Establishing a Collaborative Professional Development Team Using Critical Friends

Video Transcription

In this tutorial, we'll discuss establishing a collaborative professional development team using critical friends. We'll begin with the basics of critical friends. And I'll identify for you the distinguishing characteristics of critical friends groups. Finally, I'll share an example that will help you to understand how a critical friends group might come about. Let's get started.

Let's begin with the basics of the idea of critical friends. Establishing critical friends groups can be a best practice in collaborative professional development teams. Many schools are finding that the use of professional learning communities or PLCs and other collaborative professional development models can help to shape the professional development activities across the school or district and can provide the support and feedback that are necessary for teachers to find success in their professional development.

Often what may happen is that a larger PLC may break out into smaller critical friends groups. These critical friends groups are generally more informal and more personal than a larger more formal PLC group. We all know that professional development or growth can really feel like a big burdensome undertaking if we're trying to work through it just all alone, and so establishing collaborative professional development practices including PLCs or critical friends groups can be helpful for us in all stages of the process. Critical friends groups will typically include up to four teachers, and so this nice small personal group is a great forum for reflecting on the professional development process.

A critical friends group can really be thought of as a particular type of professional learning community, and a critical friends group is going to meet for very specific purposes like a PLC does. A critical friends group may meet to identify specific learning goals for students, to reflect on their professional practices, and to examine both student and teacher work in order to monitor progress towards meeting those goals that they've set. This process helps teachers both to provide and to receive that peer-to-peer feedback that is so important in the professional development process, but it also provides a non-evaluative setting which takes some of that pressure off or takes some of the anxiety away so that teachers can focus on improving their instructional practices and working together in this critical friends group towards the collaborative professional development and growth goals.

There are a few distinguishing characteristics of critical friends groups. First, a critical friends group should provide a challenging environment the members of the group should be challenging each other to be continually improving their instructional practices through the process of reflection and then engaging in reflective dialogue. The members of a critical friends group should be comfortable asking each other the hard questions because that's part of being able to openly and honestly reflect on our instructional practices and gauge how we are impacting student learning.

A critical friends group should also be following structured protocol. There should be a set of guidelines in place that helped to promote the meaningful communication and the problem solving process that need to be present and overall just to enhance the learning that is taking place in this group. There are a wide variety of protocols that are available for use in this type of situation. You'll want to select or develop a set of protocols that meet the needs of your group. And often the protocol is going to be facilitated by an instructional coach.

One of the important reasons behind wanting to make sure there is a protocol in place is because we want to avoid the group thinking phenomenon. You'll sometimes find in PLCs or in other groups of people if there's not a set structure and if the members of the group are not truly committed to that approach of challenging one another, then what contends to happen is that instead of having constantly evolving and vibrant conversation, you will have an environment where all of the individuals are just going along with one another not challenging one another and not providing that really rich environment that is going to help everyone to meet their goals.

So let's look at an example of how critical friends groups might come into existence. Let's say there's a professional learning community that has eight members, and this PLC is working towards a goal that involves the implementation of Marzano's high-yield instructional strategies. In order to help everyone have more success in meeting this goal, the PLC might opt to break into two critical friends groups with four members each.

Each of those critical friends groups then can work towards that same PLC goal while being able to provide more personalized support and feedback for that smaller group of members. So remember that the distinguishing characteristics of critical friends groups, the challenging environment and the protocol structures. Each of these smaller critical friends groups then just by the nature of it being a smaller more closely knit group of colleagues is going to be better able to provide that challenging environment for all of the members in the group. And the protocols that are in place can be tailored to a smaller group again facilitating the learning and the success of all of the members of that critical friends group who are working to support each other in making progress towards this group goal. Here's your chance to stop and reflect.

If you are currently a member of a large PLC group, can you think of a few instances where it might have been helpful to break that PLC group into smaller critical friends groups for the purpose of meeting a specific goal? For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the additional resources section that accompanies this video presentation. The additional resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material including a brief description of each resource.

Thanks for joining me today. Have a great day.