How to set your PLCs_

Leyraliz Hernández Cabiya Sandra Contreras Maria Bruzon

How to set your PLCs?

“The professional learning community process, properly executed, can deliver dramatically improved teaching and learning. But too often it’s followed incorrectly and gains fail to materialize.” The futility of PLC Lite Douglas Reeves and Rick DuFour March 1, 2016

Why do we do PLC?

#1. Work together in collaborative teams rather than in isolation and take collective responsibility for student learning. #2. Establish a guaranteed and viable curriculum that specifies the knowledge, skills, and dispositions students are expected to acquire, unit by unit.

When educators are working in a school that is truly a PLC, they recognize they must:

#3. Use an assessment process that includes frequent, team-developed, common formative assessments based on the guaranteed and viable curriculum. #4. Use the results of common formative assessments to:

• Identify students who need additional time and support for learning.
• Identify students who would benefit from enriched or extended learning.
• Identify and address areas of individual strengths or weaknesses in teaching based on the evidence of student learning.
• Identify and address areas where none of the team members were able to bring students to the desired level of proficiency.

When educators are working in a school that is truly a PLC, they recognize they must:

#1. What do we want students to learn? #2. How will we know if they have learned it? #3. What will we do if they have not learned it? #4. How will we provide extended learning opportunities for students who have mastered the content?

The Four Questions:

Group Roles

You need to build capacity and leadership among your team and ensure everyone develops ownership of the work that is being done. Is all hands on deck. Assigning roles will hold everyone accountable and engaged

Setting Norms

• Prepare:

Materials ready: AISD Blueprint Lesson Plans (IPGs), Blueprint content in BLEND, Lead4ward TEKS resources, classroom materials/resources to support student learning ↩️ Data-Driven Planning: Cycles with PLC Weekly Data Meetings Preview: Review the AISD Blueprint Lesson Plan(s) to internalize the design for student learning. Assign roles, review PLC norms, use a timer, use a note-taking template Who: Who might we include in this meeting? How will we leverage inclusion support in today’s PLC conversation?

• Map out the week
• See it
• Name it
• Do it

Planning Meeting instructions

Planning Meeting

These assessments can also be formative if:

• They’re used to identify students who aren’t yet able to demonstrate proficiency;
• Those students receive additional time and support for learning through a timely process of systematic intervention that never removes them from new direct instruction;
• Students have another opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned; and
• Teachers use the evidence of student learning to inform and improve their individual and collective professional practice.

Common Assessments

Formative assessments not only align with instruction and academic standards but also extend beyond traditional test preparation that too frequently dominates classroom time.

Common Assessments

The most effective examples of data analyses involve not the scores from the previous year but rather from the previous unit. Most important, this is not an exercise in “looking at data” as if we were looking at strange animals in the zoo. The best examples of data analysis lead to specific actions by teachers and administrators so that an examination of the data leads to interventions and changes in instruction, feedback, and support.

Data Meeting Instructions

Data Meeting

The most effective interventions are not the repetition of previous unsuccessful teaching; rather, they employ systematic, intensive, focused, and immediate individual or small-group instruction.

Interventions

Questions

Real PLCs include specific interventions that lead to measurable improvements in student performance. When the PLC process is implemented deeply and sustained over time, schools can experience dramatic improvement in learning by both students and adults. PLC Lite is an exercise in futility that helps neither students nor the educational systems that serve them.

Real PLCs