1. NJASA SOUTHERN REGIONAL SUMMIT PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES PRESENTED BY: DR. JACK McCULLEY STERLING REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

2. What is a Professional Learning Community?
We define a professional learning community as educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Professional learning communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators. (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2006).

3. Learning Community is Characterized by:
Shared mission, vision, and values
Collaborative Teams.
Collective inquiry.
Action orientation/experimentation.
Commitment to continuous improvement.
Results orientation.
DuFour & Eaker

4. Shared Mission (Purpose), Vision (Clear Direction), Values (Collective Commitments, and Goals (Indicators, Timelines, and Targets) – All Focused on Student Learning
The very essence of a learning community is a focus on and a commitment to the learning of each student
Educators embrace high levels of learning for all students as both the reason the organization exists and the fundamental responsibility of those who work within it.
Members of a PLC create and are guided by a clear and compelling of what their schools and districts must become to help all students learn.
Collective commitments clarify what each member will do to contribute to creating such organizations.
Use results-oriented goals to mark their progress.

5. A Collaborative Culture With a Focus on Learning
Collaborative teams are the fundamental building blocks of the school community.
A PLC is composed of collaborative teams whose members work interdependently to achieve common goals.
Goals linked to the purpose of learning for all
All members are held mutually accountable.
Collective Inquiry Into Best Practice and Current Reality
Educators in a PLC engage in collective inquiry into:
Best Practices about teaching and learning
A candid clarification of their current practices
An honest assessment of their students’ current levels of learning.
Collective inquiry helps educators build shared knowledge.
Educators in a PLC have an acute sense of curiosity and openness to new possibilities.

6. Action Orientation: Learning By Doing
Members of PLCs are action-oriented:
They move quickly to turn aspirations into action and visions into reality.
They understand that the most powerful learning always occurs in a context of taking action.
They value engagement and experience as the most effective teachers.
Learning by doing develops a deeper and more profound knowledge and greater commitment than learning by reading, listening, planning, or thinking (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000).
Educators in PLCs recognize that until members of the organization “do” differently, there is no reason to anticipate different results.

7. A Commitment to Continuous Improvement
Work to eliminate the status quo
Constant searches for a better way to achieve goals and accomplish the purpose of the organization are inherent in the PLC culture.
Systematic processes engage each member of the school community in an ongoing cycle of:
Gathering evidence of current levels of student learning.
Developing strategies and ideas to build on strengths and address weaknesses in that learning.
Implementing the strategies and ideas.
Analyzing the impact of the changes to discover what was effective and what was not.
Applying the knowledge in the next cycle of continuous improvement.

8. Results Orientation
Members of a PLC realize that all of their efforts in these areas:
Focus on learning.
Collaborative teams.
Collective inquiry
Action orientation
Continuous improvement must be assessed on the basis of results rather than intentions
Initiatives are subjected to ongoing assessment on the basis of tangible results.

9. The Big Ideas That Drive Professional Learning Communities
First, the fundamental purpose of the school is to ensure all students learn at high levels.
The future success of students will depend on how effective educators are in achieving that fundamental purpose.
Commitment to learning and schools must align all practices, procedures, and policies.
Members of a PLC work together.
Clarify exactly what each student must learn.
Monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis
Support for learning when they struggle
Extend and enrich learning when students have already mastered the intended outcomes.
If all students are to learn at high levels, the professional staff in the school community must also continue to learn.

10. The Big Ideas That Drive Professional Learning Communities
Second, schools will not know whether or not all students are learning unless professional staff have a strong desire for evidence that students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and dispositions deemed most essential to their success.
Schools must systematically monitor student learning on an ongoing basis.
Use evidence of results to respond immediately to students who experience difficulty.
To inform individual and collective practice.
To fuel continuous improvement.

11. Origin of Professional Learning Community
Someone with expertise in a specialized field, an individual who has not only pursued advanced training to enter the field, but who is also expected to remain current in its evolving knowledge base.
Knowledge base of education has expanded dramatically in the past 30 years.
In terms of research and in the articulation of recommended standards for the profession.
Professional staff in a professional learning community make these findings the basis of their collaborative investigation into how they can better achieve their goals.
Practice teaching and leading by constantly enhancing their skills and knowledge in the same way a doctor practices medicine or a lawyer practices law.

12. Origin of Professional Learning Community
The need for professional staff to shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning.
To move beyond the question “Was it taught?” to the far more relevant question, “Was it learned?”
Avocation for learning communities, not teaching communities.
The best way to improve student learning is to invest and improve the learning of the professional staff.
Learning suggests ongoing action and perpetual curiosity.
Educators must engage in the ongoing study and constant practice of their field.
If all students are to learn, those who educate them must be lifelong learners.

