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Adapting the PLC Framework for Small Schools
Posted on October 4, 2010, by Adam Young
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.
However, we felt strongly enough about the benefits associated with collaboratively focusing on learning that we decided to learn by doing. We formed content teams as most schools do—English, math, social studies, science, career and technical education, fine arts, and foreign language. Even though the teachers on these teams taught multiple singleton courses, the teachers developed common essential outcomes for their classes. Rather than being content driven, the essential outcomes focused on the common skills that students were expected to learn while in the classes taught by the teachers on the team. For example, the social studies team developed essential outcomes like “Students will read and interpret historical text by inferring, predicting, drawing conclusions, and formulating questions” and “Students will relate situations in the past to situations today.” The fine arts team developed essential outcomes like “Students will communicate to their audience using expression.” The career and technical education team developed essential outcomes like “Students will demonstrate employability skills through effective communication, work habits, and problem solving.”
These common skills based on essential outcomes allowed teachers to then craft common assessments that addressed students’ levels of proficiency and progression. In English classes, for example, the common assessment focused on persuasive writing, a skill that all members of the English team felt was important. Rather than being a content-based assessment that gauged students’ progress in a specific course, the common assessment measured all students’ persuasive writing progress. This allowed the English team to engage in the dialogue that occurs as a result of the common assessment approach—asking questions like “What are we going to do with our struggling writers? Why did the students in this class outperform all of the others? What strategies did my colleagues use to promote student success on the assessment? How can we stretch the students who have already demonstrated proficiency?”
An analogy that helped us understand how to focus on what we did have in common stemmed from the math team. When math students try to add fractions, they must find the least common denominator. With such a small staff, it was not possible to have true collaboration among all of the world history teachers (there’s only one!). So we had to find the least common denominator among world history, U.S. history, government, and other social studies courses. Once this least common denominator was found and we understood what we had in common, we could collaborate about learning in meaningful ways. It has also allowed teachers, who sometimes felt their content was sacred, to focus on skills that are in alignment with our school-improvement plan and our mission of helping students prepare for life in the real world.
66 Responses to “Adapting the PLC Framework for Small Schools”
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I find myself commenting on this post a few months after the most recent addition, but am hoping to possibly reinvigorate the discussion. I have found my current program situation distinctly related, but uniquely separate in dynamics.
From my experience, PLCs can be incredibly difficult to get started, but once you have a community engine going it can take you to great heights. I currently work for a HeadStart program out of Oregon, which is roughly the size of a small school district. However, a problematic difficulty is that our school is broken up into multiple smaller satellite sites. This makes meeting for any professional development in groups larger than 5 to 7 difficult between schedules and time.
A second compounding concern is that the program as a whole is very unfamiliar with the notion of PLCs. While a good number of peer teachers already have belief in the concept, creating a successful implementation is quite difficult, and thus far unsuccessful.
Our program is currently investigating and developing an online system for communication and collaboration, which has great potential to bridge the geographical gaps. The framework would system will be somewhat similar to the online blackboard system used in college courses. The counterpart to this is that many of our teachers are not technologically confident.
I’m curious if, looking at many of the previous comments, anyone could offer any guidance or insight into productively guiding our growing PLC.
I work in a school of only 300 students. Every time the admistration approaches the teachers about starting a PLC, all they do is complain about how much work they have to do and do not need anything else on their plate.
I really want to know how does your administration get you motivated to do the PLC. My school district really needs to do something because we are so unattached and the building is full of negative attitudes.
Thank you for any help that you can send my way!
@mmromer10
Negativity is contagious, unfortunately. However, so is positivity. As individuals, we only have control over ourselves. Do you have a like minded colleague that you can form the beginnings of your own high performing team with? If so, the first thing to do is establish norms. Our norms encourage us to gently confront each other when we fall into negativity. When the climate of a building or district is overall negative, falling into the status quo is so easy. Hang in there and be an army of one until you can form your own high performing team. Then, you’re an army of two! Begin to challenge the culture of negativity by pointing out the positive whenever possible. Ask your colleagues how their attitude is helping to find a solution.
Thank you for writing.
My first reaction to your question is that you have one important tool that is already in your “tool bucket.” That tool is YOU! Permit me to set the stage with a bit of research; then, I will respond directly to your question.
Dr. Richard DuFour often says, “The people who tell the stories determine the culture.” Winston Churchill reminds us that, “First we shape our culture and then it shapes us.” Toward that end, Dr. Thomas Sergiovanni helps us understand that to run a school, you need technical expertise, human expertise and educational expertise. To run a GREAT school, you further need to progress with intentional symbolism that is based on the stories that you tell and that to which you pay attention. Intended symbolism repeated over time, influences and eventually becomes intentional culture. Stated otherwise,
The Pareto Principle, often referred to as the 80/20 Rule, reminds us that 20% of a set is generally responsible for 80% of the related result (e.g. 20% of the products and people generate 80% of the profit, and 20% of the product and systems cause 80% of the product or system problems). Translated to the change process on the PLC journey, we routinely find the 20/60/20 corollary unfolding as follows (do not get hung up on the exact percentages):
Anthony Muhammad, in his book on Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division, helps us better understand why people resist change (persist in current behavior).
1. People resist (persist) when they are given no CLEAR REASONS to change.
2. People resist (persist) when they don’t TRUST the person who tells them to change.
3. People may keep their familiar tools (in a difficult situation) because an unfamiliar alternative….seems even more difficult.
