Professional Learning Groups are defined by five essential elements:

1. Shared norms and values:

Members of the PLG affirm, through language and action, common beliefs and values underlying their assumptions about student learning, teaching, the nature of human needs and human relationships, and their capacity to determine the outcomes of their work.

2. Collective focus on student learning:

Describes an unswerving concentration on student learning, a core characteristic of PLGs in schools which are successful with all students. Teachers’ professional actions focus on choices that affect students’ opportunities to learn; their conversations focuses on ways in which their instruction and assessment practices promote students’ learning – as distinguished from simply focusing on activities that may engage student attention

3. Collaboration:

Takes place as teachers share expertise and faculty members call on one another to discuss the development of skills related to the sustained improvement of teaching practices. Collaborative work also increases teachers’ sense of connection to one another, and their sense of mutual support and responsibility for the learning of all students.

4. Deprivatized practice:

Develops as teachers move inside the classroom doors of their colleagues to share and trade off the roles of the mentor, advisor and specialist. Peer coaching relationships, structures for teaming and for structured classroom observations (Practice Analysis Conversations) are methods that PLGs use.

5. Reflective dialogue:

Involves in-depth conversations about teaching and learning, in which teachers examine the assumptions, which they hold about students, learning, and their instruction, as well as those, which are basic to quality school practices. Reflection on practice leads to deepened understandings of the process and outcomes of high quality instruction.

Professional Learning Communities/Groups (PLC/Gs):

What Are They And Why Are They Important?

From: SEDL Advancing research, improving education - http://www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61.html

“As an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community/group is seen as a powerful staff development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement.”

“Astuto and colleagues (1993) label the professional community of learners, in which the teachers in a school and its administrators continuously seek and share learning and then act on what they learn. The goal of their actions is to enhance their effectiveness as professionals so that students benefit. This arrangement has also been termed communities of continuous inquiry and improvement.”

All levels of the school must be learners "questioning, investigating, and seeking solutions" for school improvement. The traditional pattern that "teachers teach, students learn, and administrators manage is completely altered . . . [There is] no longer a hierarchy of who knows more than someone else, but rather the need for everyone to contribute."

Attributes of Professional Learning Communities/Groups

The literature on professional learning communities repeatedly gives attention to five attributes of such organizational arrangements:

1. supportive and shared leadership,
2. collective creativity,
3. shared values and vision,
4. supportive conditions, and
5. shared personal practice.

A common place to put evidence allows new staff to go to that place and ‘catch up’ around PL that has gone on before them.

The focus is on good teaching and learning practice not curriculum knowledge.

Whatever the PLG focus the goal was to accomplish the desired outcomes for students EG improve student achievement