In episode 2, part 1 of Inglewood, we talked a lot about receivership.
Yeah, it's been hard to see obviously when we went into receivership, receivership, receivership,
receivership, receivership.
And the challenges that come with receivership.
How difficult and taxing it can be.
But we really wanted to get a sense of how hard this is.
How difficult it is to be a teacher when the systems around you are not working.
It's very hard to get up and just teach.
Teach.
But the teachers at Highland still got up every day and came to work and did everything
they could underneath whatever system or new thing they were told to do.
We were asked to do a lot.
And then did their best to teach their students.
The fact that they haven't given up is frankly incredible.
And so the reason to be candid and look deeply at the challenges of something like receivership
is to understand how the systems that we made up affect our ability to teach effectively.
Now we're talking about ways to change them.
A system is created by the people.
And so they have the decision to change the system, to disrupt it and do something differently.
We're talking about systems that give the power to each individual teacher to see themselves
as part of a whole.
And we collectively, when I say we, I mean all of us, the teachers at Highland, the teachers
of Inglewood School District, the administrators, the community and our legislators, we all
have an obligation to these systems that we created to make sure that we're creating
them in a way that provides the most coherence and allows our teachers to thrive.
And that's what the intensive assistance model is made to do.
This is Rising from the Margins, Chapter 2, Part 2, Highland Elementary in Inglewood, California.
The intensive assistance model requires a lot of work.
That's Dr. Stephanie Gregson, Deputy Executive Director for CCEE.
She's leading the direct technical assistance efforts for a number of schools in Inglewood
Included.
What it looks like the first year for any school site is 51 days of coaching.
51 days of coaching in leadership, in collaboration and in content areas.
But Inglewood needs to do work on having a vision, a mission and common goals to make
sure that every action, every decision they make is aligned with those.
And that is the work that Highland is doing.
That is a lot of the work that the first year of this model is about.
What is our vision and mission together as a team and what are our goals?
In the last episode, we talked about the recipe for how this could happen at another school.
The loss of leadership, the loss of culture and the loss of coherence.
These three things are connected and they're pretty essential when you start to look at
a lot of schools.
If you recall from Episode 1, PLC stands for a professional learning community.
The true model PLC work unfolds all three of those essential things.
It can restore each of them and create a space so they can thrive.
And the beauty of that, the beauty of how the model PLC does it, is from the ground
up.
Leadership unfolds from the teachers themselves by giving them tools, agency and authority
to solve problems in their classrooms.
Culture begins to unfold from their continued collaboration and coherence unfolds as they
communicate and discover problems in real time.
So in the last episode, we said there is a lot of programs that sometimes try to get
tacked on to schools.
You know this multiplicity of adorned, superficial projects that go on and on and on.
And so you might be thinking, well isn't the intensive assistance model PLC just another
one of those tacked on things?
And you'd be right to think it.
So let's look deeper at how this PLC work.
This intensive assistance model unfolds those three key necessities of a successful and
thriving school.
Leadership, culture and coherence.
And see why it's not just another.
Superficial adorned project, project, project, project.
We're seeing the shift in the types of work that's happening at the district level, especially
the work with Bernadette Lucas.
Dr. Bernadette Lucas is Inglewood's chief academic officer.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of this model with CCE.
As a leader within the district, it would be hard to find another as passionate as Bernadette.
Her focus is clear and she's driven to steer Inglewood in the right direction.
I was told by several teachers that it's hard not to leave a conversation with her inspired.
And I felt that too.
You know, I've been in administration now for, gosh, the vast majority of my career.
So at least 20 years, probably more than that.
And I have never seen an educational organization make moderate to significant movement if the
adults in that organization aren't engaged in collaborative teamwork and shared leadership.
I've never seen it.
And it's unlikely to happen.
Not in a sustained way over time.
So why is ground up leadership so important at schools?
We've talked in both episodes about the need to value the degrees and experience of our
teachers that respects their knowledge and allows them to grow in new ways and not just
be told what to do.
There is so much talent in this district.
That's something that also kind of bothers me about the receivership thing.
There's an assumption that the adults in the organization are somehow lacking or without
talent and that is absolutely not true.
The system has created this kind of veil of incompetence because of receivership, which
could not be more false.
I've been here 27 years.
