1. Professional Learning Communities At Work (DuFour, DuFour & Eaker)
Board Presentation
Fall 2014
Dr. Scott L. Crane

2. PLC Definition
A Professional Learning Community is a group of educators committed to working collaboratively in an ongoing process of collective inquiry and action research in order to achieve better results [academic results] for the students they serve.

3. The ‘Three Big Ideas’ of PLC’s
Ensuring that all students learn.
A Culture of Collaboration
A Focus on Results
Schools with highly effective PLC’s emulate the ‘Three Big Ideas’

4. Ensuring that all Students learn.
‘Learning for All’ is not just a cliché
It is the school mission
It is a literal statement of fact
It is the staff’s internal belief

5. Teaching to Learning

6. Ensuring that all Students learn.
The school staff finds itself asking:
What school characteristics and practices have been most successful in helping all students achieve at high levels?
How could we adopt those characteristics and practices in our own school?
What commitments would we have to make to one another to create such a school?

7. Ensuring that all Students learn.
What indicators could we monitor to assess our progress?
As the staff collaboratively answers these question they:
Build shared knowledge
Common ground
On which they can build a solid foundation for improvement

8. Every professional in the school must engage with their colleagues to determine the answers to these crucial questions.
What is it we expect students to learn?
How will we know when they have learned it?
How will we respond when they don’t learn it?
How will we respond when they already know it?

9. As PLC’s analyze these questions they soon realize that there is an incongruity between
The commitment to ensure ‘Learning for all Students’
The lack of a coordinated strategy to respond when some students do not learn.

10. Staff addresses this problem by
Designing strategies to ensure that struggling students receive additional time and support
Accelerated students receive enrichment activities
No matter who the teacher is

11. Strategies must be School wide/Grade wide/Department wide
Timely: Needy students are quickly identified
Intervention rather than remediation:
Help is provided when student experience difficulty rather than waiting for summer school, retention etc.
Directive:
Students are not invited to seek help
Students are required to devote extra time and receive additional assistance

12. Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Educators, creating PLC’S, recognize that to ensure ‘Learning for All’ they must create structures that promote a collaborative culture.
Despite extensive research that indicates that working collaboratively is successful and best practice, many schools and teachers still work in Isolation.
The staff’s willingness to collaborate stops at the classroom door.

13. Traditional Teacher Isolation

15. Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Collaborative PLC’s do not:
Develop consensus on operational procedures
Supervising recess
Developing tardy policies
Oversee school operational facets
Discipline
Technology
Social climate

16. Let’s be clear… Professional Learning Communities: Not a workshop
Not a program
Not a book study
Not a faculty or department meeting
IS a never ending journey of continuous improvement
IS a framework for the entire school, district

17. Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Collaborative PLC’s do:
 Work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice
Engage in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep team learning

18. Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Collaborative PLC’s do:
Create common formative assessment:
Monitor student’s mastery of essential outcomes
Set common standards for each student skill or concept that student must master
Agree on the criteria by which they will judge the quality of student work
Practice these assessment tasks until they are consistent in their practice
Determine when to administer assessments

19. Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Collaborative PLC’s do:
Team conversations are public not private
Goals
Strategies
Materials
Questions
Concerns
Results

20. Schools Create Successful Collaborative PLC’s by:
Ensuring that everyone belongs to a team
Provides weekly/daily collaboration time during the work day
Requires teams to generate products that reflect their discussions and actions to ensure that all student learn
Essential outcomes
Assessments
Student data
Strategies developed from student data

21. Schools Create Successful Collaborative PLC’s by:
Teams must develop norms or protocols to clarify team
Expectations
Roles
Responsibilities,
Relationships

22. Schools Create Successful Collaborative PLC’s by:
Removing barriers to success
Move from intended curriculum (What is contained in curriculum maps)
To implemented curriculum (What the teacher actually teaches)
To attained curriculum (What students learn)

23. Schools Create Successful Collaborative PLC’s by:
Faculties must stop making excuses for failing to collaborate
We just can’t find the time
Not everyone on the staff has endorsed the idea
We need more training in collaboration
We need more training in PLC’s

24. Schools Create Successful Collaborative PLC’s by:
Are teachers and administrators willing to accept the fact that they are part of the problem?...God didn’t create self-contained classrooms, 50 minute periods, and subjects taught in isolation. We did...because we find working alone safer than and preferable to working together. Roland Barth (l991)

25. PLC’s judge their effectiveness on the basis of results.
Focuses on Results
PLC’s judge their effectiveness on the basis of results.

26. Every PLC participates in an ongoing process of
Identifying the current level of student achievement
Establishing a goal to improve the current level
Working together to achieve that goal
Providing periodic evidence of progress
Team goals shift from
We will create two new reading groups to-We will increase our reading scores by 5%

27. Teams Reverse the DRIP Syndrome (Date Rich/Information Poor)
PLC’s turn the data rich teaching environment datum into useful and relevant information for instructional enhancement at the student level.
Teams use data for student skill comparison among team students
Individual teachers can use the expertise of colleagues to help reflect on areas of concern

28. Each teacher has access to the entire teams knowledge of instructional
Ideas
Materials
Strategies
Talents

29. Continuous academic improvement based on results requires a change in educator traditional practices and assumptions. Educators must:
Embrace data as an indication of progress
Stop disregarding or excusing unfavorable data
Honestly confront the sometimes brutal facts
Stop using averages to analyze student performance

30. Begin to focus on the success of each student
Stop assessing educator effectiveness on how;
Busy they are
How many new initiatives they have launched
Stop working in isolation and hoarding
Ideas
Materials
Strategies

31. Creating PLC’s is a fundamental Shift on how we create schools.

32. It’s Shifty…Fundamental Purpose
From a focus on:
To a focus on:
Teaching
Curriculum Overload
Learning
Less, but more significant content

33. It’s Shifty…Assessments
From a focus on:
To a focus on:
Infrequent individual summative assessments
Frequent, commonly developed formative assessments

34. It’s Shifty…What to do When Kids Don’t Learn
From a focus on:
To a focus on:
Individual teachers determining the appropriate response
A systematic response that ensures support for every student

35. It’s Shifty…The Work of Teachers
From a focus on:
To a focus on:
Isolation
Collaborative Teams

36. It’s Shifty…Entire Focus and Celebration
From a focus on:
To a focus on:
Inputs
Infrequent recognizing of a few students
Results
Creating lots of winners and celebrating success, emphasizing improvement as well as meeting arbitrary standards

37. If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.

38. The Creation of PLC’S Hard Work Stressful Challenging Demanding
Rewarding
Educators must have the COURAGE and WILLINGNESS to ACT and have the PERSISTENCE to keep on ACTING.

39. “The rise or fall of the professional learning community concept depends not on the merits of the concept itself, but on the most important element in the improvement of any school…the commitment and persistence of the educators with it. DuFour (July 2008)