PLC Blog Archives

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC at Work™ associate

Bill Ferriter has been working to introduce learning teams and singletons to a range of free products and services that can make collaboration more efficient. This is an excerpt from his blog “The Tempered Radical.”

One of the greatest challenges in …

By Adam Young, PLC at Work™ associate

The professional learning communities approach (a collaborative focus on learning with the yardstick for success being the results obtained) resonates with so many educators right off the bat. Sometimes, however, making it happen in your school can seem overwhelming. This is especially true when your school, at first glance, appears significantly different from other schools.

The White Pine High School team that attended a PLC conference during the summer of 2004 felt this way. While the philosophies, strategies, and suggestions made at the conference resonated with all who attended, we quickly ran into some problems. Most of these problems stemmed from the fact that being a small school (420 students), we found it difficult to adopt the common assessment framework so important to PLCs because there was only one teacher of English 9, one teacher of Biology 1, one teacher of Geometry, and so on. Since the “focus on learning” questions are centered on common assessments (What do we want our students to learn? How will we know when they’ve learned? What will we do when students do not learn?), we struggled to understand how to adapt this framework with limited numbers of job-alike teachers to collaborate.

By: Rick DuFour

Education thrives on acronyms – IEP, UBD, RTI, ESL, SES, LD, NCLB, AYP, API. Sometimes this abbreviated attempt to communicate can create confusion. Recently, we received a query from a high school principal who felt his efforts to help his school become a professional learning community (PLC) would be enhanced by converting the school into a Smaller Learning Community (SLC). Teachers in his school had been working collaboratively in content-specific teams as they attempted to implement the PLC concept.

Posted by Robert Eaker and Rick and Becky DuFour

QUESTION:

I am principal of a small school, with 1 or 2 teachers at each grade level.  The collegiality/cooperation in the school is nearly nonexistent. I buy into the whole idea behind PLC’s. My question–how can we accomplish this with such a small school, and with the disrespect and distance in some of the staff members?