Professional Learning Community

We all have our stories. Things we tell ourselves and others over and over that we have come to believe. Things that by the telling define us.
Ponder your own stories for a moment. What is it you tell people about yourself? What is it you tell your friends when you are relaxed and others are telling their stories even if you and your friends have all heard each other’s stories before?
Now take a step back and reflect on the stories you tell about your job, your community. Your car, your bank, your kids, your barber. Your schools! Yes, your schools. What stories do you tell about your schools? What are your impressions and what do you tell others when the subject comes up?
That teacher who gave you a lousy grade because she didn’t like you? That math class that ruined your grade point average? That teacher who let you sleep in his class if you didn’t bother anyone else? That teacher who hadn’t changed his tests in 30 years and everybody had the answers? What about the one where the book was wrong but the teacher refused to believe it and marked your correct answer wrong because the key said you were wrong?
I’ve heard all of these and more on the negative side. But what of the positives? Who tells great positive stories about how a teacher inspired a student who raised himself out of ordinary circumstances to achieve success? Or the teacher who took a student who just couldn’t get it and found a way to teach the subject that ignited the student as never before? It happens. Thank goodness it happens.
There is a program in your schools by the name of Professional Learning Communities (PLC). It’s been happening for about a year and it involves tested methods to convey excellence and creativity within the system so that successes get multiplied and problems get shared for broader solutions.
It is a district wide activity and schedules have been creatively flexed to permit groups to work together within buildings. Teachers in the same grades share what works and what doesn’t. Teachers in the same discipline share best methods to convey material. One of the goals is to remove the “silo” effect of teaching and open the system to cooperation among peers to reach greater heights.
It involves a good deal of study to find out what has worked other places. And it involves sharing what works and doesn’t work within our own system to tighten up our methods.
Not everyone is enthusiastic. All too often programs of one sort or another have been adopted one year only to fall into disuse the next year. That has happened so often there is even a phrase to express the concept. “The bandwagon that we’re going to jump off next year.”
The success of this effort will be dependent upon experiencing some victories that are valued by the system itself. By students, teachers, administrators, the board and the community. A tall order, but the test scores thus far are showing a handsome payoff. A payoff we have probably not celebrated enough.
Professional learning communities will ultimately involve the community as it extends beyond the classroom and the buildings to the community in general. It will affect what kind of community we become, what kinds of jobs are created and what kind of people want to live and learn here. It will affect our story of who we are.
If you’re not excited about our story, maybe you can be part of the change as a new one gets written.