Professional Learning Communities…

…the what and the why.

Hello all. Welcome to the 155th edition of TEPS Weekly!

A Professional Learning Community (PLC), as the name suggests, is often imagined as a group of professionals coming together to learn and achieve a shared goal. For example, a group of nurses working together to make patient care safer, or a group of software engineers working together to make a publicly-available open-source app work more smoothly. But, what makes a PLC different from regular weekly/monthly meetings is the process that the professionals follow together. Instead of imagining it as a one-off meeting, it is helpful to think of it as professionals engaging in a cyclic/ongoing process of active inquiry. This means that they start with a real problem they all care about, ask a clear question and then look for evidence in search of the answer. Then, they try a small change, see what happens and learn from it together. If it works, they build it into routine practice. If it does not, they adjust and try again. So, learning is not just happening during a meeting, it’s also happening in between meetings through action. This cycle of question-test-evidence-improvement is what makes a PLC different.

So then, a weekly meeting where all the nurses come together and share their experiences and learnings will not count as a PLC, nor will a training session where the software engineers are introduced to a new product and taught how to use it. Both these cases are useful, and learning is happening in the direction of their larger goal – making patient care safer and making an app work smoothly. But it stops with the sharing of information. What is missing is a shared plan to try something, a follow-up check using evidence and a team decision on what to change next.

The idea of forming a Professional Learning Community started in the education sector to achieve the shared goal of improving student learning. A PLC in the education sector would mean a group of school leaders/administrators/teachers working together to improve the learning of all their students. The three guiding principles for a PLC in education can be:

1. Shared goal of improved student learning: For this, have answers to the following 3 questions:

   1. What do we want each student to learn?

   2. How will we know when each student has learnt it? 

   3. How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

2. Collaboration: By collaboration, we mean teachers working as a team around a shared learning problem. They agree on one focus, plan a common approach and then learn from each other by comparing what happened across classrooms. 

3. Focus on results/outcome: Success is measured by student outcomes and not by the extent to which a teacher was able to implement a lesson plan or complete activity.

Running a PLC

An entire school can be considered one Professional Learning Community because ideally everyone in a school – the teachers, administrators, school principal/leaders – they’re all working towards improving student learning. And this work cannot be done by just one group of teachers alone. So, we divide the school, which is the PLC, into smaller teams within it to perform different roles, and along with that the larger goal is also broken down into smaller and specific learning outcomes. In practice, the PLC work happens mainly in grade or subject teacher teams. School leaders and administrators support this by protecting time for meetings, keeping teams aligned on shared expectations and making it easier to collect and use evidence of student learning.

To set up a PLC, the school makes a few structural decisions:

• Team structure: How will teachers be grouped into teams?Example: Grade 1-2 English teachers form a team, Grade 3 Maths teachers form a team 

• Meeting schedule: When will teams meet, how often, and how will that time be protected in the school schedule?Example: The school blocks one 45-minute slot every Friday after school for PLC meetings and ensures no other duties or classes are scheduled during that time.

• Ways of working: What simple norms and roles will help the meeting flow smoothly and lead to action? Example: Who is leading? Who is taking notes? Who is going to help analyse data? and so on.

Within each grade/subject team, the PLC is then run as a simple repeating action cycle which can look like this:

• Gather evidence of current student learning levels.Example: To see how students are doing in reading comprehension, all grade 5 English teachers use a short passage with the same set of questions for the students to answer. 

• Identify strengths and gaps, and then choose a strategy.Example: The team notices that students can answer factual questions based on the reading comprehension passage but struggle with inferential questions. They analyse the evidence (student answers) to understand why they’re not able to. They realise that many students can state an opinion but can’t justify it. After a discussion, they agree on one  strategy: teach “answer + evidence” using sentence starters like “I think ___ because ___”. They plan on how they would include this in their lesson plans and execute it. A teacher can even model this out during the meeting.

• Implement the agreed strategies in classrooms.Example: Every grade 5 English teacher practises this strategy in the classroom for the next 2 weeks. Teachers model one example, students practise in pairs, then students write one response independently.

• Analyse impact using fresh evidence to see what worked and what did not.Example: At the end of 2 weeks, teachers use a new reading comprehension passage with the same question format and compare how many students now include evidence in their answers. If one class shows stronger improvement, teachers may observe that class to learn what made the difference.

• Apply the learning and begin the next cycle.Example:  If the strategy worked, the team keeps it and adds extra guided practice for students still struggling. If it did not, the team adjusts the approach and runs the next cycle with a better strategy.

Because PLCs run as an inquiry cycle that is led by the teachers themselves, they do more than what workshops or individual effort can. PLCs are very student oