I have been learning alongside two of my classroom teachers and PLC Facilitators this year through a Data Analysis course presented by Demonstrated Success. The Data Analysis Course is a year-long course that is a combination of self-paced online modules, virtual meetings, and full-day in-person sessions. The co-facilitators of this course have a wealth of experience, expertise, and resources to share with all educators – no matter your role. I strongly encourage school and/or district teams to attend their courses. Our focus during this module has been to read through an article about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and use the “Four A’s Protocol” to reflect on the reading and apply this information to our practice.
In the article How to Build Radically Different PLCs That Empower Teachers with Ownership and Raise Student Achievement (Jody Honaker, Deana Senn, and Shakira Fetherolf, 2022.), helped me affirm all of the intentional moves I have made over the past 7 years as a school principal to continually improve and enhance our PLC experience to be more effective.
Assumptions
- Configurations: The authors of this article made some assumptions about the configurations in schools. I’ve worked in schools where there is only one teacher per grade level, and I currently work in a school where we have 4 or 5 classroom teachers at each grade level. We also have some teachers who are generalists – teaching all content areas to the same group of students, and then we have other teachers who are content-specific. In my current school, we are fortunate to have an embedded model for Special Education which means we have anywhere from 1-3 Special Educators on each grade level team – I’m well aware this is not true in all schools. The configuration of the school should be taken into consideration when designing PLC structures.
- Time: The authors of this article don’t specify how much time or what an example schedule would look like for PLCs, but there is an assumption that we have the time available to add PLCs to our schedules. Administrators are up against a lot of competing factors that can be barriers to supporting PLCs – and for me, it comes down to the teacher contract, scheduling needs, and a lack of adequate time that is essential when establishing and maintaining effective PLCs. I have tried a variety of different schedules over the years, and have been persistent in maintaining that PLCs are a priority, so we are now using 1 hour each week during our early-release time to ensure every grade level and department team has at least an hour to meet weekly. (Again, I know that we are unique – and most schools do not offer an early-release day for students.)
- Terminology: The authors of this article assume that all PLC members have a shared understanding/definitions of terminology, language, and experience in PLCs – when our realities are that we have teachers that are brand new to teaching, teachers who are joining us from different districts/states, and teachers who are veterans who may have only worked in this one school or one district with limited exposure to schools beyond this school/district. There’s an assumption that there is an aligned scope, sequence, and pacing for grade level and department curriculum. In one school I worked in, they used the term “Learning Targets” as student-friendly “I can” statements that explained the specific skill the students were working on developing and how they were going to demonstrate that skill by the end of that lesson, while my current district refers to “Learning Targets” as these broad, end-of-year goals based on the Common Core State Standards.
Agreements
Reflecting on your vision for the team involves various shifts as you gradually move your team to a higher level of maturity and share more responsibility with your team.
When we first started building a structure for PLCs in my building (7 years ago), we hired an outside “expert” in PLCs to help encourage belief in the PLC potential. As this was a new format and structure for teaching teams, and I was a new administrator at the time, I approached this first year as a very hands-on (aka micromanager) to offer support, structure, consistency, and accountability. I was the facilitator for every PLC meeting, I attended every meeting, I took the notes at every meeting, I set the agenda, etc. Then, I asked for feedback. (Is anyone noticing a trend here?!?! Oye.)
The next year, I asked for one volunteer from each grade level team to become their grade level rep/PLC Facilitator for the year. I still set the agenda and made the note template (so they were consistent in all the grade levels). I also attended as many PLC meetings as I could – but at this time, we still had PLCs taking place during the school day, and they were only 30 minutes per week. We also did not have consistent data to bring to the table each week. I received feedback at the end of this year, which led to…
I was completely hands-off the following year. We still had PLC Facilitators, but I did not create the agenda, notes doc, I did not attend the meetings, etc. The feedback I received that year was that the PLCs felt like a waste of time because there was no direction, guidance, support, or purpose. Teachers weren’t showing up to meetings, they considered it a waste of time, or a joke, or the agendas focused on logistics rather than student data. Teachers were asking for more structure and support – and I needed to strike a balance between my too-tight and too-loose approaches tried in the past.
