PLC stands for Professional Learning Communities. The purpose of the PLC is to allow divisions within schools to plan for, and implement and reflect on teaching strategies that are directly linked to specific curriculum expectations.
The first round of PLCs across the Board were based on a Reading Expectation that says, "extend understanding of texts by connecting, comparing and contrasting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to other familiar texts, and to the world around them." Students have been answering open response type questions to demonstrate this understanding.
The process for the PLCs works like this:
Meeting one -- teachers meet to discuss the expectation, develop a rubric for assessing the learning, develop a diagnostic question to be given to all students in a particular grade or division, develop anchor charts and exemplars to help the students understand what is being asked of them.
Meeting two -- teachers bring the marked diagnostics and discuss trends they have in their class. For example, in our first round many teachers found that students could either make connections to their own thinking, or to the text, but not to both (which is what we want to happen). Based on the information gathered from the diagnostic assessment teachers plan lessons together.
Meeting three -- schools are paired up with other schools in the area. This is called a "Networked PLC" because there are multiple schools involved. We meet as divisions with the Elma and Wallace staffs. At this meeting teachers share best practice ideas, and brainstorm different resources and teaching strategies to help each other figure out how to best help the students.
Meeting four -- teachers bring their "summative" assessment (that's the final written work) and we mark them cooperatively. This ensures that a Level 4 in one class is the same as a Level 4 in another.
This PLC process and the cooperation, research and structured learning is vastly different from how teachers and schools have operated in the past. Yesterday was the Primary teachers' Networked PLC. I so wish that parents could have sat in to listen to the conversations. To hear teachers so focused on the craft of teaching, and talking about how to reach all students was really inspiring.
The PLC process is relatively new to education. I believe that it will change education for the better, for all of our students. Teacher collaboration and the exploration of learning and teaching strategies is powerful stuff. I am proud of how our staff works together, always with the question "how do I best help my students." When you see how learning can change based on such conversations it gives me great hope for our children. The sky really is the limit!
