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.