Time spent in PLCs should produce increased student learning. Listen in on thoughts from several experienced school leaders who have interacted with Steve and shared indicators that suggest your PLCs are on the right track or might need modifications to increase their impact on student learning.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.220] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.880] – Steve
Why invest in PLCs? I’ve recently signed on to work with a school system that is wanting to implement PLCs next year as a process to increase educator learning that would positively impact student learning and student success. PLCts are going to be brand new for this system. My first steps are to work with a leadership planning team that’s exploring the best process for successful PLC implementation. I planned to start with the team identifying their common thoughts about what happens in PLCs that effectively produce the desired outcomes. I looked back in my earlier podcast for some resources that could trigger their initial thinking. This podcast shares some thoughts from educators who have engaged earlier with me in conversations about PLCs. This first clip shares thoughts from Mike Mattos and Anthony Muhammad, two of the authors of, “Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work, Fourth Edition.” I asked them to describe what is a PLC. Mike began with these comments.
[00:02:00.860] – Mike
I’ll start by giving a bit of clarification on what it isn’t that we hear a lot, and that is a lot of people, when they would term PLC, they reference it as a collaborative teacher team. But in the PLC at Work process, the process first created by Dr. Rick DeFord, Dr. Bob Aker, they consider the larger organization being the professional learning community. If a school commits to the process, the school’s the PLC. If a district commits to the process, the district is the PLC. We think that’s an important clarification because the ultimate goal of a professional learning community is to ensure high levels of learning for all students that that school or district serves, as well as the adults that serve within it. If you think about what it would take to ensure, to make certain that every student learned that the highest levels needed to succeed next next year and ultimately leave with the skills and knowledge and behaviors academically needed for success in their adult life, then a collaborative teacher team, a second-grade team in an elementary school, a math department in a middle school, a science department in a high school, they can’t alone meet the learning needs of all kids.
[00:03:19.140] – Mike
It would take the collective efforts. I like how you captured it so well in your intro there. That is, it’s through our collective knowledge and skills, the diversity of expertise and experience that that larger organization has that would take to achieve that mission of high levels of learning for all. To officially think about how we define a PLC, we would talk about this way: It’s a never-ending process in which teachers work collaboratively to commit to collective increase building shared knowledge of best practice, both through research and through field study, and experimentation, applying what they’ve learned on behalf of their students to achieve higher levels of learning. It’s about job-embedded adult learning with an assumption that the better the adults in the building do their job, the more kids are going to learn. One last point here. I think sometimes as educators, we make ourselves into a victim mindset. We look at the factors outside of a child’s school life that we can’t directly control. Economics at home, parental involvement, sometimes educational regulations that come from above us that are not always aligned to best practice. We use those as reasons why kids don’t learn instead of looking internally, thinking about what we can control and what can we have a lot of influence on, pedagogy, instruction, curriculum, assessment, interventions
[00:04:51.720] – Mike
Those are the things that have the greatest impact upon student learning. The better adults get at what they do, and not hoping PD happens at a conference now and then or a couple of PD days within the school year, but embedding that collective inquiry every single week as part of our professional responsibilities, that’s our best hope to improving student achievement.
[00:05:30.270] – Steve
Anthony, anything you’d plug in, add on there, another piece?
[00:05:35.350] – Anthony
The only thing I would add is I think Mike did a great job encapsulating what we mean by a PLC at work, is that the P in the PLC stands for professional. And a professional is not just one who goes through a rite of passage or some course of study to enter the field, but who is expected to continue to evolve with the evolving knowledge base in the field. It’s the assumption that a research-based profession continues to grow. And when teachers get a chance to learn, experiment, and grow, that their professionalism, their effectiveness improves. This is a huge culture shift from the tradition in American education that once I become licensed, my responsibility is to teach. Well, you become better at teaching when you become a learner. If teams and schools could make that shift alone, we’d see great dividends when it comes to improving student comprehension and student learning and outcomes.
[00:06:36.010] – Steve
Mike’s and Anthony’s focus on educator learning in PLCs reinforces my refrain about the difference between PLCs and PWCs. PWCs, teacher working communities, are teachers collaborating to get work done. A good thing to do, and the outcome is work completed. In PLCs, PLC’s, the outcome is teacher learning because we aren’t sure what to do. We look at student work and we ask the question, what do our students need us to learn? That teacher learning focuses on increasing student success. I also envision an outcome of PLCs being increased teacher empowerment, a move from involving teachers to increased teacher agency. Listen in on a conversation that I had about empowerment in PLCs with Kelly Hastings when she was a principal at a junior high school.
[00:07:42.080] – Kelly
I have to empower my teachers so that they have autonomy to do their job. So that was a realization for me when I first became a principal that I thought I had to have all the answers and I had to direct everything. And I realized that unless teachers have the autonomy, unless they are empowered, that that’s never going to happen. And so my last couple of years has been learning how to lead teachers in a better way so that we can actually have those outcomes. So that is why I applied for that Learning Forward grant to transition my leadership style so that teachers can be empowered so that we can empower our kids.
[00:08:31.960] – Steve
Thanks. Last year, I wrote a blog about empowering teachers in professional learning communities. And I wrote it because I first found a site by Mind Steps in a blog that they had posted that talked about compliant learners versus engaged learners. When I read that, it struck me that I thought I was observing too many PLCs where teachers were being compliant participants, carrying out whatever it was that they were asked to do, more than being empowered to, I guess, be innovative and designers – let me read the I’ll raise this to you that I found in that article, and then I’m wondering if you’d respond to it. It describes that compliant learners follow directions with minimal prompting. They timely complete explicit procedures. They focus on task completion. They respond to straightforward questions rather than deep critical thinking or questioning. And they complete work with no expectation for personal relevance. I think I’ve seen that in some PLCs. Your thoughts?
[00:10:08.170] – Kelly
That is what goes on in a lot of PLCs that I’ve observed as well. And I read your blog, and it was really an aha for me because that is what I have asked teachers to do in the past. Here are the questions to answer. Be accountable so that I can make sure you’re doing what you need to do. And it just needs to be more than that. I had to do cognitive reflection and say, okay, so what is the balance between accountability and empowerment? And so reading more about that, how do we empower people and hold them accountable is let them know this is what we want in the end. However you get there is okay. And so that’s what we have evolved to, is letting teachers figure out their own way. They’re good people. I have hired amazing teachers, and some were here before I got here. We have a great, great staff. So I need to let them do their job like what Steve Jobs said.
[00:11:28.680] – Steve
Yeah. That Steve And perhaps, quote is, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” One of the elements that I found, Jim Knight and I had this conversation that a lot of instructional coaches time was being spent in working with teachers in PLC. Perhaps initially, the thought was that the role of the coach would be to teach teachers, coach teachers on how to have effective PLCs. But what seems to have happened instead is that the coaches ended up being responsible for the PLC. So the teachers come to the PLC meeting and they’re looking for the coaches to, in effect, map out what they need to do. And I describe it almost to the point of, if we have a PLC that isn’t effective, we can blame the coach for it rather than the members of the PLC having to take ownership for not having effectively spent the time that they were just working together?
[00:12:49.030] – Kelly
That definitely happened our first couple of years of implementing PLCs. At this point, the I have teachers who want to do a good job and want to take ownership. So that last couple of years hasn’t been an issue for us because they do take ownership, and they want to lead their PLCs and engage with their professionals the way that they want to be treated. And so while our instructional coach can provide support if they need it, answer questions if they need it, our level leaders, our teachers, do a good job of leading those PLCs. But it took some time to get there.
[00:13:43.550] – Steve
Kelly’s focus on empowering PLCs reinforces a statement that I often make to principals about effective PLCs. Quality PLCs will often generate problems for administrators.
[00:13:57.210] – Steve
You might call them positive problems.
[00:13:59.950] – Steve
You see, strong PLCs continually are generating ideas that require some change to better serve students. Leaders should be working to support those changes to reinforce teachers’ goals of increased successful outcomes for students. Lastly, let’s listen in to a few other thoughts about effective PLCs from Darby Tobolka, who had several years of experience experience implementing and supporting PLCs as part of her instructional coaching role. I asked Darby to identify some observable indicators that PLC time is being used effectively.
[00:14:46.950] – Darby
So some of the things I think really show effective PLC time is setting clear expectations on what that time together looks like beyond just the agenda. So thinking about what teams are tight about and what things are loose about, and then how they can make their time together the most efficient. I think focusing on the learning piece of student work, really getting in and digging into student work, studying what students are doing after what your team is planned, I think is very important to be an effective PLC.
[00:15:23.680] – Steve
I’m pretty big on that if I’m observing PLC and student work isn’t on the table most of the time, that’s probably an indicator that the focus is going more on teaching than on learning. Does that match up with what you were saying there?
[00:15:47.300] – Darby
It does. And I will be honest and say this is a growth area. I think that early on, I felt like PLCs were great for students, but for teachers, teachers, it was really good because they got all on the same page about what they were doing, but it was more teacher-focused. But the more I’ve learned and grown and experienced lots of different PLCs, I’ve noticed that the power is actually in the student work, and we’ve got to figure out how to get teams ready and comfortable with that piece rather than focusing on the curriculum and the planning piece.
[00:16:22.800] – Steve
It’s interesting that you say that because what’s emerged for me is that my favorite PLC question is, what do the kids need us to learn?
[00:16:34.600] – Steve
So if we’re looking at student work, what should emerge from that is what we would have to learn to move student work from where it is to where we want it to be.
[00:16:48.800] – Darby
Absolutely. I would say, to me, that’s a higher functioning PLC. So once you can finally get to that place, you know that you are doing all you can. I’ve been exploring an idea lately. I’ve brought it up to a couple of our teams that I work with, and it’s about the flow of the PLC time, too. The magic of the interdependence of the teams together. Some teams I’ve worked with have been… The facilitator says, okay, this is what we’re talking about. They’ll ask a question, somebody will respond, and then we’ll move on. But the most highly effective ones – all members are throwing their ideas into the conversation. They’re bouncing back and forth off of each other. They’re really all engaged, and there seems to be some flow about it. Those are the ones that I’ve realized have been the most effective, really. Teams leave knowing that. They leave feeling accomplished.
[00:17:54.800] – Steve
As I begin supporting a leadership team in the design of their PLC process, I’ll share these resources and others. I’d appreciate any input you might share on other items that I should have this group consider, either as we begin the PLC implementation or further along into the process. You can always reach me at barclipd. Com. Thanks for listening.
[00:18:24.410] – Steve
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
