Using Professional Learning Communities - Report Example

Using Professional Learning Communities Using Professional Learning Communities A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is a learning opportunity that is that seeks to instill collaborative learning among teachers of a particular subject by organizing them into special working groups. The Ontario Ministry of education defines a professional learning community as a shared vision of running a school in which everybody is involved and makes a contribution, and the staff members are encouraged to collaboratively undertake activities and collectively undertake reflection so as to constantly improve the performance of their students. Richard Dufour, an expert in PLCs found out that to create a Professional Learning Community, more stress should be put on learning rather teaching, work should be performed collaboratively and finally and most importantly, teachers are held accountable for the results. It is the combination of the stakeholders in education, people who have interest and passion in it, including the grade level teaching team, the entire school district, a school committee, a state department of education, a high school department, and the national professional organizations among others (Dufour & Eaker, 2005). There is more to it than just this. There are certain big ideas representing the guiding principles of a professional learning community. These principles help to guide the school’s endeavors to sustain a PLC model till it is deeply embedded in the school culture. The three major ideas include the following: 1: Ensuring that the students learn One of the biggest assumptions of any PLC model is that it is not just important that students are taught, but that they end up learning once they are taught. There should be a shift of focus from teaching to learning and this is what is thought to inspire schools with motto statements such as ‘Learning for All’. The problem arises when the statement is taken by teachers as some politically correct hyperbole rather than literally. If the latter is the case, then no doubt, change starts to happen. Teachers start asking questions as what practices have helped students to achieve high levels of success. They promise to ensure the success of every student. It could also get them asking how those practices could be adopted in their schools, the commitments they would have to make to one another in order to create such a school and lastly the indicators that could be monitored to assess the success of a PLC model adopted. Once the shared knowledge is built among the staff and those questions are answered, then the school will have laid a solid foundation for going forward to improve the initiative (Marzano, 2003). As they go about it, the professionals involved need to engage in exploring certain crucial questions that would act as the driving force for those working within the Professional Learning Community. These questions are majorly three and include: a) What is it that we want the students to learn? b) How are we going to tell that the content has been learnt? What are the testing/assessment methods? c) What should be the response upon realizing that the students find the content hard to learn? It is the question c) that creates the difference between the learning communities and the traditional schools. In a traditional school, a teacher may at times teach a unit to the best of their ability, only to realize at the end of the teaching exercise that the desired outcomes have not been attained, that the students have been unable to master the desired outcomes of the lesson. They are then torn between redoing the unit and just moving forward to cover the remaining part of the course content. Any choice made has implications. If he uses the instrumental time to help the students, who were unable to learn at the first attempt, then the progress of those who had mastered the content will suffer (Gajda, 2007). If, on the other hand, he chooses to rush so as to cover new concepts, then the struggling students will be messed further. So it becomes a tricky balance. The solution to this question will be suggested later on in this work. It is the core of this exercise. 2: The Culture of Collaboration If a professional learning community is to be built, then the educators involved must inculcate the idea of working together to achieve the common objective of learning. Learning must take place, that’s what’s important. Structures must be created to ensure the collaborative culture. It has been proved in many cases that the collaborative approach to learning is the most effective, but some teachers still opt to work in isolation (Hord, 2002). Staff’s positivity toward the idea of collaboration will in most cases stop once they reached the classroom door, even if the school adopted it as a teaching rule. Some staff will often equate the idea of collaboration with focus and congeniality on building some sort of group camaraderie. One would be wrong to take collaboration to mean joining forces in order to develop procedures of operation, for example how to supervise recess or respond to tardiness. Others will form committees for overseeing the various facets of school’s operation, such as social climate, discipline and technology. These, though important and can serve a very useful purpose, do not meet the threshold for a professional dialogue needed to establish a Professional Learning Community. Professional Learning Communities are characterized by such a powerful collaboration, which is a systematic whereby teachers work in unison to improve and analyze the classroom practices. Teachers resort to teamwork, engaging in a cycle of questions which go further to promote team learning. This is the collaboration sense that result in higher students’ achievement levels. 