professional learning communities
DESCRIPTION
Professional Learning Communities. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Professional Learning Communities
“If there is anything that the research community agrees on, it is this: The right kind of continuous, structured teacher collaboration improves the quality of teaching and pays big, often immediate, dividends in student learning and professional morale in virtually any setting.”
DeFour
The Three Big Ideas
• Ensure That Students Learn
• Build a Culture of Collaboration
• Place a Focus on Results
Ensuring That Students Learn
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
“The PLC model flows from the assumption that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. The shift from a teaching focus to a learning focus has profound implications for schools.” DuFour
Professional Learning Communities
• DuFour’s PLC based on doing whatever it takes for all students to succeed.
• Paradigm shift from it’s my job to make learning available to it’s my job to make students achieve.
• Learning is required. • Students can and will be successful
here. • Students may not choose to fail.
Ensuring that all students learn critical corollary questions• What is it we expect them to learn?• How will we know when they have
learned it? (FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT)• How will we respond when they don’t
learn?– Interventions
• How will we respond when they already know it?
Key to improved results:• Team meets to identify essential and
valued student learning, • Develop common formative
assessments,• Analyze current levels of
achievement, • Set achievement goals and then • Share and create lessons and
strategies to improve upon those levels.
Common Formative Assessments
• Clarify 8-10 essential outcomes per semester• Develop at least 4 common assessments per year• Establish proficiency standards for each
assessment (what is the score needed to be proficient?)
• Analyze results (average score, number proficient, percent proficient in different areas (predictions, compare/contrast, main idea, etc.) Look at individual student proficiency and objectives. Use the information to intervene and enrich and organize student groups.
• Develop and implement strategies to improve results.
PLC’s provide a systematic response to students who are not learning using the results from the common formative
assessments. The students and skills are then identified for intervention and enrichment.
• Increased levels of time and support when the student is not being successful
• Response is increasingly directive, not invitational – required, no opting out
• Response is timely (at first indication of difficulty)
• Response is systematic and structured
SPEED intervention criteria• Systematic – school-wide, independent of
individual teacher• Practical – affordable, sustainable,
replicable• Effective – available and operational early
in the school year, flexible entrance and exit criteria
• Essential – agreed upon standards and outcomes. Targeted to student learning needs
• Directive – mandatory, during the regular school day, can’t opt out
Learning organizations are “organizations where
people continually expand their capacities
to create the results they truly desire.”
Peter Senge
Culture of Collaboration
Group IQ “While a group can be no
smarter than the sum total of the knowledge and skills of its members, it can be much “dumber” if its internal workings don’t allow people to share their talents.”
Robert Sternberg (1988)
What is a Team?A group of
people working together
towards a common goal.
What is Collaboration? A systematic process in
which we work together, interdependently to analyze and impact
professional practice in order to improve our individual and
collective results.
Dufour, Dufour, & Eaker (2002)
Four Types of Collaborative Cultures
• Individualistic (Isolation, Closed Door Technique)– Regard intrusion of adults as invasion of privacy
• Balkanized (Big kids w/ issues)– Deep-rooted cliques, align themselves w/
• Contrived Collegiality (Fake, Surface Dwellers)– How was your weekend? How’s your test scores?
• Collaborative (True Believers, Work Toward Education for All)– Analysis of the data to discover ways of improving
learning. Failure is Not an Option, Blankstein, 2004
What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School?, Fullan and Hargreaves, 1996
Collaborative Team @ School/District
A group of people working interdependently to
achieve a common goal about learning, for which
members are mutually accountable.
Collaborate What? congeniality and focus on building group
camaraderie
consensus on operational issues
discipline, technology, social climate, field trips, attendance,
tardiesWhat do students need to learn and be able to do?
How do we know students are learning it?
What will we do if the students have not learned it?
What will we do if students have learned it?
Collaboration
Focus on Results
Process of Working Together
Ensure Student Learning
Key Idea # 3
AFocus
OnRESULTS
PLCs judge their effectiveness on the
basis of
RESULTS !
1-Identify current level of student achievement2-Establish goals to improve current level3-Work together to achieve goals4-PROVIDE PERIODIC EVIDENCE OF PROGRESS
Data Rich/Information Poor
Data Rich/Information Poor
Data Data
DataData
Data
DRIP Data
In a PLC…. Teachers share AND COMPARE their RESULTS from Formative Assessment and/or Common Cumulative tests.
They quickly learn which teammate has been particularly effective in teaching a certain skill.The othersreplicate theeffective practice!
Professional Learning Communities Excuses!
They
are
all
OU
R s
tude
nts.
RESULTS Focused!
The rise or fall of the PLC concept depends on the most important element of any school…
the commitment and persistence of the educators within it!