New on Principal Center Radio: Brig Leane on How To Create a PLC Dashboard

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Announcer (00:28):

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here’s your host, director of The Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder.

Justin Baeder (00:38):

Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Brig Leane. Brig is an education consultant and former principal of Fruita Middle School in Colorado, which under his leadership became a national model professional learning community, a veteran of the United States Coast Guard. He began his second career as an educator in 2000 and has served as a principal, assistant principal and teacher at the middle and high school levels in inner city, suburban and rural schools. Break has also been an adjunct professor at Colorado Christian University and his work has been published in Phi Delta Kappan, principal Leadership and elsewhere. And he’s the author of Singleton’s in A PLC at work, as well as the new book, the PLC Dashboard, implementing, leading and Sustaining Your Professional Learning Community at Work, which we’re here to talk about today and now our

Announcer (01:27):

Feature presentation.

Justin Baeder (01:29):

Brig, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

Brig Leane (01:30):

Justin, I’m honored to be with you today. Thanks for the invitation.

Justin Baeder (01:34):

Well, I’m excited to talk about your work helping schools implement PLCs. And I understand this started with your school when you were a middle school principal. What was it initially that got you going with PLCs? Why did you pursue and go so far with the PLC model as a principal?

Brig Leane (01:54):

To be perfectly honest, I started, I had many false starts in the PLC process meetings that when I was in the classroom as a math teacher in high school meetings that were called PLCs, but they really weren’t doing anything like was in the books, but I didn’t know it at the time, so I just thought PLCs didn’t mean much. Then I got asked to go to a middle school that was struggling to be a math teacher there, and I went and my partner there was a guy named George. He was an out of retirement math teacher they could find for this position. And at the time I was getting my master’s degree in ED leadership and I read my first DE four PLC book and I thought, wow, what I’m reading in this book is nothing like what I’m hearing people call PLCs. So I went back and said to this out of retirement teacher who was also teaching eighth grade math, I said, George, would you be willing to try this thing called A PLC with me?

(02:53):

And to my surprise, he said yes. And we just did the simple determine an essential skill, have a short way to assess whether kids could do it or not. Brig Leane: “And we did that 14 times over the course of the school year, just 14 skills that we thought kids should learn. And George went back into retirement at the end of the year and I got a job and assistant principal and I didn’t think anything of it until the state test results came out. And we were the highest growth of any level third through 10th grade in our 22,000 student school district by far. And it was really the simplicity of just doing the PLC process of determining something they had to know, having a way to assess where they can do it and intervening for those when they can’t.” And I became kind of a believer at that point. And since then I’ve been an assistant principal and most recently I was the principal of Fruit of Middle School, as you mentioned. And now I work with principals and teacher leaders all over the country, try and implement the PLC process in a doable way. And so that’s my background on PLC work and where I developed just the experience to know it works

Justin Baeder (04:10):

And what a dramatic and visible impact in your own practice. And how many years had you been teaching at the point when you started doing this with your colleague?

Brig Leane (04:18):

I’d been teaching about seven or eight years, and I felt like I was a very good teacher, but I really didn’t know how to collaborate in a meaningful way. And I certainly had no idea how to implement the PLC process in a doable way either.

Justin Baeder (04:32):

Right. I agree completely that it’s one of those things that everybody has heard of and everybody thinks they’re doing, but if you look at what people are doing, it’s all over the place and people often are not talking about the same thing at all. And I imagine a lot of your work is involved with helping schools get that right and get those key elements in place.

Brig Leane (04:48):

It is, and I end up working with a lot of principals and teacher leaders who they’ve maybe tried the PLC process in the past, but it just didn’t take or it didn’t go. And yet we keep coming back to the research on collective teacher efficacy and we keep coming back to the research on a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And Justin, I’ve just found that many people just don’t know where to start in the PLC process. Maybe they’ve tried it several times in the past and they didn’t quite get the results they want, but we keep coming back with the research that says Collective teacher efficacy makes a big difference. A guaranteed and viable curriculum makes a big difference. And the PLC process does help people make those things happen in the classrooms, but you got to know how to begin that. And that’s where a lot of people, I think struggle is they just don’t know where to start. They don’t know how to do it.

