The Six Secrets of Change and the Six Principles of Failure Is Not an Option^® have a lot in common because both sets are based in examples of large scale successful school reform. Both are based on actual practice. The Secrets—love your employees, connect peers with purpose, capacity building, learning is the work, transparency rules, and systems learn—are all found in the operational work of the six principles.

In our work in Ontario, Canada and around the world we have been trying to bring about significant improvements in schools and school systems. We have aligned this effort with the best of research and practice around the world, and tested our theories and findings with the evidence in the business literature.

Our goal is large-scale improvement, that is, how to change the entire system whether it be a whole district, province or state. We started this work in earnest in 1997 when Tony Blair launched his nationwide literacy and numeracy initiative in England, and commissioned a group of us in Toronto to evaluate the strategy, which we did from 1998 to 2002. We learned a lot about what to do (focus on a small number of priorities, invest in capacity building, monitor results and intervene when necessary); and about what not to do (over emphasize targets, use punitive accountability, and drive the strategy from the center without building corresponding bottom-up ownership).

In 2003, with a new government in Ontario, we had the opportunity to build on the  English strategy as the Premier, Dalton McGuinty, appointed me as his chief adviser in education. We then set out to transform Ontario’s public education system that  had been stagnant from 1998-2003. The public system has 4000 elementary schools, 900 high schools, 72 districts with 2 million students and over 100,000 teachers. Since 2003 we have had considerable success. literacy and numeracy scores have increased by 12%, high school graduation rates have gone from 68% to 77%, morale of teachers and principals improved considerably and so forth.

Read the entire article here.

A growing number of educators are involved in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within their schools. Once a PLC structure is established and communities are formed, a set of substantive questions must be addressed: What is the role of PLCs within a school? How do we insure that a PLC achieves its desired results? What should teachers be doing when they meet in learning teams? In other words, how do we make the most of Professional Learning Communities?

The first series published in our December 2009 newsletter discussed the role of Professional Learning Communities serving as a critical friend. This second series addresses looking at student work in teams.

Professional Role #2 – Looking at Student Work in Teams
Three times a year, the secondary English teachers meet together in grade-level groups to evaluate student work from their district’s writing assessments. Student papers from the various classes are mixed and divided among pairs of teachers. Using a common rubric, the pairs score the papers and discuss their judgments (for inter-rater reliability).

As part of the process, the entire grade-level team identifies "anchor" papers that illustrate the various performance levels of the rubric. The selected anchors are then annotated with comments in the margin, describing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses. The scoring session concludes with the team identifying areas of needed instructional emphasis and share "best practice" strategies and resources for addressing the noted weaknesses.

Increasingly, educators are being encouraged to use "data" as a basis for instructional decision-making and school improvement planning. How does a school or district become data-driven? In some cases, we see school- and district-level administrators dissecting annual test score reports and summarizing the results for their teaching staff. Although it is surely better than nothing, such an approach to data analysis will have less of an impact if it bypasses teachers. As an alternative, I recommend that teachers be actively involved in the analysis of achievement data and the formulation of improvement plans, so that they will come to better understand and "own" student performance data.

For the rest of the second installment of this article, click here.