A Tribute to Stevenson High School

I umpire tennis. A player friend of mine got me interested in it last year.

I was in Chicago this weekend umpiring a youth tournament and, lo and behold, you’ll never guess what high school was close to the tournament site.

Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois.

For those of you not familiar with Stevenson High School, if there was a Mount Rushmore of historical education sites that have made an impact on how we approach learning in this country, this Chicago suburb campus would be on it.

Stevenson High School was the place Rick DuFour began applying professional learning community strategies, first as the school’s principal and then as the school district’s superintendent.

Professional learning community practices are still around today, but sadly DuFour died of cancer some years back.

Basically, professional learning communities believe that there are three (or four) questions that need to be answered for every young learner inside a school:

What do we want the learner to learn?

How do we know that the learner learned it?

What do we do when the learner hasn’t learned it?

And what do we do when the learner has learned it?

Although professional learning community practice had been around years before Stevenson High School started modeling the strategy inside a public school, it was DuFour that perfected its practice and then took it nationwide as the pied piper of focusing on the four questions above.

I remember I was a young middle school principal when I first met DuFour. After a short 45-minute session at a national conference, I was hooked on DuFour’s professional learning community approach, and became a lifelong learner of anything the Oracle of Lincolnshire taught. There were others like me. Lots of them.

The reason professional learning communities made so much sense to so many of us practitioners back in the 1990’s was that we had so much invested in human capital when it came to a school budget. In fact, still today, almost 90% of a school’s budget is tied to teachers and staff. Even if you found a silver bullet in the form of some program that would fix reading and problem-solving challenges inside your school, you wouldn’t have enough money to afford that program given the amount of staffing the school had already invested in.

I remember the few times I visited Stevenson. I worked in a very diverse, urban school district, so spending time on the Stevenson campus was different in that DuFour’s school was majority white and middle to upper middle class. That turned a lot of school leaders off. They were unable to transfer what they saw at Stevenson into their own campus’s change strategy. But for me and my staff, we were able to apply the four questions, and other strategies connected with the Stevenson story, to make a big difference on how we approached expectations, challenges, and outcomes when it came to our young learners’ education.

The middle school was an easier place to implement DuFour’s ideas. The high school I opened as the founding principal was a tougher road to hoe. You see high schools are filled more teachers who see themselves as independent contractors than middle schools. And our high school was much bigger than the middle school, so it was more challenging to monitor behaviors associated with professional learning communities.

But at the high school, we were fairly successful at implementing professional learning community strategies, until it came to the alignment of grading practices. That experience almost crashed and burned all of our efforts trying to build a learning community for our kids and our adults.

Regarding Stevenson’s diversity challenges, there were other schools and school districts, more diverse that DuFour’s school, that demonstrated authentic professional learning community behaviors, and some still do.

Today’s challenge for professional learning communities is to make the leap from the school campus to the out of school learning world. The four questions are still good ones. Other Stevenson creations, like response to intervention, when young learners are struggling, are still learning practices. There’s no reason why professional learning communities can’t be employed for learners who choose not to attend places called schools. In fact, many of the professional learning community practices offered up by Rick DuFour can be the basis for a very strong individualized, personalized learning plan for each young learner.

Next time you are wandering around the northwest suburbs of Chicago, look up Stevenson High School. Realize that what was created and introduced there has made a difference in millions of young learner’s lives.

Til tomorrow. SVB