Know Your Rights/Contracts

The professional learning communities are department or grade-level based depending on the school, and will take place throughout the year.

Secondary schools (Ryan, Wynn, TMHS) will be department based, and the elementary schools will be grade-level based. They can either take place for thirty minutes twice a week, or 60 minutes once a week. PLCs have the choice on whether or not they want to conduct their meetings within or outside of their teacher contractual day.

If you decide to spend the hour of PLC time outside of the teacher contractual day, then your additional hour of extra help and parent communication can be done within your teacher contractual day. On the other hand, if you want to conduct PLC meetings within the teacher contractual day then your additional hour of extra help and parent communication needs to be done outside of the teacher contractual day. This means that the PLC language does not add additional time to your work day. To see the times that you are responsible for being at school, but not having students please see Article VIII, section 1A.

Purpose of PLCs

The language is clear about the reason for these learning communities. To summarize, PLCs are meant to bring grade-level and content groups together for the purpose of collaboration. Collaboration means the following:

• Examination of student work
• Examination of formative assessment data
• Coordinating lessons
• Reviewing best professional instructional practices
• Curriculum development
• Topics that are agreed upon by the PLC facilitator and the building principal.

This gives PLCs quite a bit of flexibility in what they want to work on. This language is meant to give you autonomy in what is being discussed and done in these meetings.

Role of the PLC Facilitator

PLC meetings will be run by PLC Facilitators at the Wynn, Ryan, and all elementary schools. At TMHS these meetings will be run by Department Heads and Lead Teachers. The PLC facilitator's role is to conduct PLC meetings and to make sure productive collaboration is taking place. If there is a topic of interest that PLCs want to discuss then the PLC facilitator will discuss this with the building principal. Please note that the PLC facilitator position (Wynn, Ryan, and elementary schools) is not the same position as a Department Head. Those who are only PLC facilitators will only be focusing on running these PLC meetings in a way that best helps the learning community collaborate to reach the purposes stated above.