PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES A Faculty Seminar for Curie Metro High School hosted by Leonard Witucki, NBCT

Today’s Pop Quiz Fill in the blank: • _______ is partly system and partly process. As a system it delivers powerful professional development via comprehensive staff collaboration. As a process it brings about improved learning and increased student achievement by regular and consistent examination of instructional practices.

How did you fill in the blank? • Did you think about naming a trendy program or philosophy? • Or did you think..... Curie High School?

For now, we can safely fill in the blank with A Professional Learning Community (PLC)

ULTIMATE GOAL • But…our ultimate goal is to make Curie High School a highly effective model of a Professional Learning Community!

So in the Future…. • Some day, we will be able to say confidently: Curie High School is partly system and partly process. As a system, Curie delivers powerful professional development via comprehensive staff collaboration. As a process, Curie brings about improved learning and increased student achievement by regular and consistent examination of instructional practices.

What is a PLC? • The professional learning community approach is a school structure whose instruction depends on regular professional collaboration and using data to assure that all students learn. • It is not “trendy”, but rather has shown very promising results.

What is the basis of a PLC? The PLC approach rests on three "big ideas": • The core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught, but to ensure that theylearn. • Educators recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. • Judging the effectiveness of all efforts must be based on their results. Richard DuFour, Educational Leadership61:8 May 2004

Big Idea #1 The core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught, but to ensure that they learn. • What school characteristics and practices have been most successful in helping all students achieve at high levels? • How can we adopt these practices in our school? • What commitments would we have to make to each other to create such a school? • What indicators would we monitor to assess our progress?

1) What do we want each student to learn? 2) How will we know when each student has learned it? 3) How will we respond when a student has difficulty in learning it? Three Critical Questions arise from this analysis that drive the work of everyone in any PLC:

3) How will we respond when a student has difficulty in learning it? The answer to this third question, according to Richard DuFour, separates a learning community from a traditional school.

What is the typical scenario in a traditional school when students do not learn the content in a given period of time?

In a LEARNING COMMUNITY: • Struggling students receive additional time and support. • The school community’s response is: Timely; Based on intervention rather than remediation; Directive, in that it requires students to participate in the intervention rather than invites them to do so.

Sample Intervention System: • Students receive a progress report every three weeks. • Teacher/Counselor/Homeroom Teacher meets with individual students to help resolve the problem and make suggestions: Go to a study hall during school hours that includes a tutoring center. Work with an older student mentor-tutor who will help with homework during advisory period/homeroom. (Continued)

Sample Intervention System: (cont.) • Students falling short of expectations on two consecutive three-week progress reports.... are required to attend study hall tutoring, and have their progress checked weekly by counselors. • Students who do not improve within the next six weeks are assigned a daily guided study hall with ten or fewer students. • Guided study hall supervisor ascertains exact homework assignments and monitors completion of the work.

What About Mom and Dad? • In this sample program, parents had attended a required meeting at the beginning of the year. • At this meeting the PLC program and intervention methods were explained. • A contract was signed by the parents, the classroom teachers, the counselor and the student that details each person's responsibility.

Big Idea #2 Educators recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. • "Despite compelling evidence that working collaboratively represents best practice, teachers in many schools continue to work in isolation. Even in schools that endorse the idea of collaboration, the staff's willingness to collaborate often stops at the classroom door." Richard DuFour, Educational Leadership 61:8 May 2004

The collaborative component of a PLC requires creating structures to promote a collaborative culture: • Teachers work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice. • Teachers work in (content area) teams that identify the essential knowledge and skills their students must attain in each unit. • Teachers determine critical outcomes that will indicate knowledge/skill attainment.

Collaborative Component (continued) • Formative assessments are developed to monitor each student's mastery (more on this later). • Team determines the most authentic and valid ways to assess mastery of knowledge/skills. • Overall results to common formative assessments are reviewed to determine what is working and what is not. • Team discusses new strategies to raise student achievement.

Assessment Types • As you may know, there are generally two types of assessment in our classrooms: • summative • formative

Summative Assessment • Assessment at the end of a unit meant to assess student’s mastery of the content knowledge and/or skills. • Given just before moving on to the next skill set. • The traditional classroom assessment tool.

Formative Assessment • Takes place in the course of the unit, possibly several times; • Is typically short and focused; • Provides students with immediate feedback about their achievement; • Allows students to find strategies to fill gaps in their own learning; • Allows teachers to find individual and collective gaps in learning in order to develop new strategies.

Formative Assessment A PLC thrives on formative assessment!

Formative Assessment • Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam documented the tremendous difference formative assessment can make in instruction in their 1998 report, Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.

Back to Collaboration • PLC Collaboration asks team members to make public what has been traditionally private: goals, strategies, materials, pacing, questions, concerns and results. • The collaboration gives everyone someone to turn to and to talk to. • The collaboration is specifically structured to improve the individual and collective practice of classroom teachers.

For PLC Collaboration to occur: • The school must: • Ensure that everyone belongs to a team focused on student learning • Ensure that teams have time to meet during the school day and throughout the year

For PLC Collaboration to occur: • Each teacher team must: • Focus its efforts on critical questions related to learning; • Reflect that focus as it generates lists of essential outcomes, different types of assessments, analyses of student achievement and strategies for improving results; • Clarify expectations regarding roles, responsibilities and relationships among team members.

What Are We Teaching? What Are They Learning? • According to Robert Marzano in What Works in Schools: Translating research into action, the amount of attention schools and school districts pay to three different types of "curriculum" might look something like this chart.

Three Curricula or One? • The curricular goal of a PLC approach is for the intended and implemented and attained curricula to be one and the same curriculum for every student. • Teachers are given time to analyze, discuss and implement state and district standards and goals, and they are given the time and resources to ensure that every student can reach them.

Alone or With Others? • However, researchers (e.g., Richard DuFour, Roland Barth, Robert Marzano) have noted that teachers feel safer working alone. They find it easier than working with others. • Research also has shown that the PLC approach can turn schools around and result in significant gains in student achievement.

Will We? • DuFour asserts, then, that building a PLC is a question of will. The staff of a school can overcome any perceived obstacles - including any preference to work in isolation - to building a PLC if they have the will. • http://www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61/outcomes.html

Big Idea #3 Judging the effectiveness of all efforts must be based on their results. Collaboration focused on improving learning becomes everyone's routine.

The Routine • Teachers determine current levels of student achievement (e.g., formative assessment); • They establish goals to increase that level of achievement; • Teachers work together to achieve that goal; • Periodic evidence of progress is provided (e.g., summative assessment); • The focus of team goals will shift to be more data-based.

A PLC is data-driven • DuFour claims that many schools suffer from the DRIP syndrome: D Data- R Rich, I Information- P Poor

Data vs. Useful Information • Teachers have standardized test data, their own assessment data and other types of data about their students. • But they have minimal time and resources to use this data to effect a difference for the struggling student. • The PLC collaboration allows teachers to use data to get information about what is working and what is not. It promotes discussion of interventions, re-teaching, and revising instructional strategies.

Making Data Useful • Let's watch a short clip of a portion of a real PLC teacher team meeting and using data. The subject is 6th grade mathematics. http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=eb96a64a3254ca7b50d8

Summarizing… • The PLC approach has been shown to be effective in all types of schools. • The PLC approach lets teachers efficiently help all students to learn. • The PLC approach makes teachers more artful in their practice and their instructional repertoire.

How Can we Say NO? • Questions • Obstacles • Consensus • Where do we go from here?

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES