Co-Labor on the Right Work

Syracuse was fortunate to host the Professional Learning Communities at Work© Institute just a few weeks prior to the opening of school and the beginning of the hard Common Core and Data Driven Instruction work. One thousand people from all over North America attended, including an [obviously] large contingent from the Empire State. Rick and Becky DuFour were there, as were other presenters from the PLC stable of practitioners and presenters. It was a great three days, which included a Saturday in August! PLC-ers are hard core!

More than the flawless conference logistics and more than the large and enthusiastic audience I was impressed by how closely aligned the PLCs at Work message is with the work before us. Rick DuFour, in his keynote address effectively explained how educators must co-labor on the right work. He doesn’t use the word collaborate anymore – that’s been corrupted to mean something more like just getting along. Co-labor has a stronger connotation and means professionals interdependently working together on shared goals with mutual accountability. It sounds serious, doesn’t it? It is.

It isn’t enough, Rick said, to “merely” co-labor. More than that, we have to co-labor on the right work. This is what he said at the Institute constitutes the “right work.” Check out how it lines up with the RTTT work (with my connections in parentheses):

• Educators work collaboratively and take collective accountability for student learning (sounds like professional practice to me)
• Collaborative teams implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit (sounds like the Common Core Learning Standards to me)
• Collaborative teams monitor student learning through ongoing common formative assessments (data-driven instruction, here)
•  Educators use the results of the common assessments to improve professional practice, achieve instructional goals, and intervene on students’ behalf (data-driven instruction meets professional practice)

 

Why I was surprised to see absolute alignment with Common Core Learning Standards, Data-Driven Instruction, and Improving Professional Practice I do not know. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was struck by the absolute convergence of research and best practice around the same things – the right work. No fad. No flavor of the month. No next new thing. A clear and consistent identification of the work we all have to do in all of our schools. The right work. Our co-labor.

Go!

There’s a core collection of videos on YouTube that are great for use as metaphors of situations we face in education. There’s the BBC’s School Season video that shows the kindergartener heading off to the first day of school – in space. There are all those “Did You Know” and “Shift Happens” videos that make the point about our changing future. And, of course, there’s one of my personal favorites: herding cats. More than any of these, however, another video comes to mind at the beginning of this school year – a school year likely to be different and more challenging than any other we’ve encountered. It’s the video that shows workers building a plane as it flies through the air. It’s not a new video -- most of us have seen it -- but it’s timely.

Why is this an apropos video as we start the 2011-2012 school year? Quite simply, we are building a new airplane that has to take off before it’s completely built, tested, and cleared for takeoff. There’s a lot that we know about that we have to get started on this year: Common Core learning Standards (and a unit per semester), Data-Driven Instruction (and 6-8 week common interim assessments), and Professional Practice (APPR). Each of these initiatives is significant in its own right; implemented at the same time they represent a statewide shift of never-before-seen scope and complexity. To say it’s a heavy lift is an understatement. It sure would be nice to have all our curricula realigned and our units transformed to be standards-based. It would be great if all our teachers were co-laboring in effective and focused teams with common interim and data-analysis protocols all prepared and scheduled. We all wish we had our APPR plans and decisions about rubrics, local achievement assessments, and growth measures all worked out.

The truth of the matter, however, is that we don’t have all of the details all worked out – nobody does. Yet, our students are waiting… waiting for us to better prepare them for their future rather than for our past. Because they (and the world) are waiting, we have to start the year without all the answers. We have to build the plane as it flies through the air. So, the advice is simple: go.

Get the plane going with what we have and keep working on it as it flies. Get going. Go.