MyNotes: Best Practices for Professional Learning Communities
Source: Print Article: Best Practices for Professional Learning Communities
MyNotes:
-
A PLC represents the institutionalization of a focus on continuous improvement in staff performance as well as student learning.
-
PLCs entail whole-staff involvement in a process of intensive reflection upon instructional practices and desired student benchmarks, as well as monitoring of outcomes to ensure success.
-
PLCs enable teachers to continually learn from one another via shared visioning and planning, as well as in-depth critical examination of what does and doesn’t work to enhance student achievement.
-
The focus of PLCs is ongoing “job-embedded learning,” emphasizing teacher leadership, active involvement and deep commitment to school improvement methods.
-
The process of intensive reflection and job-embedded includes six steps:
-
Study: Teachers work in collaborative planning teams to examine critically and discuss standards-based learning expectations for students.
-
Select: These teams select evidence-based instructional strategies for meeting the standards.
-
Plan: Teams develop a common lesson plan incorporating the selected strategies and identify the type of student work each teacher will use to demonstrate learning.
-
Implement: Teachers implement the planned lesson, record successes and challenges, and gather evidence of student learning.
-
Analyze: Teams review student work and discuss student understanding of the standards.
-
Adjust: Teams reflect on the implications of the analysis of student work and discuss potential modifications to instructional strategies.
-
The PLC approach:
-
takes 3 to 6 years to fully incorporate into a school’s routine practices.
-
Staff need to have time to meet during the work day throughout the year.
-
Staff need to focus efforts on essential questions about learning, generate products such as lists of key student outcomes, methods of assessment and strategies for meeting goals
-
PLCs work best when schools have:
-
A culture that supports collaboration [so how do you build that?]
-
Articulate a clear, specific, and compelling vision
-
Match tasks and role to staff members who are personally invested in them
-
Expand leadership roles
-
Make coordination easy through online tools
-
Ensure that the intended curriculum matches what teachers are actually teaching.
-
Educators must stop making excuses for failing to collaborate.
-
The ability to take an objective/macro view of school efforts; [whose view?]
-
External facilitator has to assess their way of operating as it relates to school improvement goals.
-
Helps bring school’s fragmented efforts into alignment at beginning of process.
-
Recognize leadership qualities of the principal and extent to which leadership is dispersed in the school and provide appropriate support
-
Shared beliefs and behaviors [whose beliefs?]
-
Failure, mistakes and uncertainty in work are openly shared and discussed
-
Colleagues agree on broad educational values, but accept disagreements that foster new dialogue
-
Administrators support “dispersed leadership” where teachers develop the confidence to select and adapt strategies that drive improvement
-
Relentless commitment to improvement
-
A view of improvement as a team effort for which everyone is responsible
-
An acknowledgement that teacher behavior is key to enhancing student learning;
-
A belief that knowledge is constructed from day-to-day experiences, along with the ability to share those experiences; and
-
A value placed on ongoing learning (continuous learning)
One Sentence Summary: The focus of PLCs is ongoing “job-embedded learning,” emphasizing teacher leadership, active involvement and deep commitment to school improvement methods dependent on schools that embrace a culture that supports collaboration, an objective view of their efforts, and share beliefs/behaviors.
Quotes:
-
The focus of PLCs is ongoing “job-embedded learning,” rather than one-shot professional development sessions facilitated by outsiders, who have little accountability regarding whether staff learning is successfully applied.
-
PLCs emphasize teacher leadership, along with their active involvement and deep commitment to school improvement efforts.
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure