After observing many teacher meetings with the label of Professional Learning Community and having lots of discussions with administrators, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders responsible for the effectiveness of these meetings, I have separated the focus of each of these meetings into three categories.
All three of these purposes are valuable. I believe that understanding the desired outcome of a meeting is key to teachers knowing the participatory behaviors that are most productive for each. Everything being called a PLC interferes with participants being able to focus on the educator learning in true PLCs that leads to increased student success.
In a PWC teacher collaborative time is spent getting work done; tasks completed. Historically, most department, grade level, and middle school team meetings have been PWCs. I was first triggered to this thought when I realized many administrators had taken an activity previously called common planning time and renamed it PLC. Observing common planning sessions, I most often found teachers collaborating by divvying up the work that needed to get done. One teacher planned the 4th grade science unit, another planned the social studies unit, and a third mapped out writing assignments. One algebra teacher created the assessment for the first unit while another did the second or each teacher in the department is assigned a topic and creates 5 questions for the end of unit assessment.
Zachery Herrmann in an article titled, “Cooperate or Collaborate” pointed out that cooperative teams are most common in schools. Teachers share resources, coordinate joint efforts, work to improve processes, and build standardization and quality. Cooperation can be important in having teachers agree on what “mastering a standard” means. For 8th grade science teachers from two different middle schools to identify that students entering high school have mastered a standard takes substantial cooperation.
“Teachers on the team delegate tasks to each other to improve efficiencies, such as having one teacher photocopy materials for the entire team or having another teacher build a draft of an assessment rubric for the other teachers to use. Teachers work jointly to prepare activities and lesson plans, and grade student assessments together to ensure standard norms and practices are being used across classrooms. All of this activity has the potential to be mutually beneficial to teachers, the school, and the students they serve. However, there is often no understanding of what is occurring in each other’s classrooms as a common plan is implemented.’
In professional learning communities, purposeful teacher learning around how to increase student achievement is the focus. Teachers are collaboratively asking, “What do the students need us to learn?” In the research article, “Practices of Professional Learning Communities,” three professors from the University of Helsinki, Finland identify the following key characteristics of PLC’s.
- Shared norms, vision, values, and beliefs
- Shared and participative leadership
- Focus on student learning
- Group learning, individual learning: professional growth
- Continuous improvement, result orientation
- Culture of trust, respect, and supportive relationships
- Collegial relations, inclusive membership
- Mutual support and mutual obligation
- Reflective dialog, collective inquiry
- Action orientation and experimenting
What a great list for use in identifying how often your teachers are engaged in real PLCs. I often find that PLCs tackle too many things and therefore seldom work deep enough and long enough for teacher learning to impact student learning. When teams need time for PWC tasks, I suggest they identify a split agenda. The first twenty minutes of the time might be a PWC and the remaining 40 minutes is a PLC. The PWC portion probably has an ever-changing agenda based on current school issues and individual student/teacher needs and concerns. The PLC agenda should follow a longer-term focus working to learn how to change the student learning outcome.
Here is an example I developed with a middle school team from a small K-8 building. This team teaches grade 6, 7, and 8 students in all content areas. They decided to split their one hour a week common release time into PWC and PLC agendas. With a PLC desire to increase student achievement across all content areas, they developed a theory that if students set personal goals, established a set of behaviors to achieve that goal, and implemented self-discipline and self- assessment strategies to maintain repetition of the needed behaviors, student achievement would increase.
The team began by having the physical education teacher present the first instruction and practice with goal setting. Students identified the needed behaviors to reach a goal as part of a PE unit. Other team members later began implementing goal setting and planning into their units of study. The continuous exploration of the impact of teacher actions on student behaviors and learning outcomes generated individual and collaborative teacher learning. What is working? What isn’t working? What modifications might we make?
For me, this focus would be worthy of their PLC time for the year. What are the teacher behaviors necessary to teach, motivate, and coach the development of these goal setting skills? What are the initial indicators that students are changing their learning behaviors? Which students struggle most to develop the necessary self- discipline and how do we support them? How can we simplify processes for student self- assessment? When and how do we teach these skills? What are the first indicators that student goal setting is impacting student achievement?
What value might your staff gain from identifying when they are engaged in PWC or PLC functions?
