Julie H. Rucker
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Standard 2: A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth .
Questions:
If an administrator makes the decision to begin Professional Learning Community (PLC) groups in her school, how does she convince the faculty to participate?
How can an administrator encourage collaboration among school faculty?
Situation:
Ms. Scott, an assistant principal at Covey High School , has read Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn , by Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, Rebecca DuFour, and Gayle Karhanek. She has also attended a conference for administrators and listened to other administrators talk about the success of Professional Learning Communities in their schools.
Ms. Scott has been looking for a way to get her school faculty members to collaborate to improve student learning and sees possibilities in PLC. She wants to do whatever it takes to move teachers out of isolation, to encourage them to open their doors and let other adults come in and collaborate. A PLC would be a positive step toward school improvement and has been proven by research to work.
The teachers at Covey High School have been taking RESA workshops to earn PLU's and have earned professional development credit from attending redeliveries from Intech and Learning Focused Schools to the new Georgia Performance Standards. They have never been exposed to PLC's with the exception of a couple of teachers who are members of online networks of teachers in their subject areas.
At the beginning of the current school year, Ms. Scott takes two teachers she considers to be leaders and learners with her to an administrators' conference out of town. The conference focuses on professional development strategies. In the breakout sessions, the teachers attend sessions where administrators and other teachers share their experiences with PLC's. The teachers are excited about this type of professional development because it is conducted by peers in their schools who know their students, and it also will not require them to miss class time with their students. PLC activities are varied and can be done at a time decided by the different groups.
When the teachers return, they help Ms. Scott plan a PLC activity for the academic departments in the high school to be completed by the end of the first semester. Each department will work together to plan a lesson that can be taught by more than one teacher. The teacher will teach the lesson and film it. Afterwards, the teachers in the PLC group will watch the lesson and offer ideas to improve it. Then another teacher will take the improved lesson and teach it, also videoing it for the PLC group to observe. At a group faculty meeting, each PLC group will present the lessons they taught to the complete faculty and discuss anything else related to the activity or the lesson with the faculty as a group.
The second semester, Ms. Scott lets the PLC groups choose from a list of approved PLC activities and asks them to complete it by the end of the second semester. Several groups are reading books on topics related to improving student learning while another is developing pretests and posttests to use in each of the courses taught within their department.
What She Discovered:
Ms. Scott was very pleased with the presentations given by teachers in the first semester faculty meeting. Teachers had thoughtfully considered what lesson to teach, what teaching strategies they would use, how students would be assessed, and how the lesson could be improved. The math group actually gave their presentation and then presented a math problem to the faculty like the one they had taught in the videoed lesson. They even arranged with the principal to allow the winning teacher a day to eat lunch off campus.
Second semester, the PLC activities were more varied, but teachers were not asked to present them to the faculty as a group. In a sense, there was no accountability for the groups, so many of them pushed the PLC activity to the side while they focused on other day-to-day operations in their classroom. Ms. Scott realized that while it was good to allow teachers the freedom to determine what they needed to study to help their students improve in class, the teachers also needed a deadline of accountability to finish their projects.
What Changes Will Be Made As a Result:
While PLC's are always more successful when teacher-led, if PLC's are going to be part of the official school improvement plan, then an administrator will need to set basic guidelines for all PLC groups. PLC groups will still have the autonomy to decide what type of learning project they will undertake, they will also be responsible for presenting what they learned to the faculty as a whole.
Responding to the Questions:
If an administrator makes the decision to begin Professional Learning Community (PLC) groups in her school, how does she convince the faculty to participate?
Ms. Scott took a small group of teachers, considered leaders and learners in their school, and exposed them to positive examples of Professional Learning Communities. As a result, these teachers went back to their school and talked with their peers about implementing the PLC concept in their school.
How can an administrator encourage collaboration among school faculty?
Teachers also are more willing to participate in activities where they must make a majority of the decisions. She also has encouraged an activity where the PLC groups are made of faculty members that teach in the same subject areas so that they will be more comfortable entering their colleagues' classrooms for the activity. Teachers more easily open their doors to colleagues who come for a non-threatening purpose.
When structuring the first PLC, Ms. Scott made sure that teachers would have choices to make for the lesson they taught, strategies they would use, and how they would improve. For the second, she allows the faculty even more autonomy to choose their PLC activity. In order for faculty to complete their activity, she must provide a forum where they can share their activity with the rest of the faculty.
Assessment of Administrator: Developing
Ms. Scott has introduced a new school improvement strategy using small PLC groups within the high school faculty. Accountability for faculty members was given for the first semester of PLC groups, but was relaxed for the second semester in hopes that the faculty would appreciate the freedom to develop their activities for their groups without the added burden of developing a presentation of sorts to discuss what they learned during the second semester. First, the PLC process must be focused on student learning. Teaching is a job, and as such, teachers should be willing to step outside their classroom world and participate in a professional learning community. Ms. Scott is only a second year administrator and she is a bit uncomfortable mandating activities for faculty members. I give her a "Developing" rating for introducing PLCs to her faculty and engaging them in that work.
e-mail: jrucker@friendlycity.net