Tag: facilitation strategies

Professional Learning Communities don’t automatically produce collaboration or impact. They often require skilled facilitation to keep the focus on high quality learning for all students and teachers. A facilitator provides the structure, prompts, and emotional conditions that help members engage deeply, share openly, and turn reflection into meaningful next steps. How can facilitators plan for the beginning, middle, and end of PLC sessions?

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.240] – 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.

[00:00:29.480] – Steve
Some Strategies for Facilitating PLCs. In an earlier podcast, Mike Mattos and Anthony Mohammed, the authors of, “Learning by Doing, Fourth Edition,” define PLCs as “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in reoccurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”

[00:01:02.100] – Steve
PLCs operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators. Professional learning communities don’t automatically produce collaboration or impact. They tend to require skilled facilitation to keep the focus on high-quality learning for all students and teachers. A facilitator provides the structure, prompts, and emotional conditions that help members of a PLC engage deeply share openly, and turn reflection into meaningful next steps. Over time, effective facilitation helps build trust, shared responsibility, and the team team’s own capacity to sustain powerful learning together. Skilled facilitation ensures that every voice is heard, and it builds trust in the structure needed for authentic collaboration. Over time, strong facilitation develops a team’s own capacity to self-direct, sustaining a continuous cycle of reflection, risk-taking, and improved outcomes for students. In an article titled, “Every Team Needs a Super Facilitator,” found in the Harvard Business Review, Jamil Zaki outlines some important super facilitation elements. “Effective facilitators tune in and balance participation. They notice who isn’t speaking, and they create gentle invitations for those voices. In diverse groups, the outlier perspective often holds an insight that can shift a team’s understanding. Without facilitation, those perspectives can be lost.

[00:03:21.920] – Steve
Rather than allowing confident voices to dominate, facilitators intentionally distribute air time. This ensures the diversity of thought surfacing in the conversation. Effective facilitators build psychological safety and structure independence.” Zaki stresses that trust is the foundation of collective intelligence. Psychological safety, the belief that you can speak up without fear of judgment, is essential if people are to share unpolished ideas or to challenge prevailing assumptions. Before discussions begin, super facilitators often collect independent inputs. This might happen with written reflections, polls, or silent brainstorming. This helps prevent early dominant voices from shaping the whole conversation. Teams make better decisions when independent thinking precedes group discussion. Effective facilitators embrace challenge. They prevent groupthink by encouraging dissent. Easy agreement is often a warning sign that the team hasn’t thought deeply enough. The best facilitators slow things down and ask what might be missing. “Who sees this differently?” Collaborative teams often actively lean into differences and explore the complexity of the problem. While this collaborative approach may not help a team reach a solution more quickly, members don’t forfeit the opportunity to collectively deepen their understanding of a problem. Elizabeth Dottie’s blogs, found on PricewaterhouseCoopers, provide some insights for facilitators to consider regarding the opening, middle, and end of sessions.

[00:05:44.760] – Steve
Regarding openings, she writes that most of us need to warm up to get into a creative spirit. Neuroscience tells us that to do this well, people must feel welcome and connect with one another. As a rule, the sooner people speak, the more engaged they will be throughout the meeting. In a smaller group, a facilitator might provide an opening question for everyone to respond to. It could be something like, “When did a student put a smile on your face this week?” If the group is larger, you might form pairs or triads. The key is that everyone talks. Next, it’s the facilitator’s job to bring the purpose of the meeting, the purpose of this PLC, to life, to activate people’s interest in the challenge or the task at hand. This is the reason that I’m a big fan of PLCs having minutes and agendas, notes from our last session and an agenda for this one. If our last meeting ended by setting an agenda for this PLC, we should be ready to move forward and make progress. For the middle of the session, Dottie suggests that you choose a prompt to focus the discussion. Usually, that’s framed as a question.

[00:07:15.580] – Steve
A strong prompt is specific enough that people can respond without too much effort and broad enough to invite diverse views and new thinking. The ideal stimulus meets three criteria. One, it gets people oriented or reoriented to the task and relevant context. Two, it adds something new to their thinking. Three, if possible, it sparks some emotion. The more vivid and concrete, the better. I often describe this element as the facilitator providing a spark. The spark can frequently be student work or student concerns, and it leads a conversation among the participants with the facilitator recognizing when the time is right to move to the next step or action. Taking action is key to PLC members finding value in their PLC time. PLC time should be sacred. It should be a space for educators to collaborate, reflect, and most importantly, move the needle for students. But somewhere along the line, many PLCs often lose steam. Their meetings can become routine, the goals can get fuzzy, and what was once a promising structure starts to feel like just another meeting. The ending – tight timelines, such as the start of the next class period, can lead to rushed endings, and this can leave members feeling stressed with what was left in the air or sensing that their time may have just been wasted.

[00:09:17.460] – Steve
Dottie provides suggestions for facilitators concerning meeting endings. Queue the close. A usual meeting process is open, narrow, close. Queuing the members to be narrowing can increase the likelihood of ending with an action. I’ve suggested that often for a PLC, 20 minutes of a discussion should lead to action. That action may not be that we have a plan to implement. It could be that we have raised questions that need to be explored so that we start the next meeting with information that leads us forward. Discussing a struggling student, members might ask for information from last year’s teacher, specialist teacher’s experiences, or the student’s interest outside school. The team can make commitments for different members to go gather pieces of information prior to our next PLC meeting. Call for the decision. Agreement on how a decision will be reached should be part of the PLC norms and/or decided upon before the group begins exploring options on a particular decision. Is the group under a fixed deadline for a decision to be reached in this meeting? Or is there time to leave the meeting to explore further and decide at the next meeting? Is the decision a critical one and time must be made available for coming to a consensus?

[00:11:03.420] – Steve
Or is a majority view decision agreeable to the members? Commitment to the decision is needed in either case. Outline next steps and open questions. If a decision was reached and action is to begin, it’s critical that the next steps with a suggested timeline are stated. If the decision was delayed, what are the questions that still need to be explored? What research does the group desire to gather? Again, this is why I’m such a big fan of minutes being taken at PLC meetings and forwarded to members along with the agenda for the next meeting. Most PLC sessions end with homework to be completed prior to the next session. Nothing is worse than starting the next meeting with different expectations of what was agreed to be done or what data was agreed to be collected and brought to this meeting. Minutes encourage the commitment of team members. I also believe that reading minutes assist administrators in assessing how PLC time is being invested. Some schools share minutes with everyone or with all the PLC facilitators. This encourages teaming across PLCs using each other as a resource. Having quality PLC time requires each member to take some responsibility for the group’s effectiveness.

[00:12:51.060] – Steve
All members learning facilitation skills, which certainly are also applied in a classroom, can advance greater learning and success. School leaders should consider providing opportunities for training and coaching feedback on facilitation skills. As members fulfill PLC commitments, trust builds among the team. Increased trust leads to members being more vulnerable, which increases risk-taking and increases members learning, of course, leading to increased student learning. That’s a great, strong upward spiral. I hope you found some thoughts and strategies to consider as you either facilitate a PLC or look at providing coaching feedback to your colleagues who are. Thanks for listening. And as always, you can find me at barkleypd.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts or additions to this topic of facilitation.

[00:14:03.220] – 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, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkelypd.com.

Podcast: Some Strategies for Facilitating PLCs