PLCs: Fake trend alert?
I’ve sat through consultants’ presentations, I’ve read the books, I have visited schools trying to achieve this, but no matter how hard I try I still don’t understand what “professional learning community” actually means, besides a commitment for a school’s staff to collaborate in figuring out how to help students. Shouldn’t that happen as a matter of course? Yes, I know it often doesn’t, but do we need a nebulous phrase, expensive materials, a movement?
Please, reporters, don’t repeat that phrase until you can find a jargon-free and meaningful way to explain to readers what it means and how it differs from what was going on before.
Please, reporters, don’t repeat that phrase until you can find a jargon-free and meaningful way to explain to readers what it means and how it differs from what was going on before.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
2:33 PM
4 Comments:
My take -- and I'm something of an outsider to the process -- is that collaboration used to be fairly informal. Some teachers got together after school and talked, some viewed their classrooms as self-contained little worlds, and the principal was agnostic on the matter. Official staff meeting were for "business" -- what paperwork needed to be handed in, the rules for the lunchroom, etc -- and not a place where students or pedagogy was discussed.
PLCs are a framework for organizing collaboration, and principals are generally leaders of the process.
That said, I've read some of the books and looked at websites about it, and I find the "movement" aspect a little disconcerting. The underlying message sometimes seems to be, if this doesn't work there must be something wrong with your commitment to the process, which can get very stifling.
I'll just describe what I see each week in my student teaching placement in a second grade classroom:
I see a meeting focused on the nuts and bolts of improving lessons so that they make more sense to students. For instance, in yesterday's meeting, five second grade teachers deconstructed a series of lessons on writing realistic fiction. They talked about what was working with their students and what wasn't working. One teacher explained that students frequently got hung up on taking a story from a "story arc" diagram to a booklet with pages and sentences and paragraphs; her students were simply copying the phrases from the story arc diagram into their booklets. At that point, another teacher explained how she approached this problem--she gave specific examples of the language she used and showed some chart paper with steps on it that she found helped the students over this hurdle.
The school where I'm interning considers this group of five teachers--when they're engaged in this type of activity--to be a PLC. Call it whatever you want to, but this seems to me to be the exact type of professional collaboration that will improve student performance in the classroom. It's teachers sharing their experience and knowledge in a focused, specific way.
At least, this is what it looks like from my point of view.
Should it happen as a matter of course? Yes, it should. But because it takes energy and a commitment outside of the meeting to be prepared--and not to mention a teacher's willingness to throw open his or her lesson plans for modification and evaluation--it doesn't happen as often as it should. If it takes calling this a "movement" to make it popular, can't we be okay with that?
Agreed. I've been in PLCs in three different schools in three different districts, and they've all functioned pretty differently, some vastly more effective than others.
You are right that “as a matter of course…a school’s staff [should] collaborate in figuring out how to help students.” However, that has not been and is still not the prevailing practice in this country’s public schools.
Traditionally, teachers have worked in isolation. Most teachers have their own classrooms where they spend the school day interacting with one or more classes of students. Teachers may only see and communicate with their colleagues in the teachers’ lounge, on the playground or during lunch, or at faculty meetings. Most schools do not provide time for teachers to regularly meet and collaborate in small groups. A notable exception is some middle schools that organize teachers into instructional teams and provide an extra period during the school day for the teams to confer and plan. And even in these cases, most schools do not have a systematic process in place for spreading good practices from classroom to classroom and ensuring all students benefit from the knowledge and expertise that resides within all teachers.
We define “professional learning community” as an intentional improvement process that requires educators learn and work together to increase classroom effectiveness and student performance. Its components require, at a minimum, (a) organized teams of teachers, (b) regularly scheduled and protected time for collaboration, (c) leadership and facilitation for each team, (d) a focus on developing new knowledge and skills and (e) ongoing assessments to gauge progress in achieving goals for improving classroom instruction and student learning.
What a school labels as a “professional learning community” may or may not be consistent with practices researchers have identified as essential for it to be effective. Education writers can perform a valuable service by not only describing professional learning communities but by reporting whether, how, and to what extent it leads to improvement in teaching and student learning.
Stephanie Hirsh
Executive Director
National Staff Development Council
Stephanie.hirsh@nsdc.org
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