Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky to participate in Professional Learning Communities with creative, student-centered, and dedicated teachers; the kind of teachers whose classrooms I would be happy for my own offspring to someday join (and let’s be honest, we all have those in our buildings for whom that sentiment isn’t true).

We shared lesson and unit ideas, we problem-solved the struggles our students presented, and the combined experience and innovation in the room each Friday meant that after nearly every weekly PLC I walked out with new ideas, strategies, or perspectives. Our PLC structure is supposed to follow the DuFour model, and with the focus of our building (and state) shifting toward monitoring meaningful student growth, that PLC model aligns well in theory.

My current PLC includes five of us, and three of us are teaching the course for the first time ever or for the first time after a several-year hiatus. While our classroom student growth goals aren’t worded precisely the same (we’re English teachers after all… and even the text of a student growth goal should convey voice), we’ve all focused on the broad concept of substantiation of claims, whether in analysis of literary or informational texts. This fits nicely with that giant elephant in the room known as the Senior Research Paper, which is a graduation requirement for our twelfth graders and requires proficiency at exactly that skill.

A while back, we took that big step across the threshold that every PLC must eventually broach: examining student work. In our case, a couple of us were sharing student work samples from the Senior Paper.

We tentatively distributed copies accompanied by disclaimers and pre-emptive apologies that built in a crescendo to the eventual appeal of please don’t judge my teaching by my students’ comma splices and inconsistent verb tense.

Examination of student work, and even classroom-level student assessment data, has not been the broader norm in my department or my PLC. I’m as guilty as any…and perhaps more so, considering my role as a TOSA and teacher-leader…because I feel like I should know better from all the talk about the power of PLC’s. I know that looking at student work is what can push our collaboration to the next level. Often, our PLC’s have been ostensibly productive: sharing lessons and activities, verbally processing strategies for helping students figure out some sticky issue, but all of this (truly valuable) collaboration was just a notch detached from actual examination of student results. We engaged in this dance, always moving and always talking the right talk, all the while circling wide from the potentially difficult conversation that might force us to talk less about what we teach and more about what they learned.

Once those papers were distributed, we realized something right away: we didn’t know what to talk about. The first paper happened to be one I had brought, and it was a mess. My first thought was Why did I pick this kid’s paper? She had a C- in the class… I found myself trying to explain away the rambling run-ons, the vague thesis, the weak opening situation. You should have seen her FIRST draft! This actually is an improvement! I implored.

Amidst my apologetics, the team was fumbling a little. Here we were, doing what we thought was supposed to be the “real work” of PLC, and it was unfamiliar territory. We needed someone or something to tell us what to do…we needed a protocol or a facilitator or better yet special dispensation to just keep talking about our Catcher in the Rye lesson plans.

A few PLC’s later, we talked about our group’s struggle to function. We’re all good people, well-meaning, and no one is intentionally avoiding engaging with student work. Frankly, none of us needed one more thing to think about: remembering to plan the PLC agenda, gather examples, etc., is something that during our hectic week would just get pushed to the back burner. All of us would show up on Friday willing, but without the time to prepare, not able. We agreed that we needed to give ourselves some structure, establish clearer agendas (part of each future meeting would be dedicated to building the next week’s agenda, at least until we found a groove), and perhaps follow some kind of specific protocol for looking at example papers. We decided that one protocol might be to examine student work by trying to locate student exemplars to represent the different levels of our grading scale. That task, at least, would be useful to us (so we teachers could truly understand our assessment instrument) as well as to students (who could then see examples to help them understand levels of proficiency).

Without some kind of clear focus or protocol, sharing student work or assessment scores asks us to put ourselves in a highly vulnerable position. This work is deeply, deeply personal, and I’d be hard pressed to find a teacher in my department who isn’t working their hardest to help every kid excel. When intentional collaborative focus on student work is a new thing, though, it means baring for others a part of our practice that we may influence but cannot completely control.

That first foray was uncomfortable, but I think we learned a few lessons that helped propel our PLC forward. First, all of us felt that urge to apologize, which meant that none of us should need to; each of us knew that no one paper or set of scores could define all of who we are as an effective teacher. As importantly, we realized that we needed a clear purpose for examination of student work, and that by defining a clear purpose we could absolve ourselves from the impulse to apologize.

I’m sure all this is already covered in a book about PLC’s I was supposed to have read somewhere along the way. I’ve always been one to learn things the hard way.