Critical Friends Groups
SRI believes professional development for educators best takes place in learning
communities, known as critical friends groups (CFG). A critical friends group (CFG) is designed to provide the focus and structure needed to support learning of educators within their school settings. A CFG might help members learn new strategies or implement new curriculum or their learning might be focused on improving practice by receiving feedback on lesson plans, aligning curriculum, or developing common assessments. However, at their best and most transformational, critical friends groups offer a forum in which members challenge deep-seated assumptions about teaching and learning, gain different perspectives about their students, surface troubling issues of equity in schools, and take up questions connected to the purpose of school. Learning within a CFG can help participants question how they know what they know, be emotionally open to exposing fundamental assumptions, and surface ideas that they have uncritically accepted in the past.
A CFG builds the learning capacity of the group by engaging members in significant work in an environment that supports risk taking. To make it more likely that learning in CFG will build the group’s capacity for transformational learning, several key elements are essential.
- Groups are voluntary and sustained. A critical friends group is made up of a group of six to ten educators who meet regularly, perhaps every four to six weeks, over a sustained period of time. Membership is often voluntary. Voluntary participation helps to increase the likelihood that the members are committed to taking on risky and challenging work and staying engaged over time. Similarly, CFGs continue to work together beyond the completion of a particular time cycle such as a semester or school year.
- A skilled and experienced facilitator or coach supports the group. The coach, who frequently is a member of the group who has participated in professional development to develop the skills, strategies, knowledge, and dispositions to facilitate the group’s learning.
- Groups use protocols to build their capacity for learning. The disciplined use of protocols or agreed upon processes and structures helps the CFG build its capacity for learning. Protocols help sustain a steadfast focus on teaching and learning. And, they offer the structure that allows a group to deprivatize their practice and explore the most difficult and challenging issues of insuring that students experience educational excellence.
Facilitative Leadership
The School Reform Initiative understands that schools that are reflective, collaborative, relentlessly focused on issues of teaching and learning, and able to regularly share and get feedback about their practice are schools that can accomplish great things for their students. A large body of research supports this idea, but that very same body of research also suggests that schools are not always such places. Facilitative leadership builds reflective, collaborative, learning focused schools. Facilitative leaders understand how adults learn, have a large repertoire of strategies and tools to support that learning, and are comfortable both posing challenging questions and managing the discomfort that these question surface. Facilitative leaders can be principals, department heads, coaches, or teacher leaders; however, facilitative leadership is the capacity to promote participation, ensure equity and build trust as adults learn together to improve their practice for the benefit of each student in their school.