I don't even know what the inside of another school on a professional level would even
feel like or look like.
This is all that I know.
Trevino Jones is the principal at Highland Elementary.
This will be his third year as Highland's principal and as he puts it, he isn't going
anywhere anytime soon.
I can sense that there's a change and a shift that's beginning to take place and it's not
all directed by me.
I have a tremendous support team with my guiding coalition and on any given day any of those
members may walk in or call a meeting, hey Mr. Jones, we need to meet.
We haven't done it.
Even our teachers who aren't a part of the guiding coalition, they've come to me and
they've said Mr. Jones, we're developing a CFA.
We had a discussion around it.
What do you think?
And I'm thinking to myself, wow, it's amazing.
These aren't conversations that I'm leading.
These are conversations that I'm a part of.
We've been making strides towards shared leadership for a while now.
I feel very strongly about shared grassroots type leadership.
And as a result, teachers are feeling empowered.
They have agency not only within their classroom, but it extends to the other grade levels and
even the school side.
Really the PLC work, having teachers work together in teams is very respectful of what
they bring to the table.
That is Dr. Jim Morris, County Administrator for Inglewood School District.
I feel like I own it more than before.
It's veteran fourth grade teacher Michael Reed, who started his career at Highland 27
years ago.
Because now I'm a part of it as opposed to being told XYZ, you do this, you do this,
you do this.
Now I'm talking with my colleagues and we're coming up.
We're designing.
We're making CFAs.
We're using those.
We're looking at the data.
So yeah, ownership, you know.
It's interesting how people respond when you treat them as the experts, how people respond
when you treat them as the people who have the answers.
I feel like I own it more than before.
Rather than saying, okay, I know better than y'all because, you know, I'm old and I've
been doing this a long time or whatever else, that may be good knowledge, but it's not as
relevant to solving the problem at hand as what the teachers in the second grade classrooms
at Highland know about the children that they're teaching every day.
What this means is that Highland, Washington, and any school working on the intensive assistance
model to become a model PLC school, you'll find there's less concern about leadership
changes because every teacher that comes into the school will work this way.
Every new principal that comes into the school will work this way.
And that means the culture that was established by the teachers and support staff through
collaboration continues to thrive regardless of the forces around them.
What we're trying to do is build it into the culture of our school, how things are done.
And I think what's beginning to happen is I think our teachers are taking that on.
I think they can feel it.
They can feel the shift in the culture here at Highland.
And they also know that I'm not going anywhere.
So I've made the words PLC part of our culture here at Highland.
I mean, I don't want to present it like it's the magic solution for everything, but it
is the magic solution for a lot.
And having that professional structure in place to do that is why we value it so much.
You're talking about new people to the district, right?
So they come into this professional learning community that's already set up to promote
the expertise of the people with whom they're working.
So there's now a group of people working together toward a common goal with a very focused lens
and focused structure.
So even as we were starting this process, the first thought was, well, we don't want
another thing that we have to do, but to recognize this is just not another thing to do.
It's kind of changing our culture and it's shifting us from complaining and all the
negative things in the past are really looking for solutions.
So I think that is a benefit when we can steer the conversation to what can we do better?
How can we work together?
What can we do in the future?
We can't control the past.
We can't change the past.
And there are certain things that we have no control over, but what's happening in the
four walls of each of our classrooms, we have control over and we can really look at, find
solutions to how we can do better.
You can write the bullet points of a culture on a wall, an attempt to impose them on people
or have them recite the bullets together and hope they begin to believe it.
But true deep and meaningful culture unfolds from people coming together and really collaborating,
understanding each other, sharing meaning.
That is a culture.
I think it's critical.
This is the voice of LA County Office of Education Superintendent Dr. Deborah Duardo.
Because we're talking about changing systems and not having changes programmatically like
every year, we're going to go this direction, we're going to try that program, we're going
to do this.
We have a model that's in place that will stay in place regardless of the change in
some of the administrative positions.
And True Model PLC work flattens that leadership and gives that power to the teachers to understand
what's going on in their classroom.
Really understand how their students are learning, to truly know what they have to teach with
the essential standards and to know that those standards are understood by their students.
And not only that, but that these essential standards will prepare the students to be
ready to move into the next grade because there has been collaboration between grade
levels about how they fit together.
