Transcript Professional Learning Communities

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
[email protected]