EVANSTON — It’s a familiar occurrence in Evanston. Once a month schools are released at lunchtime and parents make arrangements for their kids for an afternoon. Some parents hate them, others may love them and many feel completely indifferent, but no matter the sentiment they provoke, monthly half-days have become a way of life for parents of Evanston’s schoolchildren.

The days are marked on the school calendar as early release professional development (PD) days, but what do teachers and other staff members actually do on those half-days? 

The answer, at least for the 2017-18 school year, is that they’re learning how to collaborate and participate in the district’s professional learning community, or PLC. This focus on PLCs is a component of the district’s commitment to provide a guaranteed and viable curriculum for all students, meaning there is a realistic and attainable promise of what is taught to each student at each grade level, at every school and with every teacher. 

This school year the district has contracted with Aaron Hansen, a consultant who specializes in helping schools and districts establish PLCs and training educators on how PLCs work. By the time the school year is over, every teacher and staff member in the district will have participated in the same training. 

School board members have also had the opportunity to participate and interact with Hansen in order to understand exactly what it is the teachers are doing in these sessions. 

There are three big ideas that provide the basis of work in PLCs — that the purpose of a school is to ensure high levels of learning for all students, that helping students learn requires collaboration and a collective effort, and that effectiveness must be assessed regularly and results of assessments must be used to improve professional practices and respond to students in need. 

A PLC is a group of educators committed to collaboration within an ongoing process of inquiry and action to achieve better results for students. What this means in practical terms for staff members is that teachers at each grade level within a school, and among schools at the district middle schools, are learning to work together and collaborate to better educate all students. As the process continues, the plan is that teachers will collaborate between schools at the elementary level as well. 

This may sound like common sense, but in reality was not often regularly practiced and was not something staff were trained to do. 

As district assistant superintendent of instruction Doug Rigby said, “We’ve spent the last 10 years focused on instruction with almost a laser focus, but it was done in isolation. We took a year to assess what we needed and asked ourselves how we could invest in our greatest resource, our teachers.” 

The work of professional learning communities asks that teachers really collaborate, including sharing data and student test scores, to determine better ways to reach kids. Hansen said the work of collaborative teacher teams is to answer four questions: What do we want students to learn? How will we know if they are learning? What will we do if they are not learning and what will we do for those who have already mastered the concept?

Teacher Laura Rigby explained that it can be scary for teachers to share data because doing so opens the door to judgment from peers. Rigby, a first-grade teacher at Uinta Meadows, said the first-grade team at UME has been doing the hard work involved in building a collaborative team.

“There was lots of resistance at first,” she said, “but working together has been incredible.” Rigby said student proficiency scores at first grade went up significantly in just nine weeks. She added that even though sharing student data can be scary, it’s what is best for the students. “We don’t own those children,” she said. 

During learning sessions, Hansen discusses the “human being factor,” which is simply that students all have different needs and educators need to be able to provide an education to every single child. “Children come with challenges and unique things,” said Hansen. “Some are already on third base and others are not yet out of the batter’s box.” 

Creating and sustaining collaborative teams allows educators to better adapt and educate children in a way that prepares them for the future. “It’s a rapidly changing world that is changing faster than education is changing,” he said. “You don’t want your community to become a truck stop on the way to somewhere else, so you must have learners who can succeed in an innovation economy.” 

The professional development days spent with Hansen are full of lots of group discussions, challenges to old patterns and accepted ways of thinking, and Hansen tells participants up front that they may even be pushed to uncomfortable places. However, he emphasizes that this “messy work” is absolutely critical in order to make real change.

“Hollywood likes to portray solo teachers bucking the system,” he said, “but there is never really significant change when we talk about ‘I.’” The real cultural shift of PLCs is in mutual, shared accountability as opposed to individual teacher accountability, according to Hansen. 

Superintendent Ryan Thomas, along with Doug Rigby and Hansen, said this ongoing process is something that will take time to master. “You are not going to just snap your fingers and get results in a short period of time,” said Hansen. “Some groups and schools are going to run with this, let them run. That doesn’t mean the others aren’t working hard.” 

Evanston Middle School Principal Eric Christenot said there is lots of excitement from teachers about the process and the district-wide shift. “Never in my 20 years of education have I evaluated myself so much and felt so excited. We’re grateful that we’re involved in the process and not just being told to reach some unattainable goal.” 

Thomas echoed those sentiments. “In all the different things we’ve done in the district, there has never been any true buy-in from the bottom up. We aren’t just telling teachers to get it done, but instead we’re giving support while they build their teams.” 

“Our best resources are our teachers, so they need to be involved,” said Thomas. “With teacher buy-in, there are now 277 individuals to help with any pushback and keep us moving in the same forward direction.”