Justin Baeder (05:42):

I know there’ve been many, many books written on how to do PLCs. Right. And your book is called the PLC dashboard. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the dashboard idea itself. Take us into where that dashboard came from and what that looks like today.

Brig Leane (05:56):

Well, the started, because what really I think is happening is there are many principals who just through the natural things that take place in a school, they don’t end up with much time to devote to the PLC process, not because they don’t want to, but just because of the urgent issues that come up in a principal’s life. And the dashboard is a simple way, it’s really low tech. It even could be on a bulletin board in a team meeting room, it could be on a Google sheet. But what it really does is it just is a way to tabulate which teams and which singletons have gotten the expected PLC products done. And so the simplicity of the dashboard, it starts with what I call the seven-step learning cycle. And the seven-step learning cycle just puts a little more meat on the bones from the four critical questions that do four and his colleagues came out with initially.

(06:50):

And so this seven-step learning cycle is captured in a one page template. The one page template is very similar for a singleton as it is for a team. And that one page template is captured on the PLC dashboard. It could be with like a tiger paw if you’re the Tigers, it could be with a tiger paw next to the team name like the Algebra one team or the third grade team or that singleton art teacher, Singleton band teacher. And what it allows for is a principal who’s swamped. I know when I was a principal, we used to have to worry about getting subs on Fridays. That was a real challenge. Now it’s a challenge. You get a sub any day. There used to be hiring pools of educators you could hire. Now we’re hiring pretty much the only applicant at times. And so I think all those things are taking up a lot more administrative time on a day-to-day basis where the principal might want to spend more time on the PLC process. They just can’t. And so with the dashboard, they could say, well, it looks like the Algebra one team or the second grade team is not getting done what’s expected. That’d be an indication to an administrator to say, I better join that team. And so that’s what the dashboard is about. It’s about a way to sustain this process, recognizing that principal don’t have a lot of capacity, they’re not looking for things to take up their time. Those things are coming and finding them.

Justin Baeder (08:22):

So Brig, one issue that I’m hearing is that sometimes PLCs are not getting the traction they need to, not because of some esoteric difficulty, but because the basic steps aren’t actually taking place. Is that right?

Brig Leane (08:36):

That’s right. In my experience, the PLC process educators struggle for three main reasons with the process. The first reason they struggle is they’re not sure. Why are we trying to make a shift from teaching everything to ensuring the learning of the essentials? They’re not sure why we do that with a collaborative partner. They just don’t know why. Maybe they’re more in the more traditional mindset of teach, teach, test, assign the grades and move on. Whereas the PLC process says, let’s start by determining something that we love these kids too much for them not to have learned. So there are some that struggle with why. There are also some that struggle with the second reason they don’t know how they might want to collaborate. They might want kids to learn the essential learnings, but they just don’t know how to do it. And the third reason they struggle is they don’t have the time or the support to do this work that’s expected.

(09:33):

And so those are the three main reasons that I find that educators struggle with the PLC process. And that’s how the book, the PLC dashboard is laid out. It starts with just a refresher of why would we do this collaborative thing? And I start with 10 reasons why my top 10. And if you don’t understand why we’d be doing something like the PLC process, all the other stuff just seems like one more thing to do. But there are plenty of people who do have the reasons to do this process down. Some of my main reasons are new teacher support. Some of my main reasons are to give kids hope, but once they’ve got that, they really do want to know how to do it. And that’s the bulk of the PLC dashboard book is how to do this process in a meaningful way. And then the dashboard itself is just a way to see who needs that more time and support. So that’s kind of how the book’s laid out.

Justin Baeder (10:26):

Well, thinking back to when I was a principal and we did something that we called PLCs, and what I would always try to do is circulate among the meetings. Most of the meetings happened at the same time. All of them pretty much met simultaneously with maybe a few exceptions due to individual schedules. But I would try to get around to all the meetings and I never would be able to, even in a fairly modest sized elementary school, there were just too many teams. We had at least six or seven teams meeting at once, and I just couldn’t be in all those places at once and I didn’t really feel like I needed to. But it sounds like one type of information that you have when you’re using a PLC dashboard, this is who needs additional support, who as you said, is not really getting it done. Is that right?

