In today’s educational climate — with the pressure to raise scores on high stakes tests, the monitoring of instruction to ensure adherence to curricular programs, the demands for small learning communities and professional learning communities — it is more crucial than ever before that educators pay close attention to the work of Critical Friends Groups (CFGs). It is a tremendous step forward for our profession that the use of processes for looking at student work collaboratively has become the norm in many settings. However, educators must take care to ensure the thoughtful integration of these practices into the overall improvement efforts of the school.

Some kind of process for looking at student work has always been a part of the practice of teaching and learning. The settings have changed over the years — from the small tutor-led home classrooms of the elite, where the instructor may have continually watched his charges while they worked, interacting with them during the process of learning and demonstrating what they had learned; to one-room rural schoolhouses, where the teacher worked with multiple levels of students whom she knew well, noting their progress and their struggles, and establishing peer interactions as needed; to the imposing 3,000 – 5,000 student high schools that we have in our urban centers today, where the teacher often struggles to simply get through the load of preparing lessons and grading assignments, alone, for his/her 160 – 200 students. The key issue in each of these iterations of looking at student work has been, and still is, isolation. Teachers have most often done this work alone, without the benefit of the thinking of colleagues.

When Critical Friends Groups (CFGs) became an instrument in a number of educators’ toolkits for increasing effectiveness, some major shifts occurred in how we looked at student work. One key distinction was the deliberate breaking down of teachers’ isolation, so that teachers were not continually working alone, but were instead Looking Together at Student Work [emphasis added], the title of a 1999 book by T. Blythe, D. Allen and B. Powell. “Looking at Student Work” or “LASW” became a familiar phrase and a recognized acronym in the education community. The LASW website became a vital support for this work, as did the National School Reform Faculty, the national network for CFG coaches, facilitators, and group members. The teams of educators at Harvard Project Zero, the Coalition of Essential Schools, and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform laid a sound foundation for the growth of looking together at student work.

The foundational tools of CFGs are the protocols – structured processes for engaging in substantive dialogue to improve educator practice and student work. Each protocol consists of clear and agreed-upon guidelines for conversations, aimed at creating a safe space for taking risks and for asking challenging, probing questions, while making effective use of educators’ time. Specific protocols have been designed and revised over time to accomplish specific purposes. Some of the purposes include: analyzing student work, examining teacher work (lesson designs, assessments, culminating projects, etc.), discussing texts, and addressing dilemmas of practice.

Since the early 1990’s, the locus for the ongoing use of these protocols has been the Critical Friends Group. CFGs are cadres of usually six to ten educators who voluntarily agree to meet together at least monthly for up to three hours to:

• Improve teaching and learning
• Create a democratic, reflective professional learning community
• Establish a foundation for sustained professional development based on a spirit of inquiry (P. Silva)
• Help educators help each other turn theories into practice and standards into actual student learning

Through the use of protocols to examine substantive dilemmas of teaching and learning, members of the CFG grow into strong professional learning communities, where they develop:

• Shared norms and values
• Enhanced collaboration
• Reflective dialogue
• Deprivatization of practice
• A collective focus on student learning

In recent years, the use of protocols for looking at student work has spread beyond the confines of the traditional CFG. This expansion of the work has been intentional in some settings and quite haphazard in others. Where the spreading was intentional, voluntary members of CFGs at school sites included in their mission the goal of impacting whole school change, not just improvement for the classrooms taught by members of the CFG. They set about to make their teaching public to their CFG members, and to make their members’ collective learning public to the rest of the school.

But what happens when they get back to school? What accounts for one school team’s successful transference of CFG philosophy and processes and another team’s failed or foiled attempts?

To answer this question, I visited Our Community School (OCS), a public charter elementary school in North Hills, California. OCS actively uses CFG tools and processes and has become, by all accounts, a true learning community. I worked with the staff for a week last summer and was impressed by their professional conversations and the sincere interest they take in each other’s work. They also genuinely enjoy being together. Their story is an inspiration as well as a realistic implementation model for other schools.

I asked Chris Ferris, the principal, to tell me how OCS used CFG tools to build a successful learning community. Their story surprised me; I would not have expected this path to lead them so far in less than three years.

Just after the school opened in September 2005, a group of teachers attended one of UCLA SMP’s CFG New Coaches Institutes. The teachers returned to their school filled with enthusiasm and insisted on immediately implementing CFG strategies, which would change the nature of their staff meetings:

Norms & Roles
The first steps involved developing agreed-upon meeting norms and rotating the roles of meeting facilitator and timekeeper. At first glance, these changes seem very small, but their impact was profound. As a result of establishing norms for staff meetings, people started talking to one another differently. Teachers now had the opportunity to speak without interruption, and they refrained from using judgmental language. These changes allowed staff members, for the first time, to voice issues about how they worked together – without naming names.

Since then, the staff reviews and rewrites their meeting norms at the beginning of every year. Students, too, develop group norms in each classroom. Developing, renewing, and following norms have become a positive way to work on (and work out) issues and conflicts that arise when people work closely together.

Connections
Today, every staff meeting at OCS begins with Connections, a routine the staff learned at UCLA SMP’s CFG New Coaches Institute. Connections is a time for teachers to shift their focus from the “busyness” of their classrooms to the “business” of the meeting. During Connections, staff members have the chance to share anything they want others to know (e.g., what they are thinking or how they are feeling) without getting or giving a response. Because the OCS staff is small, they set aside five minutes for Connections, but that is enough time for everyone who has something to say to do so. Some teachers use Connections with their students, too.

Protocols, Continuum
In addition to changing how they conducted school business, the CFG-trained teachers wanted to use protocols to look at student work; however, the staff that had not attended a CFG New Coaches Institute did not understand them. To enhance their understanding, the principal and another group of teachers attended a UCLA SMP CFG New Coaches Institute in March 2006 to see, first hand, what it was all about. When they returned to the school site, they added more CFG tools to their staff meetings, including the Continuum exercise, which they used to find out where people “stood” on an issue before making an important decision. They also used the Success Protocol in triads to learn from one another’s classroom triumphs and to validate their own good work.

When a big, difficult-to-discuss issue came up, the staff tried out a protocol called Peeling the Onion, hoping to get all perspectives on the table and get to the root of the problem:

The teachers were concerned that the assistants were playing with the children too much and, therefore, not supervising them enough. Through the use of the protocol, the assistants were able to explain that, by engaging in play with the students, they were helping sustain the organized play for longer periods of time. They had made this decision with considerable thought and concern for the children. The protocol conversation led to a concrete win-win solution: the assistants were issued walkie-talkies so that they could keep playing with the children but also alert one another if a child got hurt or a fight was brewing.

Using a protocol in this case accomplished more than just solving a problem. It helped improve relationships.

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