TLN Teacher Voices

PLCs at Work: An Interview with Teacher-Author Bill Ferriter

Bill Ferriter’s participation in the Teacher Leaders Network began in March 2003, on the very first day of TLN’s existence. We kicked off TLN with an email conversation among 200 accomplished teachers, mostly from states in the southeast. The idea was to stage a series of 3-day chats exploring some key professional issues and then see who wanted to stick around and become the nucleus of a national virtual community of classroom educators.

By the end of the six-week startup, Bill’s provocative questioning and his willingness to reflect on his own professional practice — tarnish and all — made him a leader in our fledgling community. He’s gone on to serve as a TLN Senior Fellow, co-author of a major TLN TeacherSolutions report, and the internationally respected TLN blogger known as The Tempered Radical, whose lively mix of classroom practice, policy and politics, and digital learning topics attracts a broad audience and recently led to a monthly column, Digitally Speaking, in Educational Leadership magazine.

As it turns out, Bill’s willingness—compulsion, even—to bare his teaching soul makes him one heck of a book author, too. Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year, co-written with principal Parry Graham, grows out of a several-year struggle by Bill and a group of teacher colleagues at his North Carolina middle school to learn to collaborate in powerful ways. In this interview, Bill recounts some of the pain and gain of that trial by fire, and how he and Graham went about translating their own experiences into a practical primer for other educators who might be willing to set forth on a similar journey.

As a bonus, I've asked Bill to speak to fellow teachers who harbor their own desire to write a book from their teaching lives. Bill generously shares his secret to publishing success, but I’ll warn you in advance. It involves a lot of writing. – John Norton, co-founder and moderator, Teacher Leaders Network.

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What created the burn to write a book for teachers just beginning to explore PLCs? Give us some history.

Bill Ferriter: I think the burn to write a book for teachers just beginning their work with professional learning communities is a product of my own early struggles and successes with collaboration. About five years ago, I had the opportunity to open a new middle school being built as a PLC from the ground up—and I was paired on a learning team with five of the most intelligent and capable language arts and social studies teachers that I’d ever met.

The problem was that we had no real idea what it was that we were supposed to be doing with each other, and that led to early frustrations. Our initial meetings were rambling, unfocused affairs and we often felt like failures. We fought through personal conflicts and professional disagreements, though, and eventually found a working rhythm and synergy that made all of us better teachers. I wanted to try to make those early struggles transparent to other teachers, hoping that the lessons my team learned might sustain others when the inevitable challenges of collaboration arise.

Collaborative work can make any teacher more productive and professionally satisfied, but only when early efforts at collaboration are structured and meaningful. Parry and I believe that Building a Professional Learning Community at Work can provide some of that structure for learning teams at any stage of their professional work together.

Your book is filled with action-oriented subheads, reproducibles, practical recommendations — there's even an annotated chapter guide divided into seasons of the year. It has the feel of authors who have been there and done that. How much easier might things be for teacher teams who take your advice?

Bill Ferriter: I think the real strength of Building a Professional Learning Community at Work is that Parry and I are both full-time practitioners. I still meet with a learning team every week, trying to identify instructional practices that work and ensure the success of every child. Parry still works as a building principal, trying to create the systems that enable teachers and students to thrive.

That first-hand experience with the real work of learning teams is evident in every chapter, handout and subtitle in our text. Our suggestions, strategies, and materials are suggestions, strategies and materials that we’ve used successfully in our work—and the text is really nothing more than a public reflection of the learning that we’ve done as we’ve tried to make professional learning communities happen in our own schools.

Teachers as Senior Education Leaders

In a recent blog post at On the Shoulders of Giants, TLN member Ariel Sacks reflected on a new program planned by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, aimed at producing 21st century education leaders prepared with the business skills and the understanding of teaching and learning necessary to successfully lead schools.

Ariel cross-posted her blog entry in our TLN Forum discussion group. It sparked a LOT of conversation, some of which we share here. To get the most out of this dialog, read Ariel’s blog post first: Can Teachers Be ‘Senior Education Leaders’?

In her conclusion, Ariel writes:

…Coming from the opposite angle, could a classroom teacher--or group of classroom teachers--become a major force in education reform? I think yes…

I'd love to see a group of teachers enter Harvard's doctoral program and graduate having created and prepared themselves to take on hybrid roles--splitting their time between actual classroom teaching and working closely with senior "educational leaders" to help transform education.

If Harvard won't, can we create that program?

Anne replied:

That's an excellent suggestion, Ariel. I do some curriculum writing for middle schoolers. No matter how carefully and thoroughly I think it through, until I get in the classroom and teach it I don't know just how many changes I need to make! Nothing takes the place of the classroom reality check.