3: Focus on Results The effectiveness of the Professional Learning Communities is pegged on the results. In most schools, it is the routine work of everyone to work together with a view to improving the students’ achievement. First of all, one has to know the current level of student achievement, and then on the basis of their finding, work to improve the existing level of achievement. That should be the ultimate goal which may only be achieved effectively by working together, and periodic progress evidence should be provided. Using Professional Learning Communities to have High School Math Teachers Collaborate with Local Community College Professors in Mathematics to Make Them Better at Teaching and Helping Students Professional Learning Communities are a constantly evolving affair, with the collaboration aspect not restricted to the staffs anymore. Collaboration today also includes instructors at different levels of learning, with primary level teachers, high school teachers and college professors all collaborating to improve the teaching learning processes. Certain subjects or subject units may prove not too obvious and easy to only require collaboration of people at the same level or subject teachers within the same school (Barth, 2007). Departmental collaboration in high schools is today augmented with other forms collaboration, especially with community college professors. Mathematics as an area of study is the one that requires collaboration the most. Studies have shown that mathematics is one of the subjects in high schools and colleges across the US and many parts of the world that only a few dare to major in and love. Some take only because they may not have choice if the institution makes it a compulsory subject. Most schools do make it mandatory. This makes it hard to attain the highest levels of achievement, as the class is a mix of people who find it easy to master the content and those who struggle, and the latter is often the majority. A Research in 7 states in United States of America, of Wisconsin, Arkansas, Iowa, north Dakota, Virginia, California and Minnesota indicates that only 1.8% on average of the students taking mathematics either as a major or as a compulsory subject in high schools (which was the widespread case) attested to being able to fully grasp the lesson content at the end of that lesson. 46% said that it took the teacher explaining the content repeatedly, for some once, for other twice or more, for them to master a fraction or all of the content (Riley & Stoll, 2004). The remaining percentage found mathematics extremely difficult and no amount of the efforts the teachers put could make them grasp any of the content of certain topics. A majority of the teachers interviewed in sampled high schools of the 7 states did not know how better to approach the teaching of math so that it resulted in effective learning. Some had the idea what collaboration was but said it was hard to practice it, ostensibly because it consumed too much of their time and were almost left with no time to prepare for the lessons if they adhered to it strictly. For this reason, they did not practice it. Some of those interviewed practiced it, but confessed it wasn’t effective either (Thompson et al., 2004). A very negligible proportion practiced it and confessed that the rewards were tremendous. Some of them collaborated at the staff level, other collaborated both at staff level and at higher levels with the community college professors, and said it helped them devise the best teaching methods that resulted in effective learning for most of their students, most of whom grasped the contents with ease, some at the first teaching attempt, but a number at the repeat attempts. What mattered most to them was not how many times they repeated the explanations, but that learning took place in the end. But again they were bothered if the number of times that they had to repeat the explanations for weaker students to understand were too many. However, they said such cases were rare. Community college professors are a very resourceful lot if they are engaged in meaningful collaborations with high school teachers for various reasons. First of all, they have attained the near highest, if not the highest, level of education and would help teachers in high school to understand the different learning capabilities of the students, and with such knowledge, be able to devise the most effective teaching style that reconciles those different student capabilities. If this happens, then the learning processes will be most effective. As I already said in the introductory part of this work, learning outcome is the most important thing and teachers should care more that it takes place at the end of the teaching session. There were three questions as to how to choose what the students need to learn, how to test if the learning actually took place and how to intervene in cases where no learning took place at all. A meaningful and sincere with community college professors would be the only thing to help with such dilemma. They definitely know the content fits the level of a high school student and what they may only do once they progressed to colleges. This is necessary because there two categories of math students at the high school level: those who want to pursue math to the highest level of education possible, and those who take it because they have no choice, for it’s probably compulsory, but would rather drop it at the slightest opportunity (Marzano, 2003).. Content selection should therefore take care of the two cases. It shouldn’t be too tough for their level, and shouldn’t be so easy that it doesn’t prepare one effectively to face the college level mathematics, that’s for those interested. This is a very tricky balance, but has registered such in many parts of the United States. The guiding principle thus is, ‘whereas math content shouldn’t be made too tough for the learners at the high school level, it shouldn’t be made so simple that the college math becomes a problem. Once should be able to continue into college math naturally’. This begs the question, ‘what then is the most effective thing to do’? ‘It’s easy’, a college professor would say. Easy in the sense that once the right content selection is done, a teacher needs to employ a composite of teaching approaches that would fit every kind of brain in his math class. I promised to suggest what may be done in a case where the teacher is torn between repeating a math concept if there are learners who haven’t learnt understood it at the end of the lesson and just continuing to cover the remaining part of the syllabus. A Professional Learning Community in which the teachers and the community college professors is the solution. It is a problem that is mostly experienced in traditional schools. If, however, a PLC is employed effectively, and then chances of such scenarios replaying are minimal. What happens mostly when a collaborative approach is taken is that the schools may decide to let the individual teacher deal with it. Teachers at whose discretion the solution is left by the school respond in ways that vary. We have teachers who will act toward the struggling students with little patience and even suggest that they transfer to less rigorous subjects or be considered for some special education. This is where teaching is treated with preference over learning. Other teachers may decide to lower their expectations and then adopt various less challenging standards for the various subgroups that exist within the classroom. Some others will look for ways of assisting such students before and after normal class hours. Yet, some will allow the struggling students to fail. When the school starts to function as a PLC, on the other hand, the teachers get to learn the incongruity between the commitments they put to ensure that the students attain the desired achievement levels and the deficient coordinated strategies needed to respond in cases where students do not learn. These discrepancies will be addressed by designing strategies that will ensure that struggling students are provided with extra hours of learning (Dufour & Eaker, 2005). It doesn’t really matter who the teacher of a class is. The result burden is born by all the teachers, not just the particular class subject teacher. Being systematic and school-wide is not all. Other measures that PLCs put to help weak students should be: Timely; the school should be able to identify the students with difficulty in good time, so that any measures to help them are identified before it’s too late. It should be based on intervention, not remediation. This means that the response should seek to help the struggling students as soon as they experience those difficulties without relying on summer schools, remedial courses and retention. They should be directive, meaning that the plan should require the students to devote the extra time measures, during which they receive additional information until they are able to master all the concepts that they are supposed to, and not just invite them to receive the additional assistance that they need to get. At Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, there have been reports of success of using the timely, systematic and directive intervention programs. There are progress reports given to students every three weeks. In just one month, new students should be able to discover if they having any difficulties in a subject area, so that correct intervention measures are administered to them. The teacher, the faculty advisor or a counselor will be mandated to talk to the student with a view to helping them resolve the problem. The school may also notify the student’s parents about the problem. It may also offer those students a pass from the study hall to a tutoring centre where they will be given additional assistance. There are older student mentors who, together with the struggling student’s advisor, will be mandated to help with the student’s assignment and homework during the regular advisory period. The students who do not show any improvements in spite of all these intervention measures may then be required to attend tutoring sessions at the study hall. Counselors make weekly progress reports for the struggling students (Buffum & Hinman, 2006). The study hall measures may still fail to help some students, in which case the school will assign the students to daily guided study halls that contain 10 students or less. The study hall supervisor will coordinate with the class teachers through constant communication to inquire about the assignments that the students are supposed to complete, and will ensure that they are indeed completed promptly. The parents are called to meeting with the student, the class teacher and the counselor, in which she/he is made to sign a contract that clarifies what each party must do ensure that the student is helped to meet the standards required for the course of subject (Marks & Loius, 2000). Stevenson high school has about 4000 students. It may sound untrue, but believe it or not, the school is able to monitor the abilities of all the individual students ate the school. They know the strengths and weaknesses of each and every student, and keep a record of the intervention measures designed to help them all. I would advice that all schools adopt and commit to the concept of learning for its students in order to stop subjecting weak students to education lottery, which may be haphazard. This way, the students will be guaranteed to receive whatever extra academic help that they will need. References Barth, R. (2007). Restructuring schools: Some questions for teachers and principals. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(2), 123–128. Marzano, R. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Hord, S.M. (2002). ‘Professional Learning Communities: What are they and why are they important?’ Issues about Change. 6(1). Riley, K., & Stoll, L. (2004). ‘Inside-out and outside-in: Why schools need to think about communities in new ways.’ Education Review, 18(1), 34-\ 41. Buffum, A. & Hinman, C. (2006). ‘Professional learning communities: reigniting passion and purpose.’ Leadership, 35(5), 16-19. Dufour, R. & Eaker, R. (2005). Professional learning communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service. Marks, H. & Loius, K. (2009). ‘Does professional community affect the classroom? Teacher’ work and student work in restructuring schools.’ American Journal of Education, 106(4), 532-57. Marks, H. & Loius, K. (2000). ‘Teacher empowerment and the capacity for organizational learning.’ Educational Administration Quarterly, 35(5), 707-750. Norwood, J. (2007). ‘Professional Learning Communities to Increase Student Achievement.’ Essays in Education 20, 33-42 Thompson, S. et al. (2004). ‘Professional Learning Communities, Leadership, and Student Learning.’ Research in Middle Level Education Online, 28(1), 35-54. Gajda, R. (2007). ‘Evaluating the Imperative of Intraorganizational Collaboration.’ American Journal of Evaluation, 28(1), 26-44. Read More