13. Origin of Professional Learning Community
A group linked by common interests.
Common understandings.
Sense of identity
Belonging and involvement
Meaningful relationships
Communities form around common characteristics, experiences, practices
Members of the community’s beliefs are important enough to develop a kinship.

14. In a Professional Learning Community:
Professional staff create an environment that fosters shared:
Understanding
Sense of identity
High levels of involvement
Mutual cooperation
Collective responsibility
Emotional support
A strong sense of belonging
Collaborating together to achieve what they cannot accomplish alone

15. Becoming a Professional Learning Community Robert Eaker
Cultural Shifts
Becoming a Professional
Learning Community
Robert Eaker

16. Culture is often defined as: “How we do things around here
Culture is often defined as: “How we do things around here.” Compared to more traditional schools, how are things done in a professional learning community?

17. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift
Traditional Schools
Teacher isolation
Professional Learning Communities
Collaboration

18. Cultural Shift: Developing a Mission Statement Student Learning
Traditional Schools
Generic.
Belief statements; such as, “We believe all kids can learn.”
Professional Learning Communities
Clarifies what students will learn.
Clarifies how we will know what students have learned.
Clarifies how the school will respond when students do not learn.

19. Cultural Shift – Primary Focus
Traditional Schools
Primary Focus is on teaching.
Professional Learning Communities
Primary focus is on learning.

20. Cultural Shift - Curriculum
Traditional Schools
Each teacher independently decides what to teach.
Curriculum overloaded.
Professional Learning Communities
Collaboratively agreed upon curriculum that focus on what students are expected to learn.
Reduced content; meaningful content taught at greater depth.
Collaboratively developed assessment.
A collaboratively developed plan for responding to students who are not learning.

21. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Decisions
Traditional Schools
Decisions about improvement strategies are made by “averaging opinions.”
Professional Learning Communities
Decisions are research-based with collaborative teams of teachers seeking out “best practices”.

22. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Validation
Traditional Schools
Effectiveness of improvement strategies are externally validated. Teachers rely on others outside the school regarding what works.
Emphasis is given to how teachers liked various approaches.
Professional Learning Communities
Approaches are internally validated. Teams of teachers try various approaches and collaborate about how the approaches impacted student learning.
Effects on student learning as the primary basis for assessing various improvement strategies. Collaboratively developed assessment.

23. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Leadership
Traditional Schools
Administrators are viewed as being in leadership positions while teachers are viewed as “implementers” or followers.
Professional Learning Communities
Administrators are viewed as leaders of leaders. Teachers are viewed as transformational leaders.

24. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift – Improvement Plans
Traditional Schools
School improvement plans focus on a wide variety of things.
Often, the goal is to “get the plan turned in”. Then, the plan is ignored.
Professional Learning Communities
School improvement plans focus on a few, important goals that will impact student learning.
The school improvement plan is the vehicle for organized, sustained school improvement.

25. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Recognition
Traditional Schools
“Celebration” is infrequent and when recognizing teachers almost always focuses on groups.
Celebration and recognition occurs when students reach an arbitrary standard.
Recognition is limited to few.
Professional Learning Communities
Celebration is frequent and singles out individuals as well as groups.
In addition to celebration and recognition when a standard is met, celebrations recognized “improvement”
The school works hard to “create” winners and celebrate their success.
Celebrations are linked to the vision and values of the school and improved student achievement—Renaissance Program
Honor Societies, Sports Recognition, etc. focus on a few specific groups.

26. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift – New Initiatives
Traditional Schools
Improvement efforts frequently shift as new fads or trends come along.
Professional Learning Communities
The school is committed to “staying the course” in the attainment of the school vision. New initiatives are only implemented if it is determined that the change will help the school achieve its vision of the future.
Tech Prep??
PLC As long as the curriculum is aligned to the standards, stay the course. Implement change only if it can be determined that it will positively impact student learning. 26

27. Cultural & Educational Shifts
Becoming a Professional Learning Community
Sterling High School
Somerdale, NJ
This PLC workshop was as a result of the professional development committee’s questionnaire. People feel like they hadn’t been trained and needed more information on the direction that PLC was taking. Also, they needed to know what the overall goals are of PLC.
This workshop will have three sections:
Informational: giving the background of PLC at Sterling, a summation of where we are in the process, and the goals for continuation of the process.
Question and answer period to address any concerns.
Reflective assessment of individual and department progress.

