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Staff members of every school face an inevitable question each year: What happens in our school when, despite our best efforts in the classroom, a student does not learn?
In traditional schools, the answer is left to the discretion of the individual classroom teacher, who is free to respond in different ways. The support a student will (or will not) receive depends on his or her teacher's practices, rather than a collective effort and a coordinated response. In truth, most schools play a form of educational lottery with children.
In professional learning communities, however, schools create a systematic response - processes to monitor each student's learning and to ensure that a student who struggles is provided additional time and support for learning according to a schoolwide plan. Furthermore, the response is timely. Students are identified as soon as they experience difficulty, allowing the school to focus on intervention rather than remediation. The response is directive. Students are not invited to seek extra help; they are required to receive the additional assistance and devote the extra time necessary to master the learning.
This coordinated system of support for students never occurs by chance. It can only occur when school leaders work with staff to develop a plan of intervention, carefully monitor the implementation of that plan, and confront those who disregard it. Furthermore, an effective system of intervention is not merely an add-on to existing school structures and assumptions, but represents a natural outgrowth of strong school cultures dominated by certain unifying concepts.
Booties Mill Elementary School in Franklin County, Va.; Los Penasquitos Elementary School in Rancho Penasquitos, Calif; Freeport Intermediate School in Freeport, Texas, and Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., illustrate this systematic approach to responding when students do not learn (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Karhanek, 2004). The schools could not be more dissimilar in terms of size, geographic location, accessibility to resources, and the students and the communities they serve. Yet these schools share common themes.
One of the most evident commonalities is that the staff in each school is emphatic about and fixated on the fundamental purpose of the school - high levels of learning for all students. There is no ambiguity and no hedging about their goal. No one...