Remember Marcus Welby, M.D., and Perry Mason from 1960s television? They were Lone Rangers, like Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver” fame, but unlike Escalante’s contemporaries, they’re long gone. Today people in law, medicine, and business rarely work alone—either on TV or in real life. Today, people work in teams at all levels of organizations, because teams can take on challenges and find new solutions far more effectively than can individuals, working alone. Even solo practitioners like psychologists have ongoing clinical supervision, seminars for peer review of cases. Nearly every profession has reinvented itself to create forms of collaborative problem-solving—except education.

Nearly every profession has reinvented itself to create forms of collaborative problem-solving - except education.How might groups of educators be organized to go beyond mere “learning communities”—a current catchphrase—to work on ongoing problems of practice in schools and districts? What might communities of practice look like in education?

There are already some examples of teachers’ working together, with varying degrees of effectiveness. “Critical-friends groups” have been used by schools for the past decade as a means of organizing volunteer teachers to discuss their work. However, these groups often do not go beyond looking at student work to analyze the “teacher work” that may get better or worse results. For critical-friends groups to be more effective, they need to be data-driven. I was recently in a middle school where there were two earth-science teachers who had the same grouping of students, but one had managed a 92 percent pass rate on the state test with her students, while just 49 percent of the other teacher’s students had passed the test. Only the principal knew this, and he couldn’t tell me why the two teachers had gotten such different results. We need to disaggregate data by teacher, not to expose those who may be getting poor results, but to identify and learn from those teachers who are getting results far above average with comparable groups of students.

Perhaps the most well-developed model of teacher collaboration to improve practice is the “lesson study” process, described by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert in The Teaching Gap. Used in Japan as a primary means of professional development, lesson-study groups are organized by grade level or subject-content area. These teams meet regularly to discuss the learning challenges of their students and to collaboratively develop lessons that more effectively meet their students’ needs. Teachers take turns teaching these model lessons and critiquing one another’s work until they feel the lessons are polished enough to share with colleagues. Stigler and Hiebert believe the lesson-study process goes a long way toward explaining why the level of instruction in most Japanese classrooms appears consistently higher than that of other countries.

Much less attention has been given to the challenge of how to organize groups of principals and central-office leaders to learn from one another. West Clermont, Ohio, a school district with which my colleagues at the Change Leadership Group and I have worked for the past five years, now uses principals’ meetings regularly to look at videotapes of teaching and talk about what is effective instruction. We also use school walk-throughs as a means to “calibrate” principals’ and central-office supervisors’ perceptions of teachers’ effectiveness. The San Diego school district uses school walk-throughs for the same purpose and has even constructed a special classroom with one-way mirrors to facilitate principals’ discussion of “live” teaching. And in a recent meeting of 11 Washington state district teams, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we spent part of a morning looking at a videotape of a Bellingham, Wash., 9th grade teacher’s class and then watched a live and unrehearsed coaching session with that teacher.

Transforming education from a craft to a profession is the greatest challenge school and district leaders face.We have found in our work with Gates Foundation district grantees that regular use of a common teaching tool in law, medicine, and business—the case-study method—is invaluable for administrators’ learning. Groups of principals can be encouraged to present real case studies of teachers they are supervising, and even to role-play supervision conferences in meetings. Principals should have opportunities for colleagues to read and critique one another’s drafts of their schools’ annual improvement plans. Assistant superintendents and other central-office supervisors can also present real case studies of principals and schools with whom they are working. Finally, the recent work of the Connecticut Center for School Change suggests that superintendents also benefit from being in ongoing communities of practice where they conduct school walk-throughs together and discuss their work as instructional leaders with peers.

Unlike critical-friends groups and Wenger’s communities of practice, however, this new organization of work ultimately cannot be left only to those who volunteer; it must become the way we all do our work in schools and districts. Superintendent John Deasy’s work in Santa Monica, Calif., suggests a strategy for such a transition. He recently gave teachers in his small high schools additional planning time, but only on the condition that they form triads to visit each other’s classes to give and receive feedback. School and district administrators need to think creatively about a variety of incentives for participation in communities of practice that can, over time, become part of the culture of accountability and how work gets done. A first step is for leaders to model this approach to learning and problem-solving in all their meetings.

Transforming education from a craft to a profession is the greatest challenge school and district leaders face. Above all, “professionalizing” education means creating ongoing opportunities for discussion of problems of practice at every level in the organization. It is only through such discussion that we can collaboratively create new knowledge about how to continuously improve learning, teaching, and leadership.

To read article as originally published in Education Week Magazine on October 27, 2004 click here