Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

in RCAS“From the Phonograph to the iPod”

What Do You See Here?

1. The Factory Model

Management identified the “best way,”trained workers accordingly, and provided supervision to ensure the prescribed methods were followed.

Assumption – Adhering to the rules (the prescribed curriculum, class sizes, textbooks, number of course credits) results in students learning what they need to know

Little/no focus on student learning, collaboration, or improving schools

PLCs in RCAS: A Historical Look

2. The Early Years

A PLC was defined as a school that values and promotes ongoing, active collaboration focused on improving teaching and learning.

Characteristics: Shared norms and values, collaborative teams, focus on

student learning, collective inquiry, continuous improvement

Individual building exploration

PLCs in RCAS: A Historical Look

3. Building the Foundation: PLCs as District-Wide Work

PLCs have been a foundational component of BLT work since BLTs began in 2002-2003

Focused on a collaborative culture, team building, trust, building leadership capacity, quality instruction, standards, assessment

PLCs in RCAS: A Historical Look

4. The Present

4,000 research studies in the last 40 years concluded that formative assessment can double the speed of student learning

Book studies, consultant (Thomas Many), Learning-Assessment Process since 2009-2010Ongoing district and building efforts

Everyone is working hard, but there is not a district-wide, coordinated effort that clarifies what students are to learn and then focuses on what student learning data tells us

PLCs in RCAS: A Historical Look

5. The Future: New Insights on PLCs

Opportunity to function as a focused system

PLCs provide a guiding framework where student learning data are used by collaborative teacher teams to focus their work and implement best practices that ensure that every student learns.

PLCs in RCAS: A Historical Look

The fundamental purpose of schools is to ensure learning for all students. However, schools typically have no plan for responding to the inevitable moment when a student is not learning. If certain conditions are essential to the ability of an enterprise to fulfill its fundamental purpose, people would expect the enterprise to monitor those conditions and to have a plan in place to ensure a timely response if they were compromised. We expect Starbucks to have a plan for monitoring coffee levels and responding when coffee runs low. We expect Burger King to have a plan in place to ensure customers can purchase a burger. We would find it odd if those companies could not provide a basic service so essential to their fundamental purpose. Yet, educators, who claim the fundamental purpose of their schools is to ensure all students learn, seem unconcerned and unaware of the fact that there is no coordinated plan for identifying and monitoring essential learning and for addressing students who are not learning.

A PLC acknowledges the incongruity between a proposed commitment to learning for all and the absence of a coordinated strategy for identifying, monitoring, and responding when students do not learn or require advanced learning. Today’s PLCs offer educators an opportunity to embrace a new story of the purpose of schooling and the way in which they must work to fulfill that purpose.

DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Karhanek, 2010

Final Thoughts