Has anyone heard of PLCs? These are Professional Learning Communities. Our district is seriously looking at adopting the ideas involved in PLCs. Have you tried this? How did you start the process? If you are trying it, is it successful and how do you like it?
and it sort of fell by the wayside, both times. I think it's an excellent, excellent idea, but I have found that not all teachers are interested in collaboration--sort of ruins a PLC. Critical friends groups are a part of this--where you have a "fishbowl discussion" about something with your colleagues. The rest of the staff listens in and then discusses how the critical friends worked together--anyway, it's all about collaboration. The teachers on staff who are collaborative and secure in their own skills will do very well with this, and it will be a positive thing. The non-collaborators, the ones who don't like the instructional coach in their room, for instance, because they're not all that up on best practice--won't do as well. You seem very collaborative to me, and so you will probably entirely get this, and you will see others who just don't.
There is a book (can't remember the title--probably Professional Learning Communities--it's at work) that you will most likely be given to read.
has spearheaded this whole concept. He is the co-author of the book mentioned in the post below. His team held a 3 day workshop, then a week long conference several summers ago in my district - so it was a fully adopted expectation. The philosophy made postivie changes for many. It is well worth investigating (in my opinion ).
These two sites might give you a little more info. http://www.solution-tree.com/Public/Main.aspx http://www.speakersguild.com/education/r_dufour.html
I think it's a good philosophy -- but we implemented it without staff input and, in my opinion, without a lot of preplanning, so it became just a lot of extra meetings added on to the ones we had already. Where I think we went wrong -- after reading and researching the whole PLC concept, is that I think we should have directed more of our time in staff meetings already to the PLC concept instead of adding on. It became hours and hours added on extra each month with no compensation and was required and ridiculous. Most resented it -- it was poorly explained to us in the beginning so we were unclear on objectives and it failed. I think we only did parts and pieces of the whole concept so that probably contributed to the feeling of yuck with it. We're still "technically" doing PLC.... but most teams are just faking it to get by.... It's sad, because it's a really valid concept, but terribly unsuccessful in our school and many others in our district.
Thank you for your responses. I'm going to investigate the websites more thoroughly.
A few in our school have been to the seminars, and more are on the way. Apparently they are quite expensive, so they are slowly filtering staff members into the mix. Meanwhile, we are reading the "Learning by Doing" book and having discussions about the concept. Having not attended the class, I'm probably only grasping parts of the program rather than the complete picture.
My thoughts were to just dive in and start planning to implement this on a small scale next year. I thought our sixth grade reading/la teachers could come up with some basic learning requirement, such as the ability to write a summary for nonfiction and fiction. There are only 4 of us, so it seems like it would be easy. I'm not a principal, so I'm not going to try to get the whole school on board, just my little world of sixth grade teachers.
In your opinions, is this a good way to try to begin to implement a PLC? I thought just starting small with a learning objective like writing a summary seems simple. It seems we would all agree to writing a test and implementing it, but maybe it seems harder than I'm expecting. We could examine the results and then remediate the students that need help. Meanwhile other students could work on extension activities.
If it works, we could try another learning objective such as mastering inferencing or another reading strategy that we all agree is essential.
Some of my colleagues and I went to the national conference last year, and we've read Rick DuFour's book. It's an excellent idea, and seems like common sense. We have not implemented it yet because of scheduling. We can't find a way to fit collaboration time into the schedule. Each of our grade levels meet once each week after school or at lunch to discuss things, but it's not true collaboration- going over test scores, etc. It's an excellent concept but takes some planning. I would love to hear how others do it and how they fit it into an elementary schedule.
Back in November, I attended the National Quality Education Conference (http://nqec.asq.org/index.html) hosted by the American Society for Quality (http://www.asq.org/education/why-quality/overview.html).
It was an AWESOME conference. I heard many presentations from schools who use Collaboration in the elementary schedule. One school combined their library, computer, & counselor lesson times for a 90 min. block for collaboration once a week for each grade level. (This was in addition to their planning/conference time.) The admin. provided the teachers w/ a sort of "scope & sequence" plan/agenda to follow each week to accomplish specific tasks/goals (i.e. - disaggregate test scores, plan guided reading groups/lessons, etc.). The teachers also completed a quick little "exit survey" at the end of the collaboration time. They noted what they accomplished, what tools they needed to put their new plan into action, etc.
Oh, and often the collaboration for one grade level was matched w/ another grade levels planning/conference time to allow for Vertical collaboration.
but in middle, we implemented it by the following schedule:
Team meetings MTWR (that's core teachers-4)
grade level meetings every other Friday (both cores)
content partners every other Friday (like the math teachers from both cores)
All the departments, except language arts, implement this pretty well. Content partners plan together, and pace themselves to stay pretty much together. They don't do things lock-step, or necessarily even do the same lessons, but they plan together. Language arts, or course, is the department that can't ever even agree on what day it is, let alone how to teach lang. arts. There are widely varying paradigms at work in our department--which I think is okay, even good, but it does make it hard to plan together as well. I do almost nothing with my content partner. We're just so different in our philosphies, really night and day. She's a nice person, and we get along fine, but we keep the teaching separate. Not very PLC. She's retiring at the end of the year, and I am definitely sitting in on the interviews, so we'll see what happens next year. I'm optimistic.
Like someone said, it really is a common sense idea. I am continually surprised, though, at how NON-collaborative some teachers can be. Teachers who are collaborative will flourish and thrive under this philosophy. Teachers who aren't will chafe and say that more stuff is just being dumped on them (and it is, if it increases the meeting load, which it did for us). The point, though, is to enhance everyone's teaching, and I'm not sure every one of my colleagues is into that.
We don't have enough people to take the kids during collaboration time. I was thinking our district could have a "late start" one day per week to give us the time to collaborate. Clearly, the amount of time to work on this would really impact our prep, so if I'm hearing everyone correctly, we need to get some time away from our kids to meet together.
Maryteach, it sounds like you were spending lots and lots of time on this. How much are others spending on collaboration time each week?
Our superintendent has also taken this on and the only issue I am having is the lack of any parental issues. I understand the need for the whole community to be supportive of the schools from the bus drivers to lunch aides etc. I just find it hard to believe that we are actually telling parents, albiet informally, bring your kids here and we'll do it all!!! We had a meeting today talking about interventions during school hours only. Research has shown that the most successful students are those whose parents are involved. Why does this concept not include a thing about getting parents involved and to "buy in" to this? Do we really think that our students especially our at-risk ones will be successful with only what they get at school? My son was a Reading Recovery kid who is now 16 and I can tell you that if it wasn't for me at home helping and pushing he wouldn't be the success he is. Many nights he didn't "get it" and would have gone to school with no homework done or having not studied and failed. We have got to find a way to get parents more involved. Sorry about all of this. I suppose this should have gone on the VENT II site.
This is the third year that we have been involved with PLCs. All of the teachers in our school are involved in it and we meet in grade alike groups. We have at least four people in each group. We are a 4-6 school. We meet every two weeks for about an hour and work on a unit. We meet either before or after classes. About twice a year we have a day where they hire a sub to cover our classes, and again we only meet for an hour. We have only worked on math so far. We use our curriculum guide to make sure that we are addressing each objective as stated. We find and share activities that we do for each objective. We then wrote the assessments for each unit and how we will score them. This has been a very positive move for us and everyone seems to appreciatethe process and the progress that we have made. Our next goal will to tackle Language Arts. This probably won't happen until next year.
This is our 3rd year implementing PLC's. It has been growing and learning experience. We meet once a week during block time for about 1 hour. The PDT (Professional Development Teacher) is wonderful. We are fortunate because she is so knowledgeable and organized, it makes our time very productive. We focus on reading and language arts. This is a school wide initiative, therefore all elementary schools are on the same page. We have district wide formative assessments. Our district is implementing a "Balance Literacy" approach that is modified. We are using a guided reading schedule, shared, ect, to teach language arts and reading.
It gives our grade level time to discuss and catch up with each other as to how our classrooms are functioning or not. It gives us direction as to what area we should be going into or stopping and evaluating what is or not working. We are fortunate because I have heard that other PDT's are not as knowledgeable or organized. The PLC environment has given our grade level and school a cohesiveness that I feel many schools lack. We have now formed new teams that include at least one teacher and ancillary staff member that will meet once a month. These are much larger groups and one member from our grade level will be on a different team. This new group allows us to communicate with other grade levels to discuss what we see of the students coming up and what is working at our level and can be modified for another level.
We can also use the PDT to help us when we have either questions about teaching structure, resources whatever. If we need her to come in and perhaps demonstrate a lesson she will. She comes in to view parts of our teaching to help "coach" us. Even our teachers with 20= years have found it helpful and insightful to have our PDT come in and observe. It also helps because you have other eyes to see what you might be missing.
Yes, it does take the directive from the top for PLC's to work, otherwise it will just flop right on it's face.
I think though that it could be implemented at a site level, it would require a very strong principal to implement it and to keep central office off of your backs.
01-07-2007, 07:20 AM
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