Brig Leane (11:08):

That’s absolutely it. And really you could use the PLC dashboard as a way to humiliate or a way it gives you a lot of insight, that’s for sure. But what I coach principals to do is just to say, you know what? This is just your indication that that teacher or that team is unsupported. And I’ll give you an example. I was working with a principal in Arkansas just last year, and I remember I said it was an elementary principal and I said, well, how are your teams doing with the collaboration and the PLC process? And he said, oh, they’re doing great. And I said, well, how do you know? And he said, well, I just go and look in their Google Drive. And I said, oh, fantastic. Would you be willing to give me access so I could look too? And he said, sure. He gave me access.

(11:51):

And I went into the kindergarten teams folder and there were like 26 folders in there, all of ‘em with different PLC names. And I thought, oh, okay. And I looked through some of the folders and couldn’t find the thing that made sense. And then I went into the first grade team and it was like 19 folders there with different names. And I quickly realized this is too much to look at. So I went back to that principal and I said, how do you really know how the teams are doing? And he got a smile on his face and he said, I’ve got my hunches. I said, that’s kind of what I thought. And so he and I developed the PLC dashboard on his campus, which is really just a listing of teams and singletons. It’s a hyperlink if you’re using a Google sheet to the actual one page template that teams and Singletons ought to be going through.

(12:40):

And every time I show that one page template to teams and singletons, they all are like, yeah, these are great memory joggers. These are great prompts that are on this. And when I started this, Justin, the template used to be four pages, but over the last decade, educators have said, Hey Brig, could you shorten it here and could you make this more clear? And now it’s down to just a concise one page template that really feels doable to educators and can give that principle who wants to know who’s doing okay, the insights they need in seconds. I mean, you can look at the dashboard and know if you’re doing it right, you can know in seconds which team needs more support.

Justin Baeder (13:22):

And I think what’s really helpful there is the specificity, because there can be obvious problems if somebody is missing the meetings or if the team is not meeting at all. But often it’s easy to overlook it if a team is meeting and they seem to be making good use of their time, they’re having a nice conversation, it seems productive. They took notes. And I think that was the accountability that was in place in my school was teachers had to take notes during their PLC and they’d get saved somewhere. So I could look at their notes. But as I look at the seven step learning cycle in your book, the dashboard, I’m realizing that a lot of those details that probably make all the difference were probably not in place.

Brig Leane (13:59):

What you’re saying just cracks me up and I get that, could I have a great agenda? Could I take great minutes? And really no kid is growing and no teacher’s learning new instructional strategies. Those things could happen. And I’m with you. It’s kind of like I once had a principal require lesson plans from every teacher to be printed and put in his office by Monday morning. I wanted to write on my lesson plans, if you read this, please fire me because I knew he never read ‘em. And that’s not to say that you or other people don’t read the agendas and minutes, but I just think you could have a great agenda like you said, and still maybe not meet the two purposes of the PLC process, which are one that kids are learning, the things the teams say are essential, and two, that the professionals are learning in community, those new instructional strategies. So you’re absolutely right.

Justin Baeder (14:53):

Well, and as I look at the first step in the learning cycle, determine the essential learning target, I think that was probably not something we asked people to do on a consistent basis is actually articulate that those essential learning targets set smart goals and go through the rest of the cycle there. Talk to us a little bit about that cycle and how long it takes and how big grain size wise those essential learning targets can, should be ideally in order for this process to work. You have a lot in the book about filling in the graph of how many students have achieved mastery, but we also have very different ideas circulating in the profession about how much time those learning targets should take up. Do I set a new one every day? Is this for the whole quarter? What’s kind of the interval that we’re talking about here?

