principal’s day. Of course, the groups also need professional development on the core concepts of PLCs, but experience suggests that in many cases this is not enough: learn- ing what a PLC does is not the same as know- ing how to make it happen in a school. And rather than expecting these teacher leaders to figure out aspects of leadership on their own, why not explicitly teach them leader- ship skills and strategies – especially those specific to leading PLCs? That is exactly what Palmdale Elementary did, alongside its non- profit partner Pivot Learning.
Palmdale School District Palmdale School District is one of about
a dozen California school districts over the past two years to invest in training both teachers and administrators in both the what and the how of PLCs. Teachers and ad- ministrators in Palmdale, as in many places, found the idea of a PLC engaging and com- pelling. But they also found that the road to a high-functioning PLC is not always a smooth one. With the enthusiastic support of its prin-
cipals, Palmdale chose to invest in train- ing teachers to be leaders, and specifically instructional leaders with responsibility for the PLCs at their grade level or for their subject area. The professional development and follow-up support for this effort was de- signed and provided by Pivot Learning Part- ners, a non-profit service provider in Cali- fornia. The training was initially developed with a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation and was piloted in 2009-10. With additional funding through a Federal earmark, the training was tailored to meet some specific needs in Palmdale. Palmdale School District is the fourth
largest elementary district in Califor- nia, with more than 21,000 students in 24 schools. Eighty percent of their students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The district is located in the Antelope Val- ley, an area of high desert approximately 60 miles from central Los Angeles. One round of training and follow-up sup-
port was offered to teacher leader teams from nine schools in August 2010. The response to the training for the nine schools was so posi- tive that it sent Assistant Superintendent for
Educational Services Judy Hall searching for additional resources to support another 14 schools. She found the needed money in Title I, and the Palmdale Teacher Leadership Academy was born. Training began in January 2011 and fin-
ished by the end of the summer. Each school sent a team to the training. An important element was that teacher leaders were se- lected with an eye to their future leadership responsibilities. For example, each of the el- ementary schools sent a team of nine people: a teacher for each grade level (K-6), an on-site instructional support person (called a learn- ing support teacher in Palmdale) and the principal. Hall felt the invest-
ment paid off: “We feel the investment we made gave the schools the capacity to move to a higher, stronger and more successful level of implementation. … This was an essential part to establishing a team of teacher leaders that could lead from any seat.” Palmdale School
District had begun its journey to build PLCs in January 2007 by providing some training to principals. Even though the training got positive reviews and principals even received some limited follow-up coaching, by the 2009-10 school year, both coaches and prin- cipals were reporting mixed success with the site PLCs. Investing in teacher leaders seemed a log-
ical next step. In the same summer as the ini- tial teacher leader training (2010), Palmdale School District also sent all its principals and their respective learning support teachers to the conference “PLCs at Work, ” where par- ticipants had the opportunity to hear from experts such as Richard and Rebecca Dufour and Bob Eaker. Hall noted that Pivot Learn- ing’s Teacher Leadership Academy both reinforced and complemented what people
learned at the conference and gave teachers additional tools and skills to start to take their PLCs to the next level.
The Teacher Leadership Academy The Palmdale Teacher Leadership Acad-
One lesson from the Teacher Leadership Academy was that leadership is contagious.
emy began with a question: “What does it take to be a teacher leader?” Over many years of working with teacher leaders across the state, Pivot Learning has heard many teachers comment that they obviously can’t be leaders since they lack any traditional leadership role – what some call “positional authority” – to lead. So a logical starting
place for the academy was to explore this idea, including both how teachers might obtain some measure of positional author- ity – for example, by being tapped to lead a grade-level team – but also introducing the idea of “earned au- thority,” and the idea that teachers can “lead from any chair.” Te ache rs ’ r e -
sponses ranged from surprised and appre- ciative – “I have been a teacher for 20 years
and no one ever told me I was a leader before. Thank you!” – to uncertain – “I don’t know if I am ready to lead yet, but I am ready to keep on learning” – to succinct – “Less iso- lated!” In session two, things got practical, and
teachers experimented with tools for devel- oping agendas and the basics of facilitating, planning and leading meetings. By session three, participants were ready to turn their attention to PLCs and on using what Pivot refers to as the “Cycle of Inquiry” (a process for continuous inquiry), which is the core work of a PLC. In this session, teachers learned what re-
search tells us about equitable and inequita- ble classroom practices. This laid the foun- dation for the final three sessions, which
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