Cabrini teachers continually improving instruction

    Every morning in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, teachers arrive at school with a wealth of classroom expertise, whether they’re a beginning or veteran educator.
    So why not share that treasury of knowledge with your fellow teachers in your common quest to enhance student achievement? Why not put your heads together to troubleshoot students’ ongoing academic health, as a group of medical specialists might do to ensure the best possible outcome for their patients?
    That is the simple idea behind “professional learning communities” (PLCs), a model of teacher collaboration initiated at Cabrini High in New Orleans in 2009 that gives teachers a regular opportunity to learn from the classroom successes and failures of their colleagues, and then implement the new strategies.

Sharing ‘secrets of the trade’

    “There’s so much wisdom within the building,” said Yvonne Hrapmann, Cabrini’s principal since 2000. “It’s about sharing the secrets of the trade and the experience of the trade and designating that time to talk about it,” she said.
    Teachers in each Cabrini PLC meet a minimum of twice a month, usually with their colleagues from the same department and at other times interdepartmentally, if the curricular concerns require wider input. The PLCs focus on four main questions:
    ➤ Does each teacher have a clear understanding of the skills and concepts his or her students are expected to master in the given learning period?
    ➤ Are all students mastering those concepts and skills, based on test results and other modes of assessment?
    ➤ If some students aren’t “getting it,” how could the teacher’s classroom techniques be amended to help those students improve?
    ➤ What are teachers doing to continually challenge those students who are absorbing the content with no problem?
    “For example, there may be two algebra teachers who are teaching basically the same concept and one class does a whole lot better (than the other class), even though they were tested on the same concepts,” Hrapmann said. “The teachers meet and ask one another: ‘What did we do differently? Is there something special about the way you taught this particular concept or a trick you used from your past experience?’”
    “Or you might have a teacher who’s teaching calculus now, but remembers her days of teaching basic math,” Hrapmann added. “A teacher might say (during the PLC), ‘My students are struggling with inequalities,’ and the veteran teacher might say, ‘This is a way I used to break it down.’ They’re teaching each other and learning from each other.”
    While ongoing teacher consultations might seem like an obvious thing to adopt on a school campus, they are not necessarily standard operating procedure, based on what Hrapmann has heard anecdotally from her faculty over the last four years. A “faculty meeting” is not necessarily a PLC, she said.

Sharper focus on teaching

    “Sometimes meetings can get bogged down in business, announcements and deadlines – things that now can be communicated by email,” she notes. “When you have such valuable time together (as teachers), you’ve got to be making sure that you’re focusing on teaching and learning. What works best for teaching and learning? How do we keep getting better? How do we share ideas – beg, borrow and steal what’s working for somebody else instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?”
    That collaboration might involve sharing with your fellow educators samples of good and not-so-good student writing, or working with the English department when the social studies teachers notice that their students don’t know the difference between a colon and semi-colon.
    “Or the social studies department might say, ‘We are great when it comes to grading a paper on content, but when it comes to being real nitpicky about grammar and punctuation, sometimes we don’t feel as confident.’ So the two departments will meet (as a PLC),” Hrapmann said.
    “You want (teacher collaboration) to happen purposefully and create a climate that’s open to its being ongoing, rather than occasionally or by happenstance – because we happened to run into to each other in the faculty lounge or the lunchroom,” she added. “Teachers are very willing to do this, but they really need the dedicated time and focus.”
    At Cabrini, teachers get a lot of time to practice their classroom strategies. Over the summer break they read “The Skillful Teacher: Building Your Teaching Skills,” with individual teachers using the information to instruct a mock class of their peers.
    In addition, Cabrini’s classrooms are visited monthly using an observational teaching assessment tool known as the “Discovery Walk.” Teachers who are seen using an effective classroom method are invited to share it at the next faculty in-service.
    “I think in secondary classrooms for a long time, education was more in isolation; everybody had their own class and did their own thing,” Hrapmann said. “(The PLC) basically opens the doors; how do we (teachers) get better so the students get better?” she said, noting Cabrini’s steadily improving test scores that exceed state and national averages. “We know that when teachers get better, students achieve more.”
    Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.