28. WHERE WE STARTED

29. PLC At Sterling
Grew out of professional development on alternative assessment
Teachers sent to Adlai Stevenson High School in Chicago to view PLC process of common planning and assessment
Teachers became interested in developing common goals and assessments for each course
Needed common planning time for successful implementation
PLC was initiated to facilitate this goal and to focus instruction on student learning
Two morning in-service days / month are set aside for PLC time

30. MISSION OF PLC
The three “essential questions” of the PLC initiative are:
What do we expect students to learn?
How will we know that students have learned?
How will we respond to students who are not learning

31. What do we want students to learn?
State Standards
Established Curriculum Outlines
Strengths and Weaknesses of Students
Expectations of the community
Essential vs. Inessential Content
Establish specific essential outcomes per unit
Development of mandatory and elective activities

32. How do we know if they have learned it?
Common Assessments for each course at all levels
Establish specific standards of performance, targets or benchmarks for each test to indicate student mastery of intended outcomes
Clarify criteria by which work is judged (rubrics)
Analyze results

33. How will we respond when students do not learn?
Analyze results of assessment
Utilize collaboration and best practices to identify and implement improvement strategies
Ensure that all students who need it receive additional time and support for learning
Re-assess to determine mastery

34. PLC FOCUS ON LEARNING Traditional Schools PLC
Each teacher decides what to teach and test
Instruction and testing becomes a collaborative effort
Curriculum is overloaded
Focus is on “essential questions” with content taught in greater depth
Effectiveness of instruction is externally validated—standardized testing, etc.
Effectiveness is internally validated by teachers using various strategies
Emphasis is placed on how teachers like various approaches
and topics
Improvement strategies are assessed based state & local standards and student learning
Generally, we found that the PLC process demanded a shift from teachers working in isolation to working collaboratively in all aspects of instruction.

35. CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL SHIFT
WHERE WE ARE NOW
CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL SHIFT
This will vary by department. If you are not already there, we need to move in that direction.

36. PLC --Cultural Shift Professional Learning Communities Collaboration
Days of teacher isolation is over. Teachers need to collaborate so that all students enrolled in the same course have consistent standards, common pacing, and equal accountability. Previously two students in the same subject with classes right next door to each other could have completely different grading structures with different expectations. A child’s grade could be determined by who they had not what they learned.

37. Cultural Shift – Primary Focus
Professional Learning Communities
Primary focus is on learning.
Not “What do I have to teach”, but “what are the essential skills that the students need to learn”.

38. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Decisions
Professional Learning Communities
Decisions are research-based with collaborative teams of teachers seeking out “best practices”.

39. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Validation
Professional Learning Communities
Approaches are internally validated. Teams of teachers try various approaches and collaborate about how the approaches impacted student learning.
Effects on student learning as the primary basis for assessing various improvement strategies. Collaboratively developed assessment.
Previously, we relied on external measurement, HSPA, SAT, NJPASS, etc to validate instruction.
With PLC, the validation is internal, collaboratively developed, and ongoing.

40. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift - Recognition
Professional Learning Communities
Celebration is frequent and singles out individuals as well as groups.
In addition to celebration and recognition when a standard is met, celebrations recognized “improvement”
The school works hard to “create” winners and celebrate their success.
Celebrations are linked to the vision and values of the school and improved student achievement—Renaissance Program
Honor Societies, Sports Recognition, etc. focus on a few specific groups. 40

41. Professional Learning Communities
Cultural Shift – New Initiatives
Professional Learning Communities
The school is committed to “staying the course” in the attainment of the school vision. New initiatives are only implemented if it is determined that the change will help the school achieve its vision of the future.
Tech Prep??
PLC As long as the curriculum is aligned to the standards, stay the course. Implement change only if it can be determined that it will positively impact student learning.

42. Educational Shift: Curricular Focus in a Learning Community
Until a school has clarifies what students should know and be able to do, and the skills and dispositions they should acquire as a result of schooling, the school cannot function as a learning community
There are four major assumptions for curricular development

43. Educational Shift Teacher should work collaboratively to design a research-based curriculum
If a curriculum is overloaded --“Pay attention to everything”– it cannot have the necessary focus on results
Teachers need to be informed about initiatives and search for the right combination of theory and practice for their students and school at a particular time
Pooling uninformed opinions just results in making uninformed decisions
Teachers should be familiar with what is known about best practices and utilize and adapt those findings to the culture of each individual school and student population
For PLC to be effective, we must focus on essential learning outcomes. These are the essential skills that will be assessed, monitored, and remediated.
Rather than just using “ canned” programs, teachers need to be aware of these standards based programs and approaches, and be willing to adopt what is effective and adapt the curriculum accordingly.

