Teachers’ daily schedules are typically filled, if not overflowing with tasks, student meetings, planning, and anything else that pops up that needs their immediate attention. Therefore, when teachers are told they now must add weekly or monthly PLCs (professional learning communities) to their calendars, it might be met with pushback and an unwillingness to participate fully.
Principals and administrators must strive to acknowledge teacher workloads and explain how beneficial professional learning communities can be if run correctly. Teachers want to know how these groups will help them in the day-to-day planning and guide them in creating lessons that will help even their lowest-performing students.
PLCs can be excellent tools as long as they are planned in a purposeful way. The entire PLC team (teachers, content specialists, etc.) needs to be open-minded and ready to work collaboratively.
Prioritize Standards and Unpack Those Standards
First and foremost, the professional learning community team needs to identify and work through their standards. They need to look at their curriculum and analyze what standards are being addressed and where. They may find that some standards are being overlooked.
Additionally, student data aligned to the standards should be examined. This will help teachers pinpoint the standards where students are excelling and failing. This data can help when completing a needs assessment to see what standards are being overlooked or underperformed.
Next, the PLC team needs to work through those standards by reading various articles or watching videos to further the teachers’ understanding of the big picture of student learning in regard to those standards. The learning that goes on in the PLC must be tied closely to the teachers’ classrooms and students with whom they instruct.
Ensure Everyone Works Effectively Together
Professional learning communities are meant to be collaborative. They will not be beneficial if they are not. All voices need to be heard, and teachers need to contribute equally during PLCs. The goal of a PLC should be to create a collaborative culture with a focus on learning for all (teachers and students). This can be achieved through collective and collaborative inquiry into best practices and a connection to their classrooms’ current reality.
In order to facilitate a collaborative PLC, there need to be defined norms and roles. The facilitator of the PLC should work with other team members at the first meeting to come up with norms that they all agree upon, and feel are important to make their PLC run smoothly and effectively. A facilitator can either bring a list of norms for the group to discuss or the group can brainstorm their own list and then choose those that they feel work best for them.
Norms are protocols or guides of expected behaviors during a PLC. Norms can range from meetings beginning and ending on time to everyone focusing on student learning outcomes. With norms, professional learning communities need to also create a way to monitor norms to make sure that they are being followed and help PLCs to be effective.
Monitoring the norms can also ensure that everyone is working effectively together. To monitor norms, roles should be established at the beginning of each meeting. These roles should be the same each time, but a different person should be assigned to them at the start of each new meeting. Examples of PLC roles can be timekeeper, cheerleader, and gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is the person who keeps the group on task and reigns them in if they go too far off-topic.
Create Space for New Ideas and Strategies
PLCs need to have a commitment to continuous improvement and learning. PLCs should be a place to explore new ideas and strategies. The facilitator should have a specific purpose for each meeting. These can be based on ideas from previous meetings or from the data that the teachers have analyzed about their students.
The facilitator should bring articles, websites, and videos that focus on the new topic or strategy. Teachers will be given the time to examine these and share how they will use them in their lessons. They should also be given time to work with one another to share their ideas based on the new strategy.
Although PLCs need to be structured and purposeful, facilitators should also give time for an open discussion on the needs the teachers see in their classes. Collaborative time with other teachers can produce real results and actionable items that teachers can use with their students. These open discussion times can prove to be invaluable and help hook those teachers who might not be willing to participate as much in the PLCs.
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