Professional Learning Communities OKGEAR UP Public Schools April 2, 2015

Professional Learning Communities What are they? Groups of individuals who come together regularly for an agreed upon amount of time for the purpose of gaining new information, reconsidering previous knowledge and beliefs, and building on their own and other’s ideas and experiences in order to work on improved practice and enhance students’ learning.

Three Big Ideas that Drive the Work of a PLC:  The purpose of our school is to ensure all students learn at high levels.  Helping all students learn requires a collaborative and collective effort.  To assess our effectiveness in helping all students learn we must focus on results – evidence of student learning – and use results to inform and improve our professional practice.

The Goal: Help all team members become more knowledgeable through collaboration during team meeting and through individual work between team meetings with the overall purpose of increasing student achievement.

Priorities of a PLC  What do we want our students to learn?  How will we know when each student has learned it?  How will we respond when some students do not learn?  How will we extend and enrich the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?

Leadership and PLCs Traditional Administrators viewed as leaders and teachers as followers. Improvement efforts frequently shift as new fads or trends come along. PLCS Administrators are viewed as leaders of leaders. Teachers are viewed as transformational leaders. Leader protects, promotes and defends school vision and values and confronts behavior that is incongruent with school’s vision and values.

PLC Leaders at ALL Levels Are Most Effective When They…  Provide Clarity regarding the work to be done.  Monitor and support others to help them succeed at what they are be asked to do.  Sustain their focus on a limited number of goals and initiated.  Work collaboratively with others and take collect responsibility for achieving shared goals for which they are mutually accountable.  Acknowledge and celebrate small wins.

COLLABORATION IS THE KEY!!!

“NONE OF US IS SMARTER THAN ALL OF US”

What is Collaboration? A process in which ALL staff work together to analyze and impact professional practice. in order to improve our individual and collective results. (Dufour, Dufour, & Eaker, Getting Started: Reculturing Schools to Become Professional Learning Communities, 2002)

HOW DO WE FIND THE TIME?

Making Time for Collaboration  Provide common preparation time.  Use parallel scheduling.  Adjust start and end times.  Share classes.  Schedule group activities, events, and testing.  Bank time.  Use in-service and faculty meeting time wisely.

What do PLC teams actually do at meetings?

The Focus of Collaboration “Collaboration cultures, which by definition have close relationships, are indeed powerful, but unless they are focusing on the right things, they may end up being powerfully wrong.” -Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change (2001)

Initial tasks for PLC teams..  Establish group norms  Use existing assessment data to identify goals or targets for the group (examples: problem solving, reading comprehension, phonemic awareness, writing, etc.)  Identify essential learning outcomes from the curriculum needed to achieve the goal.

Initial tasks continued  Develop teacher-created common assessments to measure student progress and establish benchmarks.  Analyze assessment data  Identify and share existing instruction practice and research best practices  Adjust instruction

“It is ironic that schools and districts often pride themselves in the fair and consistent application of rules and policies while at the same time ignoring the tremendous inequities in the opportunities students are given to learn and the criteria by which their learning is assessed.” Dufour, Dufour, Aker and Many, Learning By Doing, 2006

Suggested Timelines

High performing Professional Learning Communities take work. Change will not happen over night. School staffs must learn to concentrate on learning rather than teaching.

We are not where we want to be, We are not where we are going to be, But we are not where we were. Rosa Parks

Find things to celebrate!

For more information: allthingsplc.info or Jolynn Horn