“Don’t do that.”

Those were the words out of Dr. Richard DuFour’s mouth more than a decade ago as I was excitedly and passionately explaining how my district was going about our work.

DuFour and Dr. Robert Eaker are the two co-founders of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) at Work movement. Needless to say, I was taken aback, disappointed and a bit hurt.

And yet, he was right.

Approaching Professional Learning Communities — In Theory

What I shared with DuFour was our plan to implement the four critical questions of a PLC, as detailed by Solution Tree, systematically throughout the district.

Year One: What do we want students to know and be able to do?

We weren’t getting to action fast enough. We were taking too much time planning — too much time in the realm of theory instead of practice and too much time not directly impacting student learning through implementing all four critical questions of a professional learning community.

We had forms and processes to ensure that, over the course of the year, every teacher identified eight to 10 essentials per course, per semester. This meant teams would also have to come to a common understanding of what those essentials meant, when they would be taught and what resources they would be using to teach them.

Year Two: How will we know when they know or can do it?

We dubbed our summer training “PLC Q2 Boot Camp,” and the focus for the year was to develop high-quality end-of-unit or formative common assessments. Length didn’t matter, nor did assessment type. Student results on any of those assessments didn’t matter either. The emphasis was on simply creating assessments where the targets and evidence matched each other.

Then, after two years of work, we finally arrived at Critical Questions 3 and 4: “What will we do when students don’t know or can’t do it?” and “What will we do when students do know it or can do it?” Two full years later, with hours and hours of training and team meetings, the district began helping teams adjust their instructional practices.

DuFour quickly identified the problem with our plan: We weren’t getting to action fast enough. We were taking too much time planning — too much time in the realm of theory instead of practice and too much time not directly impacting student learning through implementing all four critical questions of a professional learning community.

While ultimately, the work we did led to significant improvements in student learning — five of seven school buildings were identified as Model PLC at Work schools — the results could have come faster, positively influencing even more students. The process would likely have gained momentum more quickly than what we experienced.

Moving Quickly to Action in a Professional Learning Community

What was DuFour’s alternative? Recurring cycles of inquiry and action research.

This means that educators should work on all four critical questions within the span of a single unit and that this cycle should repeat itself four or five times during the course of a single year.

As a fun example, in one district I was working with recently, the team was hesitant to jump into the work. You may be familiar with some of the common refrains: “Everything we teach is essential for students to know” and “We are dumbing down the curriculum if we eliminate content for students” were just a couple.

Despite their hesitation, they agreed to clarify what students truly needed to learn in their next unit, what was important for students to learn in that same unit, and what was nice to know in that upcoming unit.

To be clear, we focused only on the next unit and not an entire year’s study. The standard they were focused on had to do with students evaluating the impact of the people, places, events and symbols of the Greeks, Romans, Turks, Russians, etc. As you can imagine, there was no shortage of content embedded in that one standard, and as we all subconsciously know and unfortunately don’t frequently acknowledge out loud, there was — and often is in any single unit — far too much content for students to master everything. So we started with one civilization and tried to narrow down the specific people, places, events, and symbols that students needed to learn, those that were important to teach, and those that were nice to know.

What's taught versus what's learned: The most important differences

The result was a chart like below. It was, of course, filled in with the content the teachers would teach. The difference between this practice and past practices, however, was that the need row was what the team was committing to ensuring that students learn. Everything else was not considered essential and, therefore, would be taught but not guaranteed. In other words, a chart like this distinguishes the difference between what was going to be taught and what was going to be learned.

Turning a Professional Learning Community Around to Try Again

Need help turning your professional learning community efforts around? Check out these resources to learn more about repairing or improving your PLC:

• PLC-Focused Learning Path
• Don’t Stop at PLC Lite
• Repairing the Process: How to Fix a Dysfunctional PLC
• 4 Reasons Why PLCs Fail

Just six weeks later, I returned to work with the team. The results of that one activity from September? A reduction in the failure rate on their end-of-unit exam from a typical 15 to 20 students to just two. Quite frankly, all they did was clarify the targets students needed to learn. From there, they created some graphic organizers to help kids with that content.

The team stated that not only did fewer kids fail, but the understanding of the need-to-know targets was much greater than before. As a bonus, students were actually interested in the important and nice content and made more connections to the need-to-know content than in previous years. It was a total transformation in only a handful of weeks, not years.

Lesson Learned: Getting Better at the Four Questions

DuFour was right, of course. Spending years getting ready to improve our practice without doing something about our work right now doesn’t work. For one, it’s a disservice to our students today. For another, it doesn’t generate momentum. If you’re considering the four critical questions regarding yearlong processes, take DuFour’s advice: “Don’t do that.”

Instead, ensure quick improvement cycles because it only takes a few weeks to see dramatic results and generate momentum for improvement. Move quickly to action.

Get started — and then get better.