Oak Grove program focuses on teacher collaboration

Oak Grove Elementary was recently awarded a Blue Ribbon from the U.S. Department of Education. However, the Professional Learning Communities leadership team agreed the award came from years of hard work and isn’t the most important thing.

Professional Learning Communities (PLC) is a teaching method the school has been employing for about three years. It is focused on teacher collaboration to make a better learning environment for students. Implementing it came after Principal Jenifer Richardson started taking a hard look at the school’s performance.

She said test scores were low, student achievement was low and disciplinary issues were high. Richardson knew the school could be doing better for its students, but it was a matter of figuring out how.

The first step, she said, was to look at the current realities of the school — such as test scores and student achievement — before looking at the culture in the school.

“What we found is that how we were operating within our building wasn’t working for our kids,” Richardson said. “We really had to look at our current realities. What are the things we’re currently successful at and where are the areas we need to grow?”

Programs such as Positive Behavior Intervention System and Capturing Kids Hearts played a key role in that cultural shift. The two focus on building relationships between students, and between students and staff. This is done through monthly celebrations, door greetings, affirmations and positive referrals. Teachers and students make a social contract at the beginning of the year as a way for everyone to know what is and isn’t appropriate behavior.

“We had to get our culture right before we could get everything else right,” Richardson said. “It was hard, challenging, but we found that with consistency, with a common language ... the teachers went ‘I have more instructional time. I’m dealing with behaviors less than I was before.’

“Everybody just supported each other. Once we got that culture right, we were able to move on and look at our academic piece.”

From there, PLC played a large role. Through that initiative teachers work more closely together with each other by meeting once a week to discuss lesson plans, teaching techniques for different subjects and review student data. They’re regularly faced with four questions:

What do students need to know?

How do we know if they know it?

What to do if they don’t know it?

What to do if they already know it?

Everybody in the building is part of a collaborative team, largely based on what grade level they teach. During these twice weekly meetings, they come together to address those questions.

Everybody in the building works toward a common goal, Richardson said. Everybody came together to create a mission and vision for the school, which is about everything being student driven and always asking the question of “how does this help our students?”

“We as a grade level make sure we have that collaboration,” said Kristie Robinson, third grade teacher and member of the PLC leadership team. “We get together on planning, we go over data, all of those things that are important. Then that kind of matriculates down into our classrooms because if we’re all on the same page and we share kids — all of our kids are our kids — and we share data on all of our children. We put the best strategies and pieces in practice to reach all of those learners. You can’t do that as a one-man show.”

The teams also look at student data, including test scores, to see where the individual student needs help.

They’re also not making excuses for the data because “we know the student knows it, he’s just having a bad day.” Each student takes reading and math tests. They then talk about misconceptions they had about the assessment or the students, where students are strong verses where they’re weak and strategies to teach subjects. Then, teachers go back to the students who struggled with a topic and figure out how to reach them with the subject. They also look at how to push students who did understand the subject to the next level.

Michelle Farmer, reading teacher and member of the PLC leadership team, said the PLC-style of teaching helps make sure everybody has the same tools. It can help new teachers or teachers who are struggling to have this open forum where people trust each other. She said trust and honesty are two important components to making this style of teaching work. The team all agreed that part of it is about accepting that everybody is strong or weak in different areas and realizing that even though they’re educators, they’re also still learners.

“We didn’t change the people,” Farmer said. “We changed how we did things day to day. The people are the same. The people are just as qualified as they were when we began. Now we just have a lot more tools.”

Gabrielle Bullock, first grade teacher and member of the PLC leadership team, became a full time teacher at Oak Grove last year after PLC was already in place. She also did her student teaching during college at Oak Grove. She said the collaborative effort helped her get comfortable in the new role.

“As a new teacher, you’re like ‘Man, I have to make all of these lesson plans all on my own,’” she said. “But we do it all together. It’s not just me going ‘how am I going to teach this, what am I going to do.’ We just talk about it all.”

Michelle Bates agreed that things have changed from when she started teaching at Oak Grove 18 years ago. She said when she first started at the school, teachers were largely on their own or working in pairs. Through the PLC process, she’s seen the building as a whole come together more and become a complete team.

“We didn’t put this in place just to say ‘we want to do this so we can get an award,’” Richardson said. “We did this because we identified that things were not going well for us ... and we needed to change something.”