4. People may refuse to change because change may mean admitting failure.
I’ll refer you to Patrick Lencioni’s books on The Five Dysfunctions of Teams and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of Teams to dig deeper into the importance of building TRUST. The matter of providing CLEAR REASONS to change can be addressed through constant efforts to build shared knowledge….build shared knowledge….build shared knowledge. Work collaboratively, provide modeling and share data and celebrate the successes in demonstrating the efficacy of the concepts, attributes, research-based best practices and standards for becoming a Professional Learning Community. Finally, the need to change is not about us failing in our work in the 20th century, it is about embracing a new job (as of a decade ago) – the appropriate challenge of quality learning for ALL students.
The last piece of research that I want to share deals with two comments on the importance of CELBRATION in your school setting:
“Well-constructed recognition settings provide the single most important opportunity to parade and reinforce the specific kinds of new behavior one hopes others will emulate”
(Tom Peters)
“An excellent predictor of the future behavior (of any learning community) is to examine the people and events it elects to honor.”
(Marcus Buckingham)
Putting all of this research together, I come back to my first comment. I can tell, just by reading your contribution to the discussion on this website, that YOU are a key leader in your learning community. I would further predict that many other members of your learning community listen very carefully to your words and watch your actions (even though the voice of “negativism” sounds so loud – it’s usually the same few people yelling louder and longer). You are not as far as you think from being able to energize that positive voice of the “Top 20’s” and move your learning community forward. The “Middle 60’s” are ready to listen. Formalize that guiding coalition and (intentionally) tell your positive stories – don’t frustrate about the negative story telling; rather, out-story-tell the negative story tellers!!
Have that discussion with your administration. Show them the contents of this blog discussion. Gather some of this research that I have referenced and bring it with you to the meeting.
Work together as a guiding coalition to identify and master the characteristics of high-performing collaborative teams. Model for others and celebrate your successes in formal and informal building settings, once again reminding everyone why collaboration is Big Idea #2 on this journey. Build shared knowledge. Tell stories with intention; act with intention. Then, be intentional again!!
Of course, you want to bring ALL faculty/staff members along on this journey. Toward that end, you might also consider posts tagged with the keyword ‘motivation.’ You might find these helpful, as well.
I wish you the very best on this important journey of quality learning for ALL students.
Solution Tree offers many outstanding resources to support these efforts. Some of my favorites that would really serve you well in the early stages of growth include:
1. DuFour, Richard, et. al. (2002). Getting Started: Reculturing Schools to Become Professional Learning Communities. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
2. DuFour, Richard, et. al. (2008). Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: New
Insights for Advancing Student and Adult Learning in our Schools. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
3. DuFour, Richard, et. al. (2010). Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (2nd Edition). Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
Thank you,
Dick Dewey, PLC at Work Associate
I teach second grade in a small private school of one class per grade PK3- 8th grade. I have recently been learning about PLCs and think it would be something to try in my school. However, how should we be grouped? PK-K, 1-3, 4-5 and 6-8? I know there are some topics we probably could discuss and it would be very helpful, however I would still love to find a group of other second grade teachers, possibly in my state to be able to discuss second-grade specific curriculum and challenges. Any suggestions on how to go about that?
I was excited to read this post, since I too teach at a small school (we have under 250 students in all of K through 8). In all grades we have only one or two teachers. Elementary classes are self-contained, with each teacher teaching all subjects, while middle schoolers switch between four different subject teachers throughout the day.
We were recently discussing the concept of PLC and how it is implemented at our school, and some concerns came out about how our PLC framework does not allow for cross-grade level collaboration. Basically, right now, collaboration only occurs between the administrative team and each pair (or single) of grade level teachers. To be honest, frequently our “PLC” meetings are basically “sit and get” meetings from administrators to teachers, which starts to become monotonous over time. Essentially, I do not think what our school is calling “PLC” is actually a true professional learning community, because not all team members are actively involved in the process.
I believe that in order to improve our framework, we need to find a sort of “least common denominator” as you referenced, Adam. We need to improve our use of time by allowing teachers to be actively involved in decision-making, data analysis, and curriculum use, with teachers outside their own grade level. Maybe allowing teachers to meet with teachers in the grade level below and the grade level above would be a more beneficial way to use our PLC time. Either way, our school needs to begin implementing an improved form of PLC in order for teachers to have meaningful, successful experiences and see the positive results of PLC.
If you have any advice for my school situation, please share!
@Emily.Kloter
The PLC framework is driven by teams. The work of teams is driven by a focus on learning and results. The focus on learning is where maybe a “least common denominator” could be helpful in your case. The focus on results comes in the form of common assessments designed to measure students’ learning on the common learning.
Sometimes regular old meetings are called PLCs because of a lack of shared knowledge about what a professional learning community really is. Book clubs, professional development, meetings where concerns and administrative items are discussed are all important and necessary. However, they do not constitute a professional learning community.
Maybe some building shared knowledge is necessary. Using the “Learning by Doing” book is a great place to start. Bring one of these to your next meeting and ask if you can share a scenario or even share one of the templates designed to promote the team’s self-reflection.
You’re right that grade level collaboration is only part of what needs to happen. Vertical alignment of skills and content is essential and it is so important for fourth grade teachers to know what is expected at the fifth grade etc.
Good luck!