“Professional Learning Communities” Helping All Students be More Successful in School

A New Mission The mission of the Parkway School District is to ensure all students are capable, curious and confident learners who understand and respond to the challenges of an ever-changing world.

What is a Professional Learning Community (PLC)? A professional learning community is a group of educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.

Big Ideas of PLCs Focus on Learning Build a Collaborative Culture Focus on Results

Professional Learning Communities at Work Dr. Richard DuFour A leader noted for bringing the professional learning community concepts to life in schools. A public school educator for 34 years, served as a teacher, principal and superintendent. Author of 11 books and numerous articles on leadership and PLCs. A national speaker. Becky DuFour Served as a teacher, school administrator, and central office coordinator. Lead consultant and featured principal for the Video Journal of Education program “Elementary Principals as Leaders of Learning” (2003). Coauthor of many books and video series on the topic of PLCs. RiMC00M2MyLWIyNzEtZjU4MTI3MmJiMTdj RiMC00M2MyLWIyNzEtZjU4MTI3MmJiMTdj

Five Questions of the PLC What do we want our students to understand? How will we know if they understand it? How will we respond when students do not understand? How will we respond when students already understand it? How will we teach to ensure student understanding? (Best Practices)

The Work of PLCs in Parkway … teachers worked in teams to write rigorous benchmark standards to be used as measures of the quality of their students’ work. The outcome will guide instruction to achieve the desired results from our students. It is an asset to our school to have a faculty that has developed an intense focus on raising student achievement. Gary Mazzola August 2011

The PLC at Work

A Fundamental Shift in PD Days Need to change the way we allocate time for professional learning (PD) Need to meet more frequently Analyze real-time student data Create culture of collaboration in schools Focused on individual student needs Actionable strategies to improve student performance (based on best practices)

A Better Way to Collaborate Traditional PD Days – Infrequent (5 per year) – Full day (no school) – Best practices – Curriculum planning – School & district mtgs – Important, but not as focused on results for individual students “PLC” Days – Frequent (monthly) – Short and focused (2 hrs) – Based on student data – Conversations about how to help each child be more successful – Best practices – Immediately actionable – Focused on results

Academic Calendar 3 Full-day PD Days (instead of 5) Replace 2 (8-hour) PD Days with 8 (2-hour) delayed start days First Wednesday of each month (except August and January) Morning bus pickup time = add 2 hours YMCA before-school care available at all elementary schools

Rationale for Delayed Starts More focused study time for teachers – Hard to “shut down” school after it begins – 2 hours of guaranteed time for quality work Eliminates need for unsupervised time – Waiting for after-school activities/athletics – Waiting for working parents to get home Full participation with coaches/activity sponsors

Questions and Answers