Our PLC journey initially began after the appointment of our new Superintendent of the Bartow County School System, Dr. Philip Page. In June of 2018, principals and key central office personnel received the book, Learning by Doing (Mattos, DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2016) to preview before attending the Culture Keeper conference in Atlanta, Georgia.   While attending the conference, they focused on the right work, developed our system implementation timeline, and began creating the Bartow County PLC Playbook. This enabled principals to model essential best practices within the schools. Plans were also made to add the ILT (Instructional Lead Teacher) position to help guide and support implementing the new PLC culture. Throughout the year, our system-level meetings focused on building leadership capacity and clarity in the PLC process while also focusing on the Three Big Ideas: Focus on Learning, Collaboration, Results-Oriented.  

     In November 2018, Instructional Lead Teachers and Assistant Principals were invited to attend the PLC Institute in Atlanta, Ga; where they received the book Learning by Doing (Mattos, et.al.,2016). This prompted our leadership team to create a school-wide guiding coalition. Through an application process, we chose key players to build collective teacher efficacy within the PLC process. In December 2018, our guiding coalition revised the school's mission and vision and created a set of collective commitments that focused on the “right work”. Our guiding coalition utilized the BCSS (Bartow County School System) PLC Implementation Timeline (pp. 55-59), to plan strategically for teachers to receive training and support from the Instructional Lead Teacher on all things PLC. Next, we began deconstructing and choosing essential standards in grades K-5 using the R.E.A.L (Readiness, Endurance, Assessment, and Leverage) template. Once standards were chosen, vertical collaboration meetings took place to ensure consistency of instruction across grade levels.  

     In the summer of 2019, our guiding coalition attended the PLC Institute in Atlanta, GA. This conference was the turning point that created excitement among our team which led the way to building collective teacher efficacy (Hattie, 2008). During the 2019-2020 school year, our focus on learning led us to implement bi-weekly collaborative team meetings.  Facilitators for the collaborative teams utilized the four guiding questions to build each agenda and drove the discussions for collaboration. The four guiding questions include: 

     In the fall of 2019, the RTI (Response to Intervention) subcommittee had the opportunity to attend the Solution Tree conference, RTI at Work in Jacksonville, FL. This conference introduced us to the inverted pyramid and challenged our current knowledge of RTI. It opened our eyes to innovative ideas and allowed us to utilize the incredible strategies found in Taking Action (Buffum, Mattos, and Malone, 2018). This conference taught us that to truly be results-oriented, we must let the data drive all our decisions. Our newly acquired RTI knowledge prompted the county to establish a scheduling subcommittee dedicated to creating a master schedule that would allow for adequate daily Tier 2 and Tier 3 blocks. The subcommittee, which included an AES teacher leader and Assistant Principal, created elementary, middle, and high school county-wide master schedule options that would be implemented the following year. A school level scheduling committee was formed, and a master schedule was created for AES to include all tiers of instruction.  

     Prior to sharing the new schedule with the entire staff, our schools had to move to virtual learning due to COVID 19. However, this setback did not derail our progress. Because of the dedication and desire to move forward with the collaborative culture, Microsoft Teams allowed us to continue to create units, rigorous assessments, and improve Tier 1 instructional strategies while working remotely. We are also able to continue with professional development on the Design in Five process with our ILT. 

     Our journey continued with the addition of the LSS (Learning Support Specialist) position in the fall of 2020. The LSS position complimented the ILT position and further supported RTI. Our SIT (School Intervention Team) was established to help make decisions about students in need of additional support. The new position also allowed for monitoring the fidelity of interventions in Tiers 2 and 3. For the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year, we put the new schedule into practice. The new schedule removed the barrier of not having enough time. Teachers were able to use CSA (Common Summative Assessment) data to meet students' needs in Tier 2 (Tiger Time) groups based on learning targets within essential standards.  

     As the school became more efficient with using assessment data to create our Tier 2 groups for academics (skill); we knew there was a need to tackle behaviors (will). In the spring of 2021, we were able to learn more about focusing on Will vs Skill through the guidance of professional development from Rich Smith and Behavior Solutions (Hannigan, Mattos, and Buffum, 2020). 

     During the Summer of 2021, our guiding coalition attended the Solution Tree Achievement Institute as well as Meaningful Assessment in Action (Stalets, 2021). We learned so much and were eager to dig deeper so we contacted Mandy Stalets for an additional virtual professional development based on the Feedback in Action session at the institute. Teachers realized the importance of feedback and learning progressions for the classroom. Currently, all grade levels have implemented the use of student data portfolios which allow for student accountability and self-reported grading.  

    Our current focus is to be more intentional in building and revising learning progressions to include pre-requisite and extension targets. In addition, we use behavior data to identify those students in need of more time and instruction through our social-emotional day to target Tier 2 behaviors. 

     Moving forward we are committed to fostering a dynamic PLC culture by utilizing the PLC playbook and helping to develop more A-Teams. We currently have two A-Teams at AES that serve as a resource to cultivating other highly effective teams throughout the building. We are dedicated to our mission; At AES, we work collaboratively to empower ALL students to SUCCEED!