I especially like the idea of education reformers living and teaching the changes they recommend. Either that, or get out of the education reform business and let teacher leaders be in position drive the necessary changes. Actually, I like the last idea better, anyway!

Bob wrote:

Our educational system is yet to be widely structured in a way to tap into the leadership of classroom teachers or financially compensate classroom teacher leaders who remain in the classroom. I am unsure as to whether we are going to win over politicians and central office administrators in sufficient numbers unless some of us move into those positions while staying grounded to the experiences of the classroom.

I have a principal certification and am not tempted to use it right now because I love teaching. Financially it is a stupid move because I spent $15,000 for a second masters that did not increase my salary. I am not jumping in because when I went up to the front office and was a principal for short periods of time during my internship, I thought I was doing work that was far less rewarding than teaching. Part of the reason is that internships usually touch on discipline and procedures much more than instructional leadership.

I find far fewer administrators passionate about their job than teachers. Once exception is a principal I met by the pool at a San Diego principals' conference last year. He gave a passionate endorsement for becoming a principal. I remember his words clearly: "If you are a good teacher, ok that's something, but what does it amount to in the big picture? …But if you are the principal, you can really do anything. You can change a whole school. You want to teach a class, no problem. You’re the principal.”

Some experienced teachers need to become the prominent politicians, superintendents and principals in a way that they are still grounded to the classroom. Those that try will likely be criticized because it is not a common practice right now. I am looking forward to stepping into my classroom tomorrow morning. That is where it is at for me at this moment. So I do not know if we need to draw straws and have those that lose pursue the prominent positions, but we need more teacher perspective in those positions.

Ariel replied:

I keep thinking that principals are not really the education leaders that Harvard is thinking of--or many people think of when we say policy makers. I see principals as much closer to teachers because they are in schools every day and in contact with students every day. Superintendents probably do count as policy makers, but there are lots of other players in the game. Foundation people, leaders of organizations like TFA and New Leaders for New Schools, etc, and also politicians like Arne Duncan and Joel Klein and everyone who works for them. It would be very interesting to see how many have teaching experience and if they do--would they be interested in teaching in a public school classroom once a week, for example.

Chances are it would have to happen the other way, where teachers lead the way by moving into hybrid roles.

Scoring the Testing Industry

Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry
By Todd Farley
(PoliPoint Press, 2009)


Reviewed by Kenneth Bernstein, NBCT

High School Government & Social Studies (MD)

Teacher Leaders Network

As the use of tests created external to schools and classrooms has exploded, one issue has always been the question of whether to rely merely upon selected response (a.k.a. multiple choice) items, or to also include constructed response items (paragraphs and essays).

Selected responses are cheap to administer; they can be scored solely by machine and the results obtained quickly. It is even possible, utilizing item response theory, to administer the test on a computer and use early responses to vary the items offered to the test taker, thereby determining the level of performance more quickly and accurately.

But many think we need more: after all, life does not ask us to choose one out of four or five pre-selected choices. Thus many colleges and universities, employers, and classroom teachers prefer that the tests include constructed items — “essays” if you will.

While it is possible to machine-score such items, that technology is still in its relative infancy, which is why companies that produce tests have need of human scorers. And it is because of this need that we get Todd Farley’s book Making the Grades.

Farley spent 15 years in a variety of positions involved with the scoring of such constructed responses. He worked for a number of America’s most important assessment companies, often doing the work on contract for various states, including Virginia, where I live. 

I am not a trained psychometrician, although during my now-abandoned doctoral studies I did seriously study issues of assessment. I am a school teacher today, in my 15th year of teaching. Each year but one, I have had to prepare students to sit for external tests – which may or may not have met the criteria to properly be labeled “standardized” — that included constructed responses. These tests have included the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, the Maryland High School Assessments, and The College Board’s Advanced Placement examinations. During my one year of teaching in Virginia, known for its Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments, the middle school American History test was made up entirely of selected response items. I also bring to this review some experience that parallels Farley: in 2009, I served as a Reader for the Advanced Placement examination in U S Politics and Government and scored one of the four Free Response Questions on that year’s examination.

As I glance at my copy of the book, I have more than 40 sticky notes that I have affixed to pages containing passages I thought might possibly be worth quoting. Some I obviously will forego. Farley offers explanations of terms like reliability and validity, and explains how in the case of reliability, the term was often misused by those supervising the scoring process. Simply put, scoring companies are often satisfied if those scoring agree 80% of the time, even if that to which they agree is erroneous. It is like a scale that consistently reports your weight as 20 pounds less than reality. The information you obtain is reliable — but it is NOT valid.

What educational measurement should provide is the ability to draw valid inferences from the information analyzed. If nothing else, reading this book will raise questions in your mind about whether many of the tests being used to evaluate students, teachers and schools meet that standard.