I, myself personally, professionally, have learned some new things with the way that
we're approaching it.
And I've taken it back to my class, like looking at, you know, essential standards, things
like that.
I didn't think of it like that because I was always taught or told to teach everything.
Before, I think we're trying to be all things to all standards, and I think now they're
laser focused on what's important.
So those essentials are quite vital and that focus has to be extremely poignant.
Again, Deputy Executive Director for CCEE, Dr. Stephanie Gregson.
These four essential questions are the framework at ensuring every student is receiving the
instruction that they need to be successful.
The first question is, what do we want students to know and be able to do?
And that's centered around identifying essential standards.
The essential standards are focused in the content areas of literacy, mathematics, and
language development.
Period.
Nothing more.
The second question, how will we know if they've learned it?
And the third question, what will we do if learning has taken place?
And the fourth question, what will we do if learning doesn't occur?
And that is having a school system have a structure in place that makes sure that they
can meet the needs of the students who may need intervention and those who may need expanded
learning.
All of that takes a lot of awareness around the infrastructure of the school site.
That was eye-opening for me, and that brought clarity to me where, okay, I can focus on
this, this, and this as opposed to everything.
The initial reports that I'm getting from staff around this work is that it is the right
work to do and we must continue it.
The intensive assistance model is a three-year project, but that's just the start.
Really the work comes after the project is over because that is around the sustainability
for each of the school sites.
Have they embedded this culture and approach and who they are as a team and how they work?
That is the work that has to be done beyond the three years of this project.
I just got a question from one of the teachers you're going to interview.
Dr. Lucas, how can you assure us that this isn't going anywhere next year?
Yep, that was me.
That was me.
That's the voice of third-grade teacher, Steph Rula-Dukas.
Because I like this so much.
It's not easy.
There is a different type of cognitive load here for the teacher because it's new and
I do worry because we see funding come, we like something, and then it goes away.
That's part of building trust around this work that you have those systemic pieces in
place so you can say, yes, in two, three, four, five years we'll still be doing this.
One of the things I just try and do is to reassure of our North Star on why we're doing
what it is that we're doing here.
This is a priority.
It's one of the drivers that we've identified to move student achievement in this district,
which is my singular focus.
It can work if done effectively and done with fidelity.
So here at Highland I'm trying to make sure that even though it isn't prescriptive, what
we're doing is the right thing to do.
Guiding Coalition member Valerie DeMorst.
This is not just a program that we're putting into place that, hey, in a year it's going
to go away if we don't have the funding, but it really is kind of that mindset shift that
I do hope makes a big difference.
And I do think it's going to affect student scores in the long run too, that they're really
going to be able to do better on the state assessment, but also just be better, better
readers, better academics that'll help them succeed in life.
Coherence is kind of a buzzword within the education world.
Everyone desires coherence and they say they're moving toward it.
We said PLC's unfold coherence.
So if coherence is something that's desired, the only way to get there, the only way to
have more coherence is to identify and spot incoherence.
So in order to find coherence we have to share meaning among each other.
And schools would need to be sharing meaning together so that they can see what's true
and false.
To see what's right and wrong, to see what's working and not working.
No individual teacher is going to truly be able to see this on their own.
And if everyone is just operating within their own silo of their own classrooms, coherence
will never be achieved, no matter how much it is said to be desired.
And this is what the Model PLC does.
The intensive assistance model brings the teachers together to communicate and collaborate
in order to discover coherence.
Their spotting places where things aren't working, where there is incoherence and they're
correcting them.
They're able to adjust.
And the beauty is they can do it more in real time.
And they're given the hours in the day to do it.
We're going to look at the standard space weekly test, right?
First let's make sure that 3.3 is on our essential standards, the ones that we put in
green, the non-negotiables.
This is a live PLC between Highlands 24-year veteran teacher, Steve Rulodukas, then second
year teacher, Carmen Garcia.
They're reviewing material between classes and confirming where it meets the essential
standard requirements, but also how they can share their students among each other and
teach the entire grade level together in order to support the entire grade level where they
might be struggling.
When we check our data, we should check if it's oral comprehension or fluency issue.
Yeah, that's an excellent point because we know that our students who are reading below
50% are not fluent readers and that could be a contributing factor.