Brig Leane (15:37):

Well, what another great question because what I coach the teams that I work with to do, first off, I say let’s start kind of like if we were to learn how to play football, we wouldn’t get out all the yard markers and hire referees and put helmets on. We’d just throw a ball back and forth. That’s where we’d start. And when I work with teams, that’s where I start with them. I say, alright, what’s something in the next three to four weeks in the curriculum you’re teaching or in the standards that you have to make sure you cover? What’s something that you’d be embarrassed if a kid couldn’t do? And usually these teams are like, well, yeah, I’d be embarrassed if they didn’t know their letter sounds or if they couldn’t find the surface area of a rectangular prism or graph a line or cyto source, they know what those are and they’re usually pretty good at that.

(16:29):

And so that’s where I tend to just throw the ball back and forth. I say, all right, in roughly a month, what is that skill? And it comes from a learning target, it should come from a learning target, a standard that’s been broken up into those learning targets. But at the very beginning I give teachers a little bit of leeway there. I really say you got to pick something that comes from your heart. I think one thing we struggle with is just getting good at the PLC process at first. And so you ask, how long would this process take with the average learning target, let’s say there’s three to four learning targets per standard. The average learning target to go through this process when teams can meet roughly an hour a week would be they could get through one essential learning target every three-ish weeks at the beginning.

(17:21):

And I think that’s really doable as you get better at it, maybe you’d go up a little bit more than that. But I really think a real important principle is the Goldilocks principle. Not too many, not too few, but what power it would be if every kid who left Algebra one could do nine or 11 grade level rigorous skills. And if that were the case, that would change things for those kids. I mean, algebra one’s a real gatekeeper to graduation. And I think the same thing’s true for third grade and fourth grade and first grade is that if there were 8, 9, 10 skills learning targets that a team got good at in that first and second year, that would change things because it’d bring a lot of equity, a lot of academic equity where it wouldn’t matter which teacher you were assigned in third grade, you’d come out with those same essential skills or at least have been given a lot of in-class support if you hadn’t learned it. So it’s a good question to kind of say what’s the pace? And I kind of think when you start out, less is more, but the Goldilocks principle applies, which is if you’ve got time to collaborate, let’s make sure it’s filled with the PLC process.

Justin Baeder (18:40):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Brig, that’s helpful and gives us a little bit of flexibility, and I think it’s also helpful to think about what’s done with that learning target. So the next step in the cycle is to set a smart goal and create a common formative assessment. Tell us about that.

Brig Leane (18:55):

Well, that’s where a team, let’s say for instance a kindergarten team that says, by the end of the year kids got to be able to work within 20 or know their numbers one through 20 or zero through 20. The smart goal says, okay, in a three to four week period of time, the teachers on that team are going to set a smart goal for all their kids to be proficient. And the smart goal isn’t shared with the kids, but it’s something that behind the scenes we say, you know what? By October 15th, we’d be thrilled if we can get to 73% of our kids proficient in graphing a line or in knowing their first five numbers. And that’s what a smart goal does is it tends to bring that second big idea of the PLC process into the team, which is collective responsibility. They’re not your kids, Justin and my kids, they’re our kids.

(19:53):

They’re not that teacher’s kids on an IEP and that teacher’s kids that are English language learners. They’re our kids. And so we’d set a smart goal on the grade level skill for a three to four week-ish period of time that would include in class tier one intervention. Then that creating the common formative assessment, which is also done before we teach the unit, that’s that quiz like way to assess whether kids can do that skill or not. It could be a pencil and paper assessment, more like a quiz than it would be an end of chapter test. It could be a observation, it could be a presentation, it could be a project, it could come in a variety of sources, but it would be one of those things with a team together decided, yeah, this would be evidence that a kiddo can do that work proficiently. So that that second step is after you’ve determined that essential learning is,

Justin Baeder (20:49):

I’m thinking of one team that I worked with in my school that had especially strong writing instruction, and one of the things that they would do is common formative writing assessments. They would on a pretty consistent basis throughout the year, I think it was probably not as frequently as you’re talking about, I think it was three times a year, they would have a prompt, they would have a rubric and they would cover up the names with sticky notes. They would mix up all the papers and score them with the rubric and compare scores. I think two people would score every paper, and if the scores were different, they would confer and figure out what score to end up with, and then they would take the sticky notes off, look at the names, record the scores, and then figure out what to do. Talk to us a little bit about the assessment and the scoring and the interrater reliability piece because I think that kind of thing is pretty rare. My sense is that most people are scoring their own assessments. They’re not really talking with their colleagues about scoring or assessing collaboratively. What are your thoughts on that?

