Professional Learning Communities

Professional Learning Communities were developed to provide more opportunities for staff members to collaborate and focus on school improvement. PLCs are a vehicle to continually reinforce staff development throughout the year. They give teachers the opportunity to evaluate data, analyze their curriculum, develop common grading practices, build instructional strategies to address enrichment and remediation, and learn new ideas and practices from a community of teachers, administrators, community members.

The core principles of professional learning communities are ensuring that students learn, focusing on results, and building a culture of collaboration. In order to ensure that students learn, we must focus on four essential questions. These essential questions are at the heart of every PLC.

What do we want each student to learn?

• Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
• Build Your Own Curriculum

How will we know they have learned?

• Standards-based Assessments
• Common Formative and Summative Assessments
• "Student learning drives professional development."

How will we respond if students have not learned?

• Interventions and Support Systems
  • Develop and Define as a PLC
• Time and Support for Learning Variables and Flexible, Learning is the Constant

How will we respond if they have learned?

• Differentiation is an absolute

How will we increase our instructional competence?

• Reflective teaching has the most power when it is collective and based on actual evidence of student learning.
• Reflect on student data and evaluate progress toward learning targets.

How will we coordinate our efforts as a school?

• Members work interdependently to achieve common goals and take collective responsibility for the learning of ALL students.
• PLCs develop the following...
  • Guaranteed and viable curriculum
  • Common formative/summative assessments
  • Data analysis protocols
• Interventions and extensions are part of the learning process for ALL students

"No group of educators has ever found time to collaborate; they have to make time to collaborate because they consider meaningful collaboration an absolute priority."

Richard DuFour