44. Educational Shift The curriculum should clarify the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students should acquire as a result of their schooling.
Collaboratively agreed upon curriculum focuses on essential and significant learning topics.
“Organized abandonment—deciding what not to teach.” Reduced content allows meaningful content to be taught at greater depth
Develop a process of identifying significant content, eliminating non-essential material. Curriculum is “a mile long and an inch deep”.
Analyze each unit: what does every student need to know, what information would benefit students if there were time, what is insignificant enough to eliminate?

45. What do we want students to do as a result of this unit?
Educational Shift The curriculum process should allow teachers to monitor student achievement at the classroom level
What do we want students to do as a result of this unit?
Not students will “understand” a topic, but what will they do to demonstrate that understanding
What methods and material will we use to teach the lesson? (Science department: required activities, elective activities)
How will we know whether students have achieved the intended outcomes? Observation, written tests, questioning, review of homework student performance projects, etc.
“Students will understand linear equations” does not clarify the specific skills involved for the teacher or the student.
Students will be able to solve multi-step linear equations, graph a linear function, find the slop of a linear function and express it as a rate of change.

46. Educational Shift Curriculum and Assessment Process should foster continuous improvement
Culmination of the three previous sections. An effective learning community will:
Ensure that a teacher’s daily instruction is consistent with the essential learning goals identified through the curriculum process
Insist that students are asked to learn content that has been chosen based on essential outcomes rather than on the idiosyncrasies of an individual teacher
Establish the expectation that each instructional unit will provide students the opportunity to practice the kinds of skill they will be asked to demonstrate during assessment
Ensure that assessments are aligned with curriculum and instruction
Teacher still has individual latitude, but must ensure that essential content is taught.

47. WHERE WE ARE HEADED

48. Year 1 2005-2006 Define Vision and Mission for each department
Develop departmental goals
Departments begin working toward development of common curriculum and assessment
Academic departmental folders were established on the S-drive for departmental work
Curriculum Committee of PLC leaders was established to monitor progress, concerns, etc.
Curriculum Committee felt the need for framework or structure in which the departments could work

49. Year
Framework was developed so that every department needed to re-align each individual curriculum relative to the standards and re-structure if necessary
Led to an examination of each individual curriculum relative to the NJ State Standards—Science department restructured the curriculum using this data
Assessments in Science, Social Studies and World Language were developed to reflect NJCCCS and generate data on student achievement relative to the standards
Scoring and dissemination of assessment data took place
Common Final Examinations were developed and placed in shared departmental folders
Goals for were established
Science department realized that Global Science was “overloaded”. They realigned the standards, taking environmental science out of Global and putting it into Biology. They also created a new sequence of courses, introducing Physical Science as an alternative to Chemistry which would include both Physics and Chemistry standards and content

50. Year 3 2007-2008 Align all curriculum to the state standards
Begin to develop a working curriculum for each course
Identify essential topics
Develop mandatory and optional activities for each unit
Develop common unit assessments
Use data to target areas of weakness and develop strategies for improvement

51. Year
Continue to focus on data driven information regarding student learning
Teachers work in groups to determine essential topics for each course aligned to the State Standards
Topics will form the basis of unit assessments that will be given at all levels
Remediation should be targeted to specific deficiencies
Data should foster discussion regarding teaching and assessment techniques to improve student learning
Formative assessments will be developed to assess student learning and benchmark proficiencies
Focus is on student learning.
Must narrow the curriculum to address what is most important for students to learn. Then we can effectively assess and remediate students accordingly.
The formative assessment is the transition point of the PLC process, and will be the focal point of next year’s goals.

52. and Beyond
Continue to clarify essential outcomes for each course
Develop formative assessments that can serve to assess student proficiencies
Collect and analyze feedback on formative assessments to continually assess student performance
Develop activities ( required and optional) that address the essential activity and remediate any misunderstandings or problems
Continue to develop and refine common unit assessments
Establish a cyclical process of data driven, research based responses to student achievement
Recognize and celebrate student – teacher successes
Recognize that PLC is a constant “work in progress”

53. PLC – THE SCIENCE MODEL Chemistry Essential Questions
Chemistry Working Curriculum
Chemistry Unit Test Data Analysis

54. PLC AND EDUCATIONAL CHANGE
In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer, 1972

55. Q&A
Thank You