Brig Leane (21:46):

Well, that’s step four in the seven step cycle, and that is, you’re absolutely right. It is a critical step to take. And the reason is because there’s so much professional development in it. Remember that second purpose of the PLC process is that the teachers are learning as a result of this process. And you put a group of teachers together who, like you just mentioned, when we establish integrated reliability by grading student work where I put my grade on it and you put your grade on it, maybe you gave the final writing a four because you said they had great ideas and content and I gave it a two because they didn’t capitalize and punctuate Well, who’s right? That is a fantastic discussion. And so the same thing applies in math. I mean, I’ll get math teachers, I’ve put ungraded student work from a common formative assessment on the doc camera with math teachers, and one of them gives it full credit because the kid got the answer and the other one gives ‘em no credit why they didn’t show work and who’s right.

(22:49):

What a fantastic professional discussion. And what I find is that when you do that with three or four pieces of ungraded student work on a team, you quickly do establish inner rate of reliability where we get the feeling, okay, this is what proficiency is. And the real reason that’s powerful in my experience is that you take a new teacher, someone who’s new to our profession, it is pretty darn tough in 2025 to put a grade in the grade book if you’re a new teacher. That especially is a low grade because when I started teaching, parents knew the grades every nine weeks and then they’d maybe be upset at that point. But what happens to a teacher in 2025 when they put a grade in the grade book,

Justin Baeder (23:30):

This book gets a phone call right away.

Brig Leane (23:32):

Yeah, you’re getting that. And I feel like that first year teacher who has a kid who writes IDK or something like that on his paper and is thinking of putting a zero in the grade book that’s going to basically torpedo that grade is going to be under such scrutiny themselves. But what about if that teacher is sitting on a collaborative team, that first year teacher and gets to say, what should I do about this? And they get to hear from those experienced teachers who say, here’s how I’d handle something like this. That’s such a benefit to our profession, and it’s just one of the many benefits of integrated reliability. The other benefit to integrated reliability, you brought it up in writing, which I love, is that when one teacher raises the bar up, if you do that alone and you’re the only one maybe in your department or in your building who’s got the bar high, whether it’s in behaviors or academics or writing, it’s pretty tough to keep it up there. But when you’ve established inner rate of reliability or calibrated your grading with a group of other individuals, and this is especially effective across English and social studies, when you’ve done that, then everybody’s willing to hold the bar high and we feel like we’re in it together and the kids can meet that, but not when it’s the bars down at the baseline level in one class and then the next one it’s high up. It’s not going to have the intended effect.

Justin Baeder (24:56):

Well, and I think if we are honest with ourselves, that is the reality most of the time that people actually do have fairly different expectations for their students. They set the bar in different places, and we find that out when we do this calibration work and we realize, oh, some people are scoring way up here. Some people are scoring way down there, the same piece of work, and that has consequences for how much students learn, right?

Brig Leane (25:20):

That’s right. Along the same lines, one thing that was kind of cracked me up when I was in the middle school as the principal, we were discussing different teams, essential learnings that they decided, and this social studies teacher team in our building had picked an acronym for kids to cite sources using this acronym, and this was for seventh graders. Well, as it turns out, the English team, same grade had a different acronym for citing sources. And you just have to think we all kind of laughed, but I basically just said, guys, I don’t think this is going to take me to decide this. I don’t care which acronym we use, but let’s use the same one. And when we figured out these fewer essential learnings, things like that happen, and I think it’s for the benefit of the students that we serve.

