Dennis King

Dennis King, EdD, is an assistant professor of education in the doctoral program at Baker University in Kansas. A consultant, he has served in multiple roles, from classroom teacher to assistant superintendent of school improvement.

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 process, the response is “We do that.” The questions should shift to become results focused. In other words:

What products are the teams creating?

What evidence do we have that more students are learning?

Collaboration is essential to enhance the learning for students, but only when teams focus on the right outcomes. Essential reflection within the team is necessary to determine if collaboration is compliance based or results oriented. An example of a compliance-based team is focusing primarily on developing agendas, identifying a SMART goals, and/or completing meeting minutes to send to the principal. Each compliance-based task contributes to a productive meeting but fails to provide the results-oriented culture we desire. As teachers become burdened with completing mandated forms, the process often fails to produce the desired outcome to enhance learning for students. If the desired outcomes are not being accomplished, the team should consider a few tweaks to the collaborative process to ensure the development of effective products that will promote student learning.

A tweak in the collaborative process allows teams to shift from compliance to a results orientation. The driving force to produce results lies within the products created from the four critical questions of teams (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, R. 2008):

  1. What do we want students to learn?
  2. How will we know students have learned?
  3. What will we do when students don’t learn?
  4. What will we do when students have learned?

As teachers dissect a common curricular unit formulated from the district’s curriculum standards, the results-oriented process encourages teams to create products aligned with each of these questions. The opportunity to reorganize discussions from filling in the blanks on the agenda to creating learning targets, common formative assessments, interventions, and extensions are valuable changes that allow a shift from a compliant process to a results-oriented culture. This flow chart allows teams to use the curricular standards as the primary resource to develop both key products and additional resources to support student learning.

Critical Question

Product

Resource

1. What do we want students to learn?

Learning Targets

Standards

2. How will we know students have learned?

Common Formative Assessments

Learning Targets

3. What will we do when students don’t learn?

Interventions

Data From the Common Formative Assessments

4. What will we do when students have learned?

Enrichment

 

Data From the Common Formative Assessments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This chart is a simple reminder to help teams tweak the collaborative process within the school. As teachers become invested in creating and using team products associated with the four critical questions, a results-oriented culture permeates from the team, thus enhancing student learning.

References

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (2008). Revisting professional learning communities at work™: New insights for improving schools. Blommington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Buffum, A., & Mattos, M. (Eds.). (2015). It’s about time: Planning interventions and extensions in secondary school. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Comments

Nicole Hintz

Thank you for your wonderful article. I felt as though this article spoke to me and was possibly written after watching one of my schools PLC meetings. Thank you for the insightful questions. I will definitely try to deepen my teams conversations with these questions to help us gain a better understanding and goal of where we need to go next with our students.

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Danielle Watkins

Our district has PLC's every week for 50 mins during our plan time. Our focus sometimes is lacking. At times admin is there to support us. Other times they are not. I wished we would have some consistency, and use those 4 questions to drive our PLC's weekly. I feel like our PLC's are sometimes more of a grade level meeting. I love the critical questions and how they are aligned with the products and resources, very organized and easy to understand.

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Mahmoud Ihmeidan

I love the four questions you posted in this blog. I believe that many teachers now a days go through out their day and will probably not be able to answer any of those four questions. If we can get all teachers to think like this and have a thoughtful answer to all of those questions, then we will have the most successful future for our kids all around.

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Kaitlyn Smallwood

This is a very insightful blog about the PLC process. I completely agree we need to move toward more result based goals within these groups. I think a lot of people get away from this and just try to do the basics. I am currently involved in two PLC teams in my school district and we try to base everything we do off of results from the students data. I look forward to taking back some of your ideas and questions to my teams so that we can look at some different ideas as well.

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carol warnock

I agree that our PLC main focus should be to enhance student learning. All teams need to work collaboratively on what works in their classroom, have essential reflecting, and use the latest research to guide their discussions. If the results aren't like they should be, I liked your four critical questions that all teams need to ask.
What do we want students to learn?
How will we know students have learned?
What will we do when students don’t learn?
What will we do when students have learned?
I will remember these questions when I attend a PLC at my school. Thanks for sharing this post.

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R. Alex Cranston

A pithy article. Remaining focus on desired outcome is absolutely important. I do agree with these simple but critical questions. They are important in planning and postmortem for lessons. Personally if I can adopt and apply these to my professional practice then students in my charge should learn successfully.

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Val Hudson

I liked reading this blog and gained quite a bit of relevant information from it. I am wondering how to make a PLC work when the teachers are special educators at different grade levels and teaching different subject areas.

I am to lead my PLCs this year and have had no training in doing so. I know what they should look like, sort of, but don't even know where to start. I asked for common assessments and looked at vertical alignment, but that hasn't panned out.

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Ken Liepin

Hey there Dennis,

I want to say thank you for sharing insight on this vital topic. A results-orientated culture helps allow teachers to gain deeper insight on what the individual student is grasping and what they are struggling with. I also agree that collaboration and reflection are integral skills that we must hold as priority. Too many schools try but fail to effectively communicate, therefore, leaving too many gaps or missing out on learning opportunities altogether.

Collaborating and figuring out what lessons are the most effective will yield the best results. You hit the nail on the head when you included the following questions:

What do we want students to learn?
How will we know students have learned?
What will we do when students don’t learn?
What will we do when students have learned?

Even though these questions seem basic, not only are they complex, but many teachers miss one or more of these questions while coming up with lesson ideas. It is sad knowing that there are teachers out there that stop after students have learned something. Instead of helping students master content they "truck" along to the next lesson or unit.

In all, I want to thank you for sharing this post. As I continue to grow as a teacher I plan to become more involved in these blogs.

Have a good one,

Ken

Health and PE teacher- Philadelphia Charter School

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Bonnie Orr

I am a big proponent of the PLC model. I had the pleasure of being employed with a school district through the implementation process. After experiencing this, I feel the key element in the beginning stages of the PLC model is strong leadership. The school went from a "mediocre" performing school to the number 1 performing school in Wyoming.

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Vanessa Coetzee

I really enjoyed this article and the examples of how to ask and answer the critical questions that we have!

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