of professional literature
• Increase in evidence-based instructional strategies used by teachers
• Improved analysis of student achievement data.  Interventions can be immediately implemented at the team-level  
• Increased consistency among and within teams
• Critical examination of teacher work - lesson plans, effective learning targets, scoring guides, rubrics, etc.
• Robust and authentic interdisciplinary experiences for students
• Dramatic reduction in behavior referrals
• Increased sense of belonging and team identity (for teachers and students)
• Greater sense of collegiality among faculty
• Improved school climate
• Emerging staff culture centered on reflective teaching and exemplary practice
• Increased sense of teacher leadership and investment in school improvement

The following article, published in the May 2010 issue of the Middle School Journal, details the importance of common planning time to highly effective middle schools.  I hope you enjoy it.

Common Planning Time