PLC's and Working as a Team

I was recently at a PLC conference put on by Rick and Becky DuFour.  I really enjoyed their conference even though it was jam packed and my head was spinning at all of the possibilities to bring back to our school.  I had been involved in PLC's before but I had never felt that they were as successful as they could have been.  The conference talked about creating a guaranteed curriculum.  Recognizing that the provincial curriculum was the intended curriculum and what was being taught was the implemented curriculum. I had certainly never gone through any curriculum with my PLC's and discussed guaranteed curriculum.

Another thing that really hit home for me was the analogy that they used about working in teams, as part of a community.  They distinguished between a team and a group.  If you thought of yourself as marathon runners who all had a common goal but did not work together to achieve that goal, then you were a group.  If  you were more like a Dragon race boat crew where you are all working together for the same goal, each person in the boat depending on each other member in the boat.  This was a huge 'aha' moment for me.  I would have said that, in all of the schools that I have worked at, we definitely worked as a marathon race.  Everyone worked very hard and did a very good job but in isolation.  I started to wonder if this hasn't been my mentality for quite some time now.  I am not sure that I have ever desired to be in the boat and rely on others.  I would rather know that my success and failure does not depend on someone else.  Better yet, I do not want my effort to contribute to someone else's failure.

This summer I worked on a video for a class that I was taking.  I chose to do a project that meant a lot to me.  I wanted to video the elder Mike Pinay, knowledge keeper Judy Bear and her grandson and have them speak on their experiences at residential school and being made to have their hair cut.  I could not do this project in isolation but I thought that it was an important topic and one that also fit in with the project that I had to do for my class.  It was the most stressful thing I have done in a long time.  I kept on wondering, what if I mess up the video and the message doesn't come across, what if the sound doesn't work and I don't realize it until after the interview is finished, what if I fail???  It is not a big deal for me to waste my own time (I do a lot of that anyway), but I certainly didn't want to waste the time of others.  Mike, Judy, and Merak were doing me a favor by sharing their experiences (not to mention the distance they traveled to do the interview), one of our coordinators was conducting the interview, and my school division was paying to honorarium for both of the elders to come out and speak with me.  That is a lot of pressure to not mess up!!  I wasn't sure I could handle it.  I wasn't sure I wanted to handle it.  I wanted to go back to my classroom and only rely on myself.  There is far less pressure that way.

As it turns out the video turned out great.  It is one of the proudest academic products that I have been a part of and I could not have gotten there without working on a team and relying on other people.  Was working as a team out of my comfort zone?  Absolutely.  Did I want to back out and not do the project (why didn't I just do a how to wax video instead)?  At times.  Was it worth it in the end and did I challenge myself to academic excellence through relying on a team?  Without a doubt.

So how does this relate back to my PLC conference and moving forward from here.  Well, if what I learned through doing the First Nations video was  that working as a team might be out of my comfort zone but so much more success can happen as a team than individually, then I needed to work as a team rather than a group at work and in my PLC's and I needed others to want to work as a team as well.

I started brainstorming what the subtle but crucial difference in thinking and doing in terms of 'we' instead of 'I' might look like at school?

• Staff works collaboratively to ensure that they have and can agree on a guaranteed curriculum.
• I am imagining that the staff would look happier and have more smiles on their faces because they are working together and hopefully building relationships that are energy giving rather than energy sucking.
• There would be more of a consistency in terms of expectations for students across classes and curriculums.

I am sure that there are many more but this was my start.  I will make sure I report back on the changes that I notice in myself and in my PLC's by making sure I focus on working in collaborative teams rather than groups.

Just so I don't leave you hanging on the collaborative video that I created for my summer project here it is.  The video of Mike is about the importance of hair in the First Nations culture and about how when he was made to cut his hair at residential school he thought that his whole family had passed away.  The video of Judy shares her experiences of how she saw a picture of Jesus at day school and wondered who is this guy that he gets to wear his hair long and flowing and she always had to have her hair tied back.

http://hair-importance.wikispaces.com/