A bold experiment in collaboration between educators and administrators has taken place in the Northampton public schools. It began in the summer of 2014, when Superintendent John Provost and I were both new to our positions.
We had rich and wide-ranging conversations about the many ways in which public education has changed in the 21st century, from the increased number of state and federal requirements for districts and teachers, to the competitive environment fostered by the creation of charter schools and the expansion of school choice.
The superintendent and I recognized the benefits of working together to continuously improve our public schools. We agreed on three important principles:
– Educators and administrators have a shared goal of creating the best possible conditions for teaching and for learning.
– Changes to educational policies and practices, if they are to have an impact on students, must be implemented by teachers at the classroom level.
– The teachers’ contract, because it outlines the professional life of teachers, is one of the most important educational policy documents in the district.
These agreements led us to develop collaborative initiatives focused on teaching and learning, in the form of joint labor-management working groups.
We began with the Professional Development Committee, because there was already language in the teachers’ contract establishing a collaborative approach. However, the committee had never been formed, which meant that professional development was typically designed by district leaders with limited teacher input.
The superintendent and I took the steps to implement what the contract called for. Northampton administrators and teachers have worked together to shift professional development from outside providers to district educators who are experts in their own right and can offer training that meets the needs of our teaching staff.
Almost 30 pages of the Northampton teachers’ contract are devoted to extensive new regulations for educator evaluation adopted by the state in June 2011. The law also provided funds to implement the new evaluation system, which a team of union representatives and administrators had done in Northampton.
But the superintendent and I were interested in moving our district from simple compliance with the regulations to one where evaluations are a useful tool for professional growth, and where educators understand the federal and state policy decisions underpinning the evaluation system.
We worked with the newly expanded Educator Evaluation Committee to develop communication tools throughout the year that were both districtwide and school-based, and were awarded a grant for teachers to pilot a dynamic student feedback tool.
The opportunities in Northampton for children’s summer learning have changed over the years, and so has families’ access to them. The superintendent and I believed that an enriching summer program would both benefit our students and attract families to the Northampton public schools.
We convened a joint labor-management Summer Learning Committee that took a year to thoughtfully design a program to ease the transition into school for students at two critical stages of their learning: kindergarten and sixth grade. Families can look to enroll their children in this program early next year.
Our most ambitious partnership endeavor began last summer, with the formation of the District Improvement Plan Implementation Committee.
While its name is admittedly snooze-inducing, the work of the committee was critically important. Teams of building administrators and association representatives from all six district schools met for a half-day every month to work on the goals and objectives of the District Improvement Plan, determining together how to achieve them at the building and classroom level.
Our plan was not a document that sat on a shelf, referred to once a year when educators needed to articulate how their professional growth goals were connected to the district’s goals. The plan saw action every month, when the administrator-association representative teams in each school provided information to or solicited feedback from teachers about it.
One example: several plan goals identify the importance of using data to inform instruction. The DIP Implementation Committee discussed the value of a data dashboard to provide teachers with current information about their students, saw a prototype of one, and returned in teams to their buildings to hear from teachers about what student data they would find helpful on the dashboard. These data dashboards will be fully operational in the fall.
The structure of all of our committees was fundamentally collaborative: half of the members were association representatives and half were district administrators. I appointed the association representatives, and the superintendent appointed the administrators. Because the teachers weren’t chosen by administrators, they had the independence to freely share their ideas and professional opinions, and were more inclined to interact with the administrators as partners rather than supervisors.
And the administrators welcomed the chance to engage in thoughtful discussions with teachers who offered important perspectives on educational challenges. Working in partnership to make meaningful improvements in the Northampton public schools involved a willingness to take risks.
The superintendent and I sought to redefine the traditionally adversarial roles prescribed for us, and asked our committee members to reimagine what educational leadership looked like. It was exciting to co-lead this experiment, which was supported by a three-year grant from the Massachusetts Teachers Association. It might just transform local public education.
Julie Spencer-Robinson is president of the Northampton Association of School Employees.