As the years progressed, we continued to have PLC Facilitators, and we would meet monthly as a vertical PLC – which has been super helpful. I attend PLCs on occasion, when asked, or when I have the time. I have access to the notes, and teams tag me in the notes if they need my response. Agendas are co-created by the PLC Facilitators and team members. Roles have been assigned to each member of the PLC team – so everyone is a little more invested in participating in the meetings. Student data is the focus at every PLC meeting, because we’ve added another meeting time weekly to go over anything else that the team would like to discuss together. Over time, our PLCs have shifted from manager-led to become more self-managing and self-designing – and, continue to be a work-in-progress. We have come a LONG way, and I am looking forward to continuing this important work with our teaching teams.
Welcoming different voices and opinions allows for the intellectual friction that drives diverse thinking.
I completely agree with this statement from the article as well – I believe it is healthy to have discussion, debate, and hear a variety of perspectives. When done with an open mind and an assumption of best intentions (genuinely), these conversations can help us all grow. I do question how to help support this with PLC members – we have teachers who are professional, respectful, and avoid confrontation or uncomfortable conversations with colleagues. We also have members who are negative, and don’t follow the norms/agreements/commitments, but the facilitators struggle on ways to bring everyone back to the norms/agreements/commitments. This is something we are working on schoolwide but would love to hear how other schools have helped overcome this in their schools.
Arguments
This article says that PLCs should focus on a compelling purpose, instructional planning, and data analysis. Something that we struggle with in our building is trying to figure out the timing of when all 5 or 6 classroom teachers and special educators should be planning instruction throughout the school year. I hear from teachers that they are not all on the same pacing for units, which makes it challenging to collaborate on designing units/lessons together during PLC meetings. I agree that the teams should develop the lesson learning targets or intentions together and build consensus on success criteria, but then each teacher should be able to design their own lessons/student tasks to help students achieve those targets (build grade level skills). A lot of this work could take place during post-service, summer per diem work, and pre-service, if we didn’t also have to allow time for preparing learning spaces, safety trainings, school system overviews, and district initiatives. If we could answer the Q’s; what do students need to know, understand, and do this school year? AND how will they show what they know? PRIOR to the school year, then we could continue answering the next 2 PLC Q’s throughout the school year in PLC meetings; what will we do when they show proficiency?, what will we do when students are not yet demonstrating proficiency?
Aspirations
This will probably come as no surprise, that our PLC focus this year has been to expand our use of and knowledge of data analysis. To be more specific, we are continuing to work on identifying the ‘now what‘ phase of data analysis in our weekly PLC team meetings. We are collecting a lot of data, but we don’t always know what to do with that information, and how to make revisions to our curriculum or adjustments to our instruction as a collective grade level (or department) team. MANY of my teachers are looking at formative data daily or weekly and making adjustments in their own classroom with instruction and intervention.
I’d love to see our horizontally aligned (grade level and department teams) start to meet as vertically aligned PLCs to gain a better understanding of the grade level below and the grade level above the current grade level they are teaching. This will encourage deeper conversations among colleagues and build capacity for classroom teachers to meet the various learners’ needs – knowing what to do when students already demonstrate proficiency with grade-level skills and what to do when students are not yet demonstrating proficiency with grade-level skills.
Going back to the idea of the embedded model for Special Education, I’d love to see our teaching teams move towards co-teaching models, where general classroom teachers partner teacher with Special Educators, Multilingual Teachers, Speech Language Pathologists, Digital Learning Leaders, Diversity Equity & Inclusion Coaches, School Counselors, Instructional Coaches, etc. We have an enormous amount of expertise and talent in our buildings that we have yet to utilize effectively.
We are slowly shifting our culture to realize our shared responsibility for all students, where we see how we are interdependent on one another, and where we view the PLC process as embedded professional development that highlights the strengths, talents, and expertise of ALL educators (not just coaches, coordinators, leaders, etc.).