Because they "set the stage" though professional development meetings and beginning the process at the level of administration and teacher leaders, they were able to see improvement and model the process for other teachers. Embedding this process from the top down helped promote a culture of utilizing data analysis within the school. Having a common planning time for teachers in the same department and having one teacher from each of those teams participate in the Teacher Lead Team helped the implementation of the process go smoothly.
There were also a few issues that arose through Co-op's implementation. The arts teachers, especially music teachers, struggled to embrace data in their discipline. They thought of data as being something that had to be tied to numbers, and it is difficult to assign numbers in terms of score to something as subjective as musical performance. They were able to get past this obstacle and ultimately embrace data when they focused on specific criteria students must meet in order to be considered proficient. Focusing on that also helped students know what was expected of them to move beyond their current level. The school could have also focused on training around forms of assessment. The arts teachers had probably been conducting formative assessments all along that they could have drawn data from as long as they knew the goals of the assessments.
Another problem that Co-op encountered was that teachers were prone to come up with activities for students to do rather than strategies for teaching that would address the needs they defined. This is something that my PLC struggles with as well. Similar to the teams at Co-op, my PLC has a common planning time at least twice a week. However, too much of our time is focused on activities rather than addressing the needs of students. If we were more deliberate in structuring our meetings with focused questions, we would be able to see an even higher rate of student achievement.
Luckily, the culture within my PLC is amenable to change and trying new things. The school as a whole struggles with maintaining that culture, though. We remind ourselves constantly that we are implementing changes because our focus is on "what's best for students." However, there are still plenty of teachers that are hesitant (especially with Schools for Rigor), and like some of the arts teachers at Co-op, don't believe that the new initiatives will work in their discipline until they are shown how it can specifically work for them. Co-op was able to have a staff that largely embraced the new initiative, but there are enough "resistors" at my school that about half the staff would need to be re-hired in order to get everyone fully on board.
One thing that Co-op does to help it be successful that I would like to see in my school is offer professional development that is differentiated and continues throughout the school year. A lot of the PD offered at my school is focused on only our most recent initiatives and offered in a "one size fits all" style. This has started to get better as building leaders see the need for differentiation around our old and new initiatives, but we still have a long way to go in order to be truly benefiting all staff.
The success story includes "consistent modeling and monitoring" as one of the elements of successful implementation. I think that's the most important to me because it is so easy to fall back into old routines if we are not held accountable and shown how we are expected to implement new initiatives.
While state testing is by no means the only or best way of showing a school's success, Co-op had large gains in their state testing scores. This shows that data teaming was successful in at least one measurable way. Perhaps this type of evidence would be enough to help get a few more of the resistant teachers agreeing to implement the process of data teams in my school and others that are on the brink of implementation.
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