Justin Baeder (26:15):

And that really strikes me as the difference between a meeting where maybe people say what they individually do and kind of cross their arms and look at one another and don’t respond or don’t adjust in order to get on the same page. Don’t align. Don’t calibrate the difference between that and A PLC where there is collective responsibility and a collective commitment to have a high bar and have it consistent across classrooms and score consistently, no matter who’s scoring the paper and figure out if we’re not getting the results we need to in one classroom, what do we need to do differently?

Brig Leane (26:50):

That’s right. And you bring up that next step in the seven step cycle in the dashboard book, which is sharing results. And I always mention to the teams that I work with, I say, we’re not sharing results to judge one another. We’re sharing results to figure out what’s working best. Because one thing I like about one of Marzano’s landmark books, it’s called the Art and Science of Teaching and Teaching is both. And so I can’t be Justin and Justin, you can’t be Brig. But if we both have the target, we want kids to be able to graph a line and we say, we’re going to take three weeks to teach this and then to give the common formative assessment in three weeks. I love it that in the PLC process, you get to go at it your best way and I get to go at it my best way.

(27:32):

But we’re going to give that assessment on the same day and we’re going to share results. And it’s not to judge, but it’s to say, you know what? What’d you do that got those great results? Because if we just share opinions before we have any results, I’d rather go with my opinion. But if you’re using some instructional strategy, maybe you use manipulatives or there was a video link that you gave kids access to and it got really great results. That sure opens my eyes up a lot more to saying, Justin, what’d you do? And that’s one of the things I love about the PLC process. One of my reasons for doing it is embedded professional development because we’re going to do it in this unit. We’re going to do it in the next unit, and we’re going to do it in the next unit, and we’re going to keep doing that. And that job embedded ongoing professional development that’s focused really at just getting the best results is a big deal because it not only allows new teachers to pick up some new instructional strategies, it also allows our experienced teachers to share some of the ways that they have taught that they know really work and they get to do it in a way that’s not preachy. It’s just saying, Hey, I got better results. Let me share what I did. And then people are really open to it.

Justin Baeder (28:52):

I mean, it’s hard to argue with the results when we agree in advance on the criteria, but if we each have our own approach and then we are free to assess and evaluate however we want, we’re probably going to just defend whatever our approach was instead of having that commitment to saying, okay, we’re going to do whatever works. So if I don’t have the best results, I’m not going to dig my heels in and say, well, I know that my way is best. I’m going to have to admit, basically I agreed in advance to admit that my way may have not been the best, and if I need to change something, I’m doing, let’s do it. Let’s do whatever works for kids.

Brig Leane (29:30):

And that’s step seven in the seven step cycle is make changes to our instruction. And that’s why in step two, we set that smart goal. We set that smart goal not for your kids individually and my kids individually. We set that smart goal for our kids. And I can’t make that smart goal if you’re not a part of it with me, and you can’t without me. And so really the PLC process binds teachers together in a very reasonable way with the best of intentions, excuse me, with the best of intentions. And that is for the kids to learn this essential and for us to grow as professionals throughout the process. And all this is in my 127 page book, which is the book I wish I would’ve had when I was a principal trying to figure out this PLC process. I wish I’d have known to make sure we knew the why for this and to know how to do it in a meaningful way. And for myself as a busy principal, I wish I’d had a tracking way to do it. That’s a dashboard that can let you know in seconds who needs more support.

Justin Baeder (30:32):

Well, I wonder if we could take just a second to talk about that support because after we have the data from that formative assessment, there’s an opportunity before we move on to the next unit or the next learning target to intervene and to say, okay, not all of our kids are there yet, but we’re not done. We’re going to do something to get them there and take that second attempt or that next attempt. Talk to us a little bit about that action plan for intervention and extension that happens in step six.

Brig Leane (30:59):

Yeah, that one really seems to get some people really confused in the RTI or MTSS pyramid. Tier one is all about knowing those essential learnings and then intervening in class tier two is once we’ve left the unit, because we’re probably not going to get to a hundred percent of kids have learned it, but there comes a point at which we need to leave the unit and go to the next thing when we know which kids still don’t have it and we go onto that next unit, those kids on that list are ready for tier two. But too many people think that a kid who doesn’t at first learn something that a teacher team said was essential, too many educators think that that kid needs to go to an interventionist or something else. Oh no. That first intervention in the seven-step cycle that you’re talking about in my book, that first intervention that’s mentioned there is in class.

