Reading with Mrs. D: What is a PLC?

For a dummies guide, check the Wikipedia page.

If you choose not to click over to Wikipedia (and I don't blame you, the information isn't always reliable), here's a few key points:

1. "To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than on teaching, work collaboratively, and hold yourself accountable for results."

2. It's "a shared vision or running a school in which everyone can make a contribution, and staff are encouraged to collectively undertake activities and reflection in order to constantly improve their students’ performance."

3.From SEDL: " the teachers in a school and its administrators continuously seek and share learning and then act on what they learn. The goal of their actions is to enhance their effectiveness as professionals so that students benefit."

4. Alberta Education: "The indispensable foundation is to focus on learning, not teaching."

5. Professionally Speaking: where teachers and administrators take an active, reflective, collaborative, learning-oriented and growth-promoting approach to the mysteries and challenges of teaching and learning. PLC has come to mean schools where the entire staff is involved in data-based decision making about student needs, where they define school goals and directions to meet those needs and engage in ongoing study, discussion, testing and reflection to change their practice.

FIVE ATTRIBUTES OF A PLC

supportive and shared leadership,

collective creativity,

shared values and vision,

supportive conditions, and

shared personal practice.

I'd heard of PLC's before, but I didn't really get what it meant. I couldn't grasp the concept from the subject matter it was presented in, and thought it meant all circle where you interact with other teachers. I supposed how I interact with all of you by commenting on your blogs, and replying to your comments on mine are part of my learning process, but they are not actually a PLC, because we will not be meeting and discussing outcomes and looking for solutions together, officially at least.

I hope that wherever I end up teaching next year I get to be part of a collaborative process like a PLC. I think it will have a deeper impact on my teaching than being TOLD to do something. Just like our students, I can be stubborn, and if I have some choice in the design, I am more likely to participate.

Has your school tried to implement this way of teaching and learning yet?

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If you would like me to review other books for kids please leave a comment. It must be useful to either teachers or parents of children age 4 to grade 2.

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