Chapter 7: Professional Learning Teams: Teacher Collaboration to Improve Instructional Quality

This chapter spotlights a SERVE school improvement initiative that successfully engaged teachers in focused collaboration to increase their teaching expertise and deliver high-quality instruction that improves student performance. It explains the work of SERVE staff in researching and designing a workable, replicable, research-based process to accomplish this mission, offers a description of that process, and describes its effectiveness in accomplishing the needed results. This initiative—Professional Learning Teams (PLTs)—underwent an intensive 3-year field test in the Edenton-Chowan Public School District in North Carolina, identified at that time as “low-performing,” before being rolled out to other schools and districts in the Southeast. Most of the chapter information on PLT implementation focuses on this field test.

Data we collected following the field test included student reading scores from the North Carolina End-of-Grade test, an external evaluation, and recent follow-up interviews with participating principals and district administrators—20 years after implementation. During the field test and subsequent implementations in other schools we collated, analyzed, and documented information from participants via team meeting logs, focus groups, team self-assessments, interviews, surveys, and direct observations. SERVE evaluators designed instruments for periodically gathering attitudinal data and information on changes in teachers’ instruction. The insights we gained from these and other sources were used to adjust and further develop an effective, cost-effective professional development process that could be used in all schools to build teacher knowledge and skills. As you read this chapter, I hope that you, too, gain new insights and ideas for setting up and supporting productive teacher teams.

The most successful learning occurs when teachers find solutions together. In such schools, teachers operate as team members, with shared goals and time routinely designated for professional collaboration. Under these conditions, teachers are more likely to be consistently well informed, professionally renewed, and inspired so that they inspire students. (Hord, 1997)