For the past three years, Main Street Visual and Performing Arts Magnet School (MVPA) (previously known as Oaklawn Visual and Performing Arts Magnet School (OVPA)) has been engrossed in the PLC process through the Arkansas Department of Education’s Professional Learning Community (PLC) Pilot Project. At the beginning of this process, OVPA went through an administration change at the principal and assistant principal level. During this time, the school was underperforming and was experiencing high teacher turnover. The teachers worked in isolation and there was no consistency or collaboration throughout the grade levels or building. Common planning time was only used to discuss logistics and to share information. Though all staff in the school were working very hard to do what they could for each student, there was no shared mission, vision, or goals. During the 2016-2017 school year, OVPA administrators noticed that the state of Arkansas was planning to use millions of dollars to implement PLCs. After further investigation, a team of four staff members went to the PLC at WorkⓇ Institute in Atlanta, Georgia during the summer of 2017. To the team members’ surprise, many of Arkansas’ legislators and members from the Department of Education were in attendance. After learning about the PLC process and its positive effect on student achievement, the school decided to apply for the Arkansas Department of Education’s PLC Pilot (Cohort 1). 

Learning by Doing

After attending the institute, our team was confident that we would receive an invitation to partake in Cohort 1 due to the amount of networking we had done during the institute with the legislators and members from the Department of Education. However, we received word that our application was declined. We trusted in the PLC process and knew that its mission was a way to increase student success, so we decided to incorporate learnings from the book, Learning by Doing. Our first step was to “get the right people on the bus” that would help drive the work. Thus, we created our first Guiding Coalition, which was made up of teachers we thought would help lead the work. Shortly thereafter, we started learning everything we could about what it meant to function as a PLC by reading books and watching Global PD videos. We purchased Learning By Doing for all of our staff and started to build shared knowledge as a group. For this first year, we focused on building culture and answering question one: “What do we want students to know and be able to do?” Our team quickly realized that we had to make sure we were functioning as a team while focusing on the same goals. In October 2017, our administration team started to attend all collaborative team meetings. We facilitated the team meetings and tried to mirror what we were learning via the books we were reading and the Global PD videos we were watching. Our biggest goal during the team meetings was to build shared knowledge and unpack grade-level standards. After facilitating team meetings for months, the lead teachers (who were also on the Guiding Coalition) began facilitating the meetings. This is when we started to see a shift from “I” to “we.”

Hard Work Pays Off