Blog
How Hundred Day Plans Sustain a Culture of Continuous Improvement
You’re feeling good – you have created demand for modeling your school as a PLC and have structures in place to answer the key questions. You are making progress along the PLC journey… Well, you think you are. Or perhaps your PLC is stagnant; you are not seeing progress or you are not sure about how to measure it. Or maybe your school is just beginning the PLC journey and you are questioning how to monitor the first stages, especially since small wins are essential in the beginning to sustain the momentum. Or perhaps you’re wrestling with when and how to lay out the next steps of your school’s improvement work and are trying to determine how it fits into the larger school improvement plan. Read more
Creating a Culture of Commitment
We never would have believed that the four critical questions of a PLC could create such a positive impact on our learning environment and student achievement. However, in Kinard’s PLC journey, once the teams identified the essential standards for each of their respective content areas, we were left with questions about how to systematize and coordinate the skills, dispositions and behaviors that we wanted our students to demonstrate. Read more
Getting Better at Getting Better
As I paid visits to schools at the beginning of this year, a teacher sent a question through the principal, “ask her when we are going to be good enough”. I knew the question came from a place of frustration: more new standards, another change in assessments, new technology, and other national, state, and district demands. Yet, the question itself took me by surprise. I had thought the principle of continuous improvement was ingrained in who we are; that all staff understood this was one of our district’s core beliefs. Read more
Does a Change in a School’s Leadership Always Result in a Change of Direction?
As two of the three co-principals of Mason Crest Elementary School preparing to leave the first ever DuFour Award–winning school (2016), we do so with an extremely optimistic view for its future. This optimism transcends all of the emails that have inundated our inboxes, text messages that have been sent, and concerned conversations over the last few weeks; well-meaning comments like, “no one will ever be able to fill your shoes” or “what will happen to the culture and processes we have for our student and adult learning if the new principals don’t understand the Professional Learning Community at Work (PLC) process?” Many of these conversations with parents and staff revealed a palpable fear that the culture will change... Read more
Dysfunctional Teams? Four Things that Don’t Help and One Thing that Does
All the promise of a PLC is called into question when teams are dysfunctional. Therefore, there is no greater mandate for a school than addressing dysfunction and providing teams with the support they need to become more effective. So, what to do, then, when your team is just playing at being a PLC? What fixes are there for co-blab-eration? What can we do for teams that are earnestly pursuing the wrong path week after week? Read more
Changing the Oil Before the Journey - Routine Maintenance!
Three critical questions for principals continuing on the PLC journey in 2016-2017 Read more
Why Size Doesn’t Matter
I have been blessed during the past 43 years to work in amazing school districts of all sizes—one as small as 600 students to one as large as 37,000 students. Time after time, school after school, district after district, we have learned size simply doesn’t matter for four main reasons. A highly functioning PLC continually examines and improves its capacity through four main elements: Organization, Execution, Persistence, and Celebration. Read more
The Moment Everything Changes
The first of the four critical questions of a Professional Learning Community process is, what is it we want our students to learn? This question underscores the need for teacher teams to identify . . . Read more
Put Your Money Where Your Maxim Is: “Investing” in PLCs at the District Level
Dictionary.com defines maxim as “a general truth or principle” or “a rule of conduct.” A few years ago when I was a high school principal leading the implementation of a PLC . . . Read more
Sustaining and Maintaining: No One Answer
Dear School Administrators, A question often asked during professional development workshops on professional learning communities is: “How do we sustain the PLC process from one year to . . . Read more
Revisit, Reflect, and Renew
After 45 years of teaching, I made the decision last summer to retire. After a couple of months of not setting the alarm, drinking coffee into the late morning, and staying up late, I began to . . . Read more
Channels and Eddies: Getting Students Downstream
We can consider the way our students have learned over the first half of the school year as sort of river: a river’s water moves in a powerful way in its deepest parts, but at the . . . Read more
The Important Work of Self-Monitoring by PLC Teams
In an effective professional learning community, all teachers take collective responsibility for ensuring all their students learn essential knowledge and skills. To achieve this goal, PLC team . . . Read more
Enhancing the Professional Learning Community Process: A Series of Tweaks
Are teams getting their desired results? This question resonates with most teachers and principals each week as they work within their collaborative teams. All too often when asked about the PLC . . . Read more
The Law of the Vital Few
When Robert J. Marzano conducted a review of the average state or provincial curriculum, he confirmed what teachers already knew: it is not possible to teach all curricular outcomes to every child . . . Read more