Allowing members to share knowledge,
collaborate and communicate are among the most fundamental functions of a
PLC. Care should be taken to create an environment in which members are
encouraged to both provide and receive knowledge from the PLC while feeling
comfortable doing so. The PLCs shared knowledge should be accessible,
easy to search and consistently targeted towards the goals of the PLC without
extraneous information that could get in the way.
Using the example of a PLC at a K-12 school, the
website All Things PLC lists five critical questions that a PLC should center
its collaboration around:
What knowledge, skills, and disposition must each student
acquire as a result of this course, grade level, and/or unit of instruction?
What evidence will we gather to monitor student
learning on a timely basis?
How will we provide students with additional time
and support in a timely, directive, and systematic way when they experience
difficulty in their learning?
How will we enrich the learning of students
who are already proficient?
How can we use our SMART goals and evidence of
student learning to inform and improve our practice?
GOALS/
OBJECTIVES
Establishing a professional learning community
(PLC) is important to the success of any school or educational community. An
effective PLC strongly adheres to student learning, and a critical step in
establishing a PLC is to create a shared mission and vision as well as shared
values and goals. Establishing a PLC can be challenging, which is why you need
to make sure that your goals and objectives are shared by all participants.
According to DuFour and Eaker (2006) Effective goals will specify:
- Exactly what is to be accomplished?
- The specific steps that will be taken to achieve the goal
- The individual or group responsible for initiating and/or sustaining each step toward achieving the goal.
- The timeline for each phase of the activity.
- The criteria to be used in evaluating progress toward the goal.
Sometimes it will be necessary to come to an
agreement as a PLC. A unanimous agreement is both impractical and
unlikely so the focus instead should be on building consensus. Two
important steps in consensus building are ensuring that all points of view are
heard and that the will of the majority of the group is clear. If these
steps are followed, dissenting group members should feel that even if they
don’t agree with a decision that the decision was made in a fair way.
RESOURCES:
- All Things PLC
- Creating a Professional Learning Community
- Defining a Professional Learning Community
The success of PLCs hinges on collaboration, but
don't assume it'll come naturally. Help the teams develop their own protocols
and norms. Anne Smith, assistant superintendent of Long Island's Mattituck-Cutchogue School District,
began by facilitating everything herself. She wanted her teachers to know that
they were not being judged. "You need to teach them how to ask questions
that don't put people on the defensive," Smith says. She circulated
articles and books and encouraged them to form study groups.
As a PLC facilitator, Nancy Krakowka, a sixth-grade
language arts teacher at the district's Cutchogue East Elementary School, knows
that collaboration doesn't happen overnight. "I spent a lot of time
figuring out how to make it work," she says. "Instead of saying,
'This is how we'll run our PLC,' I asked everyone for input."
Krakowka's group worked to find a common goal --
creating student portfolios. Once they let down their guard and started sharing
their own methods, they began to learn together. Five of them worked with a
sixth teacher to move past her fear of using portfolios. Having their support
made her willing to take the risk.
Create an Atmosphere of Trust
To the educator accustomed to closing the door,
sharing information about techniques can be discomforting. To overcome those
barriers, encourage teachers to form a book club or a discussion group about a
teaching topic, suggests Joseph Aguerrebere, president and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Once they share opinions in a trusting setting, they'll be open to discussing
more.
Allow Enough Time
It's important to carve out enough time for learning
teams to meet and work through their issues regularly. Nancy Krakowka's
grade-level PLCs began by meeting once a month for regular meetings. They also
had three daylong gatherings each year, as well as common prep periods.
After a few months, teachers began leaving their
doors open and meeting informally throughout the day. Anne Smith finds
additional meeting time by hiring substitutes to come in to cover entire
grades. And next year, she's guaranteeing designated time: Her contract will
include an additional three hours a week dedicated to PLCs.
Smith's staff comes up with ways to help PLCs meet
despite time constraints. The librarian and the music teacher at Krakowka's
school have started a storytelling unit that can take up to three classes at a
time, allowing those teachers to meet.
Be Broad and Inclusive
Although many PLCs consist only of teachers, a
broader population can be brought in, such as administrators, parents, and
community members who support their school. The objective is to align everyone's
interests and expertise with the school's vision and goals.
In some cases, "teacher communities are not as
robust as cross-role communities," says Giselle Martin-Kniep, founder of Communities for Learning: Leading
Lasting Change. For example, if a group is considering
replacing suspension with community service, the community can provide ideas.
In cases involving big groups, it makes sense to form smaller satellites that
gather feedback to deliver to the larger group.
Hiring a consultant with a broader perspective may
help with complex situations that can be difficult to untangle from within.
With Smith's group of teachers, the early days of the learning community were
more like interest-based study groups that didn't result in much change.
As the focus intensified and the groups began having
tougher conversations about standards and curriculum mapping, she hired a
consultant. The consultant trained one teacher per grade level to facilitate
the PLCs, and now the funding for the consultant goes to a teacher who works
half time with facilitators.
As the groups work on improving their professional
practice, teacher development happens naturally. "Before PLCs, no one
offered any kind of support," says Nancy Krakowka. "Now, my
colleagues and I are always going to each other for advice."
When they discuss a topic as potentially
controversial as assessments, the team learns from each other. "We're not
always on the same page and can have healthy disagreements," she says.
"Rather than be defensive, we sit down and discuss."
Krakowka loves hearing about her colleagues'
different approaches. Through her work with the PLC, she realized that although
she did a great job teaching ancient civilization, she wasn't relating the
subject to modern times. "By comparing content, someone pointed out my
gap," she says. "We exchanged ideas on how I could make those
connections."
This research aimed to investigate the key factors
of developing effective professional learning communities (PLCs) within the
Taiwanese context. Four constructs – supportive and shared leadership, shared
visions, collegial trust, and shared practices – were adopted and developed
into an instrument for measuring PLC function. A stratified random sampling was
conducted with the strata of geographic areas. Out of 335 high schools, 51
schools were chosen and 612 copies of the questionnaires were distributed to
teachers. After excluding invalid questionnaires, 444 questionnaires were
collected from 34 schools, yielding a response rate of 73%. The final version
of the questionnaire had 19 items with a 6-point Likert-type scale. Using
confirmative factor analysis, the four factors in the conception of PLCs were
confirmed. The results of the structural equation modelling indicated that a
collegial trust relationship was strongly and directly related to share
practices, and was an important mediating factor between supportive and shared
leadership, shared visions, and shared practices. In other words, shared vision
along with supportive and shared leadership, through collegiality and trust
relationships, could help school members collectively learn, collaborate,
innovate, inquire, reflect, and give feedback to one another in the form of
shared PLC practices.
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