If you are thinking “How does all of this PLC stuff work when I’m the only one who does what I do?” you are most likely a singleton teacher! Examples often include teachers of band, choir, art, auto mechanics, consumer science, technology, psychology, business, drama, nursing, special education, dance, media, agriculture… the list goes on and on. In a small school, you may be the only person who teaches your grade level or subject, which also makes you a singleton!
Most educators understand that they will achieve so much more if they work together and use common assessment data as a basis for making decisions. Great, but who do you create common assessments with if you are the only person who does what you do? Making the problem worse, we often find that schools new to the PLC process leave singleton teachers off collaborative teams altogether or assign them to a team as an afterthought. Ouch! That’s not how we develop a collaborative culture. We can do better!
How to Include Singletons
The critical criteria when forming collaborative teacher teams is that members must share essential learning outcomes. There are at least five team structures that can potentially meet this criteria for singleton educators: 1) interdisciplinary teams, 2) vertical teams, 3) singletons who support, 4) digital teams, and 5) structural change.
Let’s address one the most common structures. Interdisciplinary teams are comprised of educators who teach different content. They choose to focus on skills they teach that they have in common instead of the differences in their content. For example, business, automotive technology, construction, and nursing teachers might form a career tech team. Although the content is vastly different, they might find that employability skills—like customer service, collaboration, problem solving, communication, writing a resume, and interviewing for a job—are all enduring life skills that matter greatly to the future success of students who may choose any of these vocations as their life’s passion.
Highly functioning interdisciplinary teams choose to focus on enduring skills that transcend content. Once they’ve found skills in common, they create common rubrics, administer assessments, and collect data for the purpose of improving their teaching and responding to student learning. In short, they commit to follow the PLC process by finding what essential skills they have in common with their teammates rather than letting the differences in content be an obstacle.
An interdisciplinary team may not work for every singleton teacher. A different structure may work better (read about the other structures in How to Develop PLCs for Singletons and Small Schools). The point is: although the solutions may be as unique as each singleton situation, we can and should include our singletons as we build a true collaborative culture.
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Rustle,
Thanks for reading the blog. I hear your concern about creating busy work. I certainly wouldn’t advocate people getting together to create common assessments about concepts that don’t really matter to teachers or students for the sake of calling themselves a PLC team. We all have far too much to do to jump through hoops!
Instead, if I were working with members of your team, I would try to find out what skills team members do care about that that they are teaching to their students. I might ask some of the following questions:
1. “What SKILLS do you REALLY want kids to learn in your class?”
2. “What are some of the struggles that you commonly see among your students?”
3. “If you could wave a magic wand and ensure that every child learned X, what would it be and why does it matter?”
My guess is that through conversation we could quickly come up with some skills that we truly care about ensuring that kids learn. My guess is that individual teachers probably have in common at least one or two of those skills even with another teacher who teaches different content. (If not, the teacher is probably too focused on specific content vs. the skills that are enduring enough to cross content areas, or they might need to be paired with others where links are more logical.) Focus on what is in common. Not surprisingly many teams focus on skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. Or, many focus on literacy skills in preparation for college or career.
Once the team has come to consensus about a skill that matters to them, the next step is getting to work defining what proficiency actually looks like, designing rubrics, developing assessments, setting goals, and etc. (It’s unlikely that the assessments you build around these skills that matter most to you will be accurately assessed through multiple choice assessments.) It’s not easy work, but it does become much more meaningful once the team has determined a common goal of improving a designated skill that really matters.
I hope this helps you and your team as you work together toward a goal worthy of your time!
Aaron
Aaron,
We’re trying to get a group of singleton’s together for PLC at my school. I’ve been on PLCs before with others who have taught my subject. Many in our group are apprehensive that this will create more busy work for our students in trying to create assessments (multiple choice tests seem to be what is expected of us) about a skill that we all have in common(that isn’t necessarily essential, but something that is remotely related)-AND being able to show a progression of growth in that one skill throughout the year. What suggestions do you have?