So how do you feel we should address that?
I think maybe if you take Tier 3 and I take Tier 2, we can split them up like that.
Maybe you can focus on phonics and I can focus on comprehension.
If we can find a way to match and align our times, that would be ideal.
And I think that we work so well together, we could make that happen.
And these are not the only standards we need to intervene, but because this is a new process,
we could at least try it with one standard, see how it goes.
I think it'll be an amazing opportunity if we could split our classes that way.
You focus on Tier 3, the phonics, and I focus with Tier 2, which is the comprehension of
the characters in the text, and I think that'll be an excellent way to get started with all
of this.
We're willing to try.
Yeah.
I'm more than willing to try.
Again, County Administrator Dr. Jim Morris.
Competence builds commitment.
Once teachers see the value and the results they're getting from this PLC work and become
competent at doing it, they become incredibly committed.
Student Coalition member Valerie DeMorrist.
Teachers need to have that collaboration and sharing those ideas.
We haven't had a lot of time to do that, maybe with everything being given to teachers, just
haven't had time for that.
You know, they might have lunch together or something, but there hasn't been a lot of
time for true collaboration and that we're sharing our practices and sharing, did this
work, did this not work?
Because some of the sharing is also things that don't work, you know, so we can learn
from those too, but really trying to find time for teachers to have that collaboration
time is our goal through this.
Even more so now with declining enrollment to teachers per grade level, the impact a
teacher has is even greater, even greater.
So if one class didn't get it, that's 50% of your students in that grade.
That's a huge impact.
Wow.
This is cool.
Highlands, two fifth grade teachers, seeing they are 50% of the grade level, meaning they
see that they are not separate, but are part of a whole.
We started just recently how one grade bleeds into another grade, bleeds into another grade,
and started talking about the way that we're approaching it.
This is the watch metaphor from Inglewood Part One.
All the gears of a watch working together to tell time, the parts of a whole.
If coherence is desired, this is a coherent way of thinking.
To think and approach grade levels as separate classrooms would be fragmented thinking.
It is that smashing of the watch with a hammer and then trying to put it back together.
To the place where we're looking at, all students is our students.
So then, wouldn't an entire school also need to be seen this way?
It all fits together to do one thing.
Looking at the whole school as all of our kids, not just these are my kids and my four
walls, but these are all our kids and how can we support each other through this?
But I would hope that that'll affect even as kids go from grade to grade too, instead
of just, oh, they're the bad kid or they're struggling, they have discipline issues, but
it's really working with the next teacher and hey, you know what, I found this really
worked or this really didn't work and that he was able to get from here to here.
Here, let me give you some ideas that will help hopefully get him to focus to grow even
further.
So this is why this model is not just another.
Superficial adorned project, project, project, project.
It's because the intensive assistance model isn't really a system.
It's a process.
A process for understanding what's happening.
That's really, really challenging work because it is human work.
Getting together and facing each other, facing the problems of our class and realizing that
each of us are a participant in creating the very problems we are trying to solve.
That is hard work.
When we get together and look directly at how we help create problems and we face those
facts head on, those problems head on, we solve our problems in completely new ways.
These experiences create new pathways of emotional intelligence in our brain.
They lead to new emotional concepts and we realize something profound that we can fix
this, that we don't need an authority to tell us how.
We are that authority.
Language facilitates culture.
So for all speaking a common language and that language fosters expectations, having
that language, we are evolving our culture.
All of our teachers know what those four questions are.
More importantly, what those four questions mean.
What do we want our students to know and learn?
How are we going to know if they've learned those essential standards?
What are we going to do if they have learned it?
And what are we going to do if they have not learned it?
That language is helping us to create a culture of high expectations for all students.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're talking about shared meaning.
Yes.
And creating that meaning together.
So it's not me as a chief academic officer espousing my, you know, bottomless knowledge.
It's us co-creating meaning together.
So we're co-creating the culture.
We're co-creating the shift in the district.
So what is shared meaning?
Each and every teacher, each and every one of us has our own meaning of what's happening
in a situation.
We're interpreting it through our own past experience, memory, knowledge.
And if we're all separate, which we are, we can't really know what meaning person A holds
and what person B holds.
Modern neuroscience shows us that words help us create concepts.
They help us group ideas together and create meaning out of those ideas.