(31:56):

In other words, if we gave that formative assessment on a Tuesday by Thursday, give those kids the feedback and say, Hey, you seven for the last 20 minutes of class, you’re with me. And while I’m with the seven kids or 12 kids who couldn’t do it, the other 15 or 18 or however many they are who did get it, should be doing some type of an extension at that point. Maybe they have some choice. I’ve seen some teachers who for the extension group will put maybe three post-it notes on the whiteboard and they’ll tell the kids who are over there doing the extension, you can come ask me three questions, but when you come ask me, bring one of the post-it notes, and when the post-it notes are gone, you’re done asking me questions, which gets some of those extension kids to be asking each other working together to solve some of this.

(32:45):

And that gives the teacher a little bit of breathing room with that intervention group who needs that teacher the most to really help them get that reteaching and maybe even using a different modality. And then I’ve seen teachers call that time win time WIN. It’s what I need time. It’s not punishment time for the kids who didn’t learn it and reward time for the kids who did. It’s win time. I got to grow you all kids. I got to grow the kids that know it, and I got to grow the kids who don’t quite have this one yet. And so that’s really what it is. And sometimes a teacher might do that for 20 minutes right after the common formative assessment, maybe a day or two after. Maybe they’ll do it twice, 20 minutes, two times after it just for that reteaching. But it really is that acknowledgement that when we give kids quick feedback and we intervene on those essential skills more rapidly, not less rapidly, kids win. Kids grow. So it’s not some complex thing. It’s not sending them there. And the other thing I like about it, it’s not saying this, it’s not saying kids, any of you who want extra help come in at lunch or coming after school. Justin, I don’t know your experience, but mine was the kids you really needed to see never came in. So the only time we can guarantee we’ve got those kids is when they’re sitting in our classrooms. And that’s where that tier one intervention takes place.

Justin Baeder (34:14):

And there are a lot of pieces here for teams to get right. But if I’m understanding a lot of the magic of your approach in the PLC dashboard book is making that all visible to principles so that if a team does need support, as you said, that can come to leader’s attention and the team can get that support. Is that the idea?

Brig Leane (34:34):

It is. I certainly encourage guiding Coalitions, which is a teacher leadership and administrator team, to pull up the dashboard at each guiding coalition meeting and let’s just look at it together. What do you observe? What do you see? And it doesn’t take long for everybody who’s on that guiding coalition to know everybody’s paying attention to this for the benefit of the kids we serve. And when that happens, everybody tends to do just fine. I kind of liken it to this. If you and I were playing basketball against one another and we were just having fun shooting some hoops, we’d probably be playing kind of hard or however hard we’d want to. But then if somebody turned the scoreboard on and they were keeping track of Justin’s score and Brigs score, we’d probably play a little bit harder. Just kind of human nature. It’s that thing of something getting monitored. And that’s kind of the idea of the dashboard, which is how do people in the school know what matters to the leaders of the school? It’s those things we monitor. It’s those things we celebrate. And the dashboard gives principals and teacher leaders a great list of things to celebrate and to acknowledge that are going well. And that’s a big part of this process, is letting people know what we care about.

Justin Baeder (35:53):

So the book is the PLC dashboard, implementing, leading and Sustaining Your Professional Learning Community at Work, Brig Leane. If people want to get in touch with you and learn more about working together, where are some of the best places for them to go online?

Brig Leane (36:07):

Well, the best place is my website. It’s at BrigLeane.com, and my last name is not spelled typically, so it’s L-E-A-N-E brigleane.com. I’m also on Instagram at BRIGLeane, and I’m on X at @BrigLeane as well. So those are other places as well.

Justin Baeder (36:25):

Brig, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It’s been a pleasure,

Brig Leane (36:28):

Justin. I’m honored to have any of us spend this time with you, and thanks for what you do for educators.

Announcer (36:34):

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