What are the compelling “whys” for teachers to invest their time and vulnerability in professional learning communities? How do professional learning communities differ from professional working communities? When are teachers meeting as a franchise vs meeting as a team with shared accountability? Shared goals and accountability for success are keys to effective PLCs.
Read “Professional learning vs. PD: The distinction matters” here.
Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.
[00:00:25.460] – Steve
Encouraging teacher participation in PLCs. I’m currently supporting a district that is implementing PLCs as a professional learning practice across their system, from early Family Childhood programs through elementary, middle, and high school and vocational departments. In some introductory sessions, I explored with the staff some why’s, compelling reasons for investing and learning in PLCs. I thought in this podcast, I’d share some of the elements that we explored. We first looked at the need for continuous learning on the part of all educators. The phrase that I’m using frequently with that is, “there is no mountaintop in teaching or leading within our schools.” There’s no fear that I’m going to master and learn everything I need to learn prior to retirement. As you’re climbing the mountain and it looks like you’re nearing the top, you break through a cloud to find there’s another whole area of learning out there to be explored. We then connected that conversation to look at the difference between professional learning and professional development. In an article titled, “Professional Learning versus PD: The Distinction Matters,” authors from the University of Utah describe the need to examine that difference, the difference between a PD mindset and a professional learning mindset.
[00:02:23.160] – Steve
You’ll find the link to the article in this podcast lead-in. The PD mindset, a appears in sporadic, one-time events, in-service sessions, guest speakers, webinars, and workshops that are not necessarily part of a larger plan or vision. Even when they are grounded in research, PD activities often do not align with school goals or promote educator voice and agency or encourage learning and community or respond effectively to students and teachers’ current needs. The PD mindset attempts a quick fix, where it offers a small dose of content that is not sufficient to stimulate change in thinking or practice or address systemic issues. The professional learning mindset centers around accelerating personal and collective learning and closing closing the knowing-doing gap, both for leaders and teachers. Shifting mindsets requires reframing the purpose for professional learning. This shift includes moving from delivering information to intentionally co-designing with teachers the learning and growth opportunities that are grounded in the evidence about what is needed most and what would be most effective. The authors suggested that words frequently indicate a PD or professional learning mindset. PD words we frequently hear could be training, workshop, guest speaker, famous name without a link to what will be learned.
[00:04:23.780] – Steve
Professional learning words would be outcomes, implementation, data, support for follow-up, experience, facilitation, equity, and standards. Effective PLCs place educators in an opportunity for professional learning mindsets. Since many types of meetings tend to get labeled as PLCs, I encourage educators to separate PWCs, PLCs, and PD sessions. PWCs are professional working communities, PLCs, professional learning communities, and PD, professional development sessions. PD might be a book study, workshops, or training from an instructional coach. It certainly has a role in supporting a teacher’s knowledge or skills base, but it usually stops short of professional learning that closes that learning-doing gap. PWCs, professional working communities, are places that teachers gather and cooperate in order to get work done. PWCs are important times and opportunities for teachers to have. Historically, they tended to be called common planning time or department meetings. In those sessions, teachers work together to get done what they know needs to be done. So the outcome of the PWC is work is completed. It might be planning a common formative assessment or scheduling conferences with parents or designing a field trip for students together. When you switch to a professional learning community, now the keyword is learning, which means in the professional learning community, teachers begin the conversation not knowing what needs to be done.
[00:06:42.040] – Steve
That’s really how I see PLCs separated from PWCs. The PLC is formed around the question, “what do our students need us to learn?” As teachers are looking at student current performance or learning or struggles, we’re making an assumption that we’re doing everything we know to do. And so we’re going to have to learn something. It might be learning something about the curriculum. It might be learning something about an instructional strategy. It might be learning something about our students. But that learning on the teacher’s part is going to lead to increased success for students. A key to an effective PLC is is that the PLC functions as a team. Listen to these words from Rick Dufour: “Educators who are building a professional learning community recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.” I have found it valuable to define team as I begin to work with folks starting PLCs, as most educators have called team meetings what I actually ended up labeling as franchise meetings. Here’s what I mean by that phrase. When a group of third-grade teachers go to a team meeting where they work together to plan for student learning, meeting, but they leave the meeting with individual accountability and responsibility for the success of their third-grade class, I label that a franchise.
[00:08:43.580] – Steve
Consider if you owned a franchise restaurant, you might go to meetings with other franchise holders, exchange tips, ideas, strategies, maybe even decide to do some marketing together, but you leave the meeting only accountable for the success of your individual store. When you move to functioning as a team, people do that work together, but now they take on a responsibility and an accountability for all the students. If three third-grade teachers are a PLC and there’s 90 third-grade students, each teacher has the accountability for each of those students to be successful. I’ve created a continuum for looking at teams that runs from teachers working as individuals to teachers working as franchise holders to being members of a team. All the way at the individual end of that continuum, people complain about having to go to a meeting, and their phrase is usually something like this, “This is my time. I should be doing my work.” As teachers begin to move towards franchise, they help each other, they share ideas, ideas, but there’s no accountability for me to take the ideas that people have shared with me or report back to people on what has happened. I label that as sharing.
[00:10:14.520] – Steve
It’s a good step forward, but teaming requires much more. At the franchise level on that continuum, people work together, plan together, but they implement things separately and are individually accountable accountable. As people move towards teaming, they begin to modify or change an individual teacher behavior to do something that the team has decided is most important for students. For example, it could be a group of freshman teachers selecting a common note-taking form that they’re going to teach to students. It might not be the one that I would choose to use, but I believe that our agreement to use a common one with the students moves the students further along. That’s moving towards teaming. But that last big step of becoming a team is when there’s shared accountability. One of the best examples that I had a chance to observe of that teamwork was a principal walking into a math department at a high school, putting down the names of a group of students who the year before failed the required end-of-course math test for freshman students in that state. He looked out at the department and said, I need a plan for those students. He wasn’t asking for a plan to come from the two teachers who would have those students in their class, he was asking for the plan to come from the department.
[00:11:52.820] – Steve
That kind of collaboration led to teachers who didn’t have those students in their classes going observing the students so that they would be more knowledgeable about putting a plan together to help those students. It also meant the teachers who had those students in their classes were bringing the student work and the teacher’s plans to the department meeting so that a shared plan could be put together. PLCs are teams driven by common goals, so that planning of the common goal becomes an important part of establishing an effective PLC. As I encourage the teachers in the district that I was supporting to begin experimenting with their first steps into working as PLCs, I encourage them to come up with a goal that they felt was important enough to invest their time and energy in. And those goals had to be connected to student growth and success. Then I asked them to form a hypothesis as to how they would look at achieving that goal. Then carrying out the actions of their hypothesis and along the way, gathering data and evidence that either reinforced the hypothesis that they had implemented or led to modification of their plan. Here’s an example of such a goal, hypothesis, plan, implementation, and collecting evidence.
[00:13:41.800] – Steve
A middle school cross-curricular PLC is setting a goal to improve student writing. Here’s their initial hypothesis. Too often, we do not provide a real, authentic audience and purpose purpose for student writing. By doing so, we believe we can increase student engagement and effort in their writing, and thus create perseverance and willingness to rewrite and to struggle in order to achieve their writing purpose. We believe more authentic writing will motivate continued and improved student writing outcomes. Their Plan. As we gather more knowledge about our students, we will plan for four authentic writing for purpose activities during the year. We’ll set substantial time aside for writing in class, and expectations for out-of-class time will also be shared. Student peer exchanges and peer coaching of each other’s writing will be encouraged. Here’s the plan for tracking evidence. The first evidence that we’ll gather is that the authentic writing tasks have been designed, laid out, and implemented with students. Second, we’ll look to see whether those activities have impacted student learning production behaviors during writing time. Can we see a difference in student engagement in their writing? And lastly, we’ll be looking at student learning outcomes that show up in students’ writing.
[00:15:40.040] – Steve
The complexity of the goals that teachers are being asked and that teachers are making commitments to achieve with their students require our ongoing support for teachers’ continuous professional learning. Effective PLCs create that opportunity. Thanks for listening, folks. You can contact me at barkleyypd.com. I’d love to explore your thoughts about increasing the positive impact of effective PLCs.
[00:16:22.600] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