But as a group, like a group of teachers who are supposed to all be doing the same thing,
we would have to have shared meaning around the language we use and its meaning.
And we have to learn how to better communicate that meaning with each other.
Our interpretation of what we perceive comes from our past knowledge, which means every
person's perception of what is happening is different.
Any ideas we have that our perception is the same is an assumption on our part.
So the only way we will know if we're all seeing the same things is to share meaning.
A student in our district, if we're all doing the PLC process the same way, right, is going
to be approached the same way, no matter what school they're in.
And that doesn't usually happen, right?
We don't have that.
So that's a good thing for kids and their learning.
It's a good thing for teachers too, to have a common way of doing things so that kids
are learning more.
And we know that it's not a checkbox, it's actually a system, it's a way of doing things.
I want to learn.
I don't know everything, even though I've taught all this time.
I don't know everything.
I'm open to it.
Give me some ideas.
Yeah.
You gotta keep it fresh, even for yourself.
Teachers have to have available energy resources and clarity.
They can't be bogged down by a lot of noise.
And ultimately, that's what this process with CCEE is doing.
Clearing out the noise to unfold coherence, culture, and leadership.
Three things we know create a strong school and give teachers the ability to believe in
who they are and what they can do.
Giving them the authority to really, truly change the world.
Our culture is changing.
I feel it.
Those conversations are happening outside of me.
Things are shifting and I feel it.
People have more sense of hope for the future and, wow, we really can give these kids what
they need and, yeah, it definitely feels more hopeful, I think.
The hard work of grappling with all of this is being done at the school sites as they
make this meeting together and recreate our school culture and our district cultures.
And not letting all of the distractions, all the noise, all the, you know, things, but
to really remember, we're here for the kids.
And we know what we need to do to make it better.
It's very clear that the research is there, the evidence is there.
We know what we need to do.
We just need to stay focused.
When you think about the power in that, it is so defeating to think that you have no
power to change what's happening with our kids.
Oh, they come from these socioeconomic backgrounds that may not open as many opportunities for
them.
Oh, they may be English learners.
Oh, they may have an IEP.
That's a very defeatist way to look at it.
And one of the things that I've learned in doing the work for the last year and maybe
two, three months, that is that it does not have a guidebook on when you should be doing
something.
All it does is gives you the pieces to the puzzle.
When you put them in their place, however that fits for you, then that's when it's working
the way that it should.
So that's kind of what we're doing here at Highland.
We're putting the pieces together.
And we're trying to figure out what works for us because what works for Highland may
not work for Madeira.
May not work for Sac City, but it worked for Highland.
The teachers of Highland have not quit in the face of incredible, incredible adversity
and challenges that for any normal person would have rocked their belief in themselves.
They've pushed through and held on and it's to be completely commended.
And so to be working on a model that returns the power to them, that gives them the ability
to really control the outcomes of their classrooms together, is exciting and hopeful and should
inspire all of us to say, Hey, shouldn't we be doing this at other schools?
Having these conversations empowers all of us in the organization to say, These are barriers
that were meant to be torn down.
And we now have the language, the culture, the strategies, the tools to combat that.
That's such a magical thing.
When people say, What are we going to do about all this?
That's what you do about it.
There it is.
It's right before you.
The question is, Are you going to do it?
Do it.
And that right there is why the intensive assistance model and becoming a model PLC
school is not just another superficial adorned project, project, project.
I come to this job every day with my alarm clock rings that is set to ring at four or
five and I am up by four o'clock every day because we're getting it done.
This is a wonderful community.
There's nothing more, more exciting.
Every day when I wake up, I'm not a morning person.
You guys see it took me a minute to bring the donuts, but I'm not a morning person.
But every day when I wake up, I'm happy to come here.
May not always say it, but I am.
I love this place.
Thank you for listening.
This series was brought to you by CCEE, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence,
whose mission is to help transform public education so that every student is left inspired
and prepared to thrive as their best self in the world.
If you would like to learn more about CCEE, log on to ccee-ca.org.
Additional support was provided by Parsake Education.
It was produced in Fresno, California at Winsong Productions.
And then stay tuned for the next episode where we travel to Sacramento, California and take
a look at a district that is also knee deep in the intensive model process.
We hope you'll join us.