Yes, I went on the trip to Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Chicago who’s the guru of PLCs. Those who know me are surprised I volunteered to go and those who don’t know me, sorry for you. I didn’t go there to compare how much greater they were to us but to see what we do well and how to improve on it, so we become them and not envy them. I found out that we are in the beginning stages of PLC work here at Arvada. Some PLCs are ahead of others, which is fine because we can get there. The big take away for me from Stevenson was the structure that they had around PLCs and that every decision was made for every student’s success. Their PLCs started out to be about student achievement and have morphed into being about teacher learning. Where teachers learn from each other in their PLCs. This means that here at Arvada our PLCs need to concentrate on student achievement so we can start to move to teacher learning.

The last thing I took away from Stevenson was that they are moving towards learning target (outcome/standard) based grading for classes. This will show true student growth better than the old numeric system. In the old system students just accumulate gold coins (points) and the one with the most gets the highest grade but has not always learned the most. In the learning target based system student have multiple ways to demonstrate their proficiency of the learning target and the final is based on a semester's worth of evidence not a single test or a couple of tests. The teacher and student sit down and talk about the final grade with the student having some input in their final grade. It was an eye opening trip in the fact that we can get better at our PLC work and the way we grade kids. Ask someone who went on the trip to explain their experience because this is only mine.

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