Professional Learning Communities

“If there is anything that the research community agrees on, it is this: The right kind of continuous, structured teacher collaboration improves the quality of teaching and pays big, often immediate, dividends in student learning and professional morale in virtually any setting.”

DeFour

The Three Big Ideas

• Ensure That Students Learn

• Build a Culture of Collaboration

• Place a Focus on Results

Ensuring That Students Learn

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

“The PLC model flows from the assumption that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. The shift from a teaching focus to a learning focus has profound implications for schools.” DuFour

Professional Learning Communities

• DuFour’s PLC based on doing whatever it takes for all students to succeed.

• Paradigm shift from it’s my job to make learning available to it’s my job to make students achieve.

• Learning is required. • Students can and will be successful

here. • Students may not choose to fail.

Ensuring that all students learn critical corollary questions• What is it we expect them to learn?• How will we know when they have

learned it? (FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT)• How will we respond when they don’t

learn?– Interventions

• How will we respond when they already know it?

Key to improved results:• Team meets to identify essential and

valued student learning, • Develop common formative

assessments,• Analyze current levels of

achievement, • Set achievement goals and then • Share and create lessons and

strategies to improve upon those levels.

Common Formative Assessments

• Clarify 8-10 essential outcomes per semester• Develop at least 4 common assessments per year• Establish proficiency standards for each

assessment (what is the score needed to be proficient?)

• Analyze results (average score, number proficient, percent proficient in different areas (predictions, compare/contrast, main idea, etc.) Look at individual student proficiency and objectives. Use the information to intervene and enrich and organize student groups.

• Develop and implement strategies to improve results.

PLC’s provide a systematic response to students who are not learning using the results from the common formative

assessments. The students and skills are then identified for intervention and enrichment.

• Increased levels of time and support when the student is not being successful

• Response is increasingly directive, not invitational – required, no opting out

• Response is timely (at first indication of difficulty)

• Response is systematic and structured

SPEED intervention criteria• Systematic – school-wide, independent of

individual teacher• Practical – affordable, sustainable,

replicable• Effective – available and operational early

in the school year, flexible entrance and exit criteria

• Essential – agreed upon standards and outcomes. Targeted to student learning needs

• Directive – mandatory, during the regular school day, can’t opt out

Learning organizations are “organizations where

people continually expand their capacities

to create the results they truly desire.”

Peter Senge

Culture of Collaboration

Group IQ “While a group can be no

smarter than the sum total of the knowledge and skills of its members, it can be much “dumber” if its internal workings don’t allow people to share their talents.”

Robert Sternberg (1988)

What is a Team?A group of

people working together

towards a common goal.

What is Collaboration? A systematic process in

which we work together, interdependently to analyze and impact

professional practice in order to improve our individual and

collective results.

Dufour, Dufour, & Eaker (2002)

Four Types of Collaborative Cultures

• Individualistic (Isolation, Closed Door Technique)– Regard intrusion of adults as invasion of privacy

• Balkanized (Big kids w/ issues)– Deep-rooted cliques, align themselves w/

• Contrived Collegiality (Fake, Surface Dwellers)– How was your weekend? How’s your test scores?

• Collaborative (True Believers, Work Toward Education for All)– Analysis of the data to discover ways of improving

learning. Failure is Not an Option, Blankstein, 2004

What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School?, Fullan and Hargreaves, 1996

Collaborative Team @ School/District

A group of people working interdependently to

achieve a common goal about learning, for which

members are mutually accountable.

Collaborate What? congeniality and focus on building group

camaraderie

consensus on operational issues

discipline, technology, social climate, field trips, attendance,

tardiesWhat do students need to learn and be able to do?

How do we know students are learning it?

What will we do if the students have not learned it?

What will we do if students have learned it?

Collaboration

Focus on Results

Process of Working Together

Ensure Student Learning

Key Idea # 3

AFocus

OnRESULTS

PLCs judge their effectiveness on the

basis of

RESULTS !

1-Identify current level of student achievement2-Establish goals to improve current level3-Work together to achieve goals4-PROVIDE PERIODIC EVIDENCE OF PROGRESS

Data Rich/Information Poor

Data Rich/Information Poor

Data Data

DataData

Data

DRIP Data

In a PLC…. Teachers share AND COMPARE their RESULTS from Formative Assessment and/or Common Cumulative tests.

They quickly learn which teammate has been particularly effective in teaching a certain skill.The othersreplicate theeffective practice!

Professional Learning Communities Excuses!

They

are

all

OU

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tude

nts.

RESULTS Focused!

The rise or fall of the PLC concept depends on the most important element of any school…

the commitment and persistence of the educators within it!