Since our district is at its nascent stage of the process, I used Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) to help guide me.
Here are the main takeaways from this book that helped me understand more about PLCs:
1. The PLC is not a program, it is a mindset. It's an on-going and continuous process that has a profound impact on the culture of the school. You know your PLC is in trouble when teachers think its a mandate, not a mindset. Everyone needs to be all hands on deck.
2. Understand the Professional, Learning, and Community in PLC.
"Professional"- implies that the work of professionals is rooted in best practice.
"Learning"- the highest levels of learning for all students is significantly impacted by the quality of adult learning. Teachers have a moral imperative to keep learning.
"Community"- that collaborative teams are a must for ensuring the highest levels of learning.
3. Interdependence is a keyword. Teachers cannot work in isolation or independently, nor should teachers be depending on other teachers to do all the work. In order for everyone to take ownership of the process, promote the concept of teacher leaders working interdependently and collaboratively.
3. The team is not a PLC. The PLC is the school community and the team is the engine that drives that improvement. Whose driving? Teacher Leaders! This concept is huge for me.
Teacher Leaders are instrumental in facilitating meetings, not Administrators. As a balance, having an Instructional Coach to help guide you is imperative. I benefited from the guidance of having many planning and feedback sessions from both my phenomenal Instructional Coaches to make sure the PLC was on track.
4. Begin with the "Why?" to establish the mission. A lot of times teachers confuse this with the "how?"
The team needs to start with a shared fundamental purpose for the PLC and then only after that can they collectively establish the vision (the What?) and the values (the How?) to meet the goal.
They are known as the four pillars:
5. Norms are necessary as well as a protocol when conflict arises. Luckily, we have not had any Fight Club scenes and hopefully, it never gets to that point.
6. Ground your work on four questions to drive collective inquiry and action research: Learning By Doing (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) has them listed as:
- What is it that we want our students to know and be able to do?
- How will we know if each student has learned it?
- How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
- How will we extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?
The above should be the go-to questions for teachers. The PLC leaves teachers inherently vulnerable when sharing their work, so it helps to keep the focus on student learning and not the mentality of "why weren't students taught this last year." Keep the entire process as positive as possible.
There are so many things that are inextricably linked that its hard to give a silver bullet answer to what makes a PLC work. The process is messy and you have to give yourself permission to hit the reset button.
Also, I firmly believe in giving teachers a manual that helps guide them through the process. I have spent hours learning about this process and in keeping a commonality of understanding for the entire district, a book or handouts is a must.
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Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) is a wonderful resource to have a guide you. Another resource I used was Every School, Every Team, Every Classroom by Robert Eaker & Janel Keating, which is also a title from Solution Tree.
