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Having “Another Set of Eyeballs”:
Critical Friends Groups

Fourth-year science teacher Elisa Winger was stumped. She couldn’t figure out why some of her students were doing great lab work in class but not making sense of these same experiments in their laboratory books. So, she brought the books to her critical friends group at Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon.

Critical friends groups (or CFGs for short) are cross-curricular groups of teachers that meet once a month, focusing laserlike on student achievement through teaching practice. According to the Coalition for Essential Schools, “After a solid grounding in group process skills, [CFG] members focus on designing learning goals for students which can be stated specifically enough that others can observe them in operation. They work out strategies to move students toward these goals and collect evidence on how those strategies are working out. In a structured setting of mutual support and honest critical feedback from trusted peers, they then work to adapt and revise their goals and strategies.”

Winger’s six critical friends colleagues include a fellow science instructor as well as English, art, Spanish, and family living teachers. Together, they examined the lab books and listened to Winger describe her quandary. And together, the group came up with a list of suggestions to help Winger improve her students’ work: lower the reading level in some areas; use more pictures; and help students write a good, strong hypothesis.

As Winger says, she realized then that she had to be “more of a writing and artwork teacher” to reach and teach her science students. “Critical friends provides another set of eyeballs to look at the work,” says Winger.

That’s important in a school where both reading and math test scores are roughly half the state average. Roosevelt High School is small—just 700 students—but it’s ethnically diverse and two-thirds of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Winger’s dilemma taught English teacher and critical friends coach Dianne Leahy something new about the auditory skills of some of the struggling students Leahy shares with Winger. Leahy says, “I was able to reach one ELL student in particular. Without this collaboration, he would have fallen through the cracks.”

“Critical friends addresses this problem of teaching practice by focusing on student achievement in ways workshops can’t,” says Kim Feicke, director of Small Schools Northwest, a resource for public schools and districts engaged in school redesign and whole school improvement. Workshops are rarely specific enough to the school, teachers, or students. CFGs are ongoing and reflective. Feicke also points out that CFGs work particularly well for beginning teachers. “New teachers can feel left alone without feedback to build their practice. Multiple minds work better than one mind.”

CFGs were started as part of the National School Reform Faculty, a program initiated by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Studies by National School Reform researchers indicate that CFG teachers focus more on what their students actually learn than on the curriculum they teach. And CFG teachers tend to expect more from their students. In Washington and Oregon, CFGs seem to be gaining traction: Today there are more than 1,500 trained CFG coaches in Washington and almost 500 in Oregon, with a handful in Montana and Alaska.

At Roosevelt, participation in CFGs is voluntary and roughly half the teachers are involved. Coach Leahy finds it doesn’t work well if teachers are forced to participate, because critical friends involves “deep personal work.”