Plc

[anon]

Is any other school involved in the Professional Learning Community. We are acting like this is a new concept that we haven't done twice in the last 40 years--I've been through it. Right now we are discussing our "dreams and visions" for our school and classroom and this is NOVEMBER. Don't we need to be discussing students and how we can help them? It might be I'm just old!!!

 

[gabanndor]

we do

We have to discuss, show data, and improvement on our Short and Long term goals. It is tedious though. I don't mind it, because it keeps us accountable. We try hard to come up with a LTG that we really think that we will achieve. We have to show how and what we will be using to achieve these goals and how we will tweak it if we don't. It does seem that at this piont, you should be working on something other than "dreams and visions." We don't even do that at the beginning of the year.

 

[MrsM]

just found out yesterday

Yesterday my principal passed out some papers, told us we are starting PLC, will be meeting, dates announced later, information to follow....no real explanation about it or what is involved. There are so many teachers now who cannot come to the faculty meetings because they teach after-school tutoring (twice a week for 1 hour) or the after-school program (4 days a week for 2 1/2 hours). One more thing for the rest of us to carry while the others don't know what it's about? I guess I'll wait and see.

 

[Teach4]

We do these, too. Personally, I think that in an ideal world these could be a great thing. They are a chance to get together and talk about how to improve our school, our teaching, etc. Setting goals, making a plan, and working toward achieving goals are all great things. However, I wish that we could pick one of these "great ideas" for our school and stick with it. On top of PLC we've got a million other things going on. I want to just work on one thing. Why isn't that possible?

 

[DeeDee]

Involved in PLC also

Our corporation started the PLC adventure this year after a group of us attended a PLC institute in Las Vegas (yes, I was one of the lucky faculty members to attend!!). I believe in the overall concept, and agree with all of the posters that it is time-consuming amid everything else we are required to do. Since time to meet is a crucial element in making PLC work, our superintendent worked with our association to adjust our dismissal time one day per week to provide that time. Each Wednesday all 3 schools in our corporation meet in their respective buildings to meet in various groups to work on various items. Each building was required to create a schedule for the first semester to submit to the association to validate the early dismissal each week (the Jr-Sr High had to adjust their block scheduling to accommodate the change in the contract times).m

As a steering committee member, I am consistently working at building relationships with all colleagues and surveying their opinions about what we have scheduled during our PLC Wednesdays. Each teacher has stated that they are very grateful to have time each week to meet in various groups to discuss student achievement, enhancements and tutorials, and even our school improvement plan for our accreditation process this year.

Creating Professional Learning Communities takes time to establish, but it will be well worth the journey. Consistently visiting your mission and vision statements only helps the staff in establishing attainable goals and remaining focused in reaching those goals.

Good luck to everyone who is venturing into Professional Learning Communities! It is a way for you to validate all the good things that you are currently doing to improve student achievement.

 

[Tiffany]

HOPE Foundation

Sounds like your administrator just attended the conference on improving student performance - failure is NOT an option put on by the people at the HOPE foundation. I just went to it and I'm not sure what to think. Basically, the idea will be for you to sit with your team for mutual planning of a lesson. It should take only 15 minutes to do this. There are guidelines to follow. Then you teach the lesson and measure the outcomes. Use data to drive instruction. They believe small steps lead to big improvements in student acheivement.

Sounds good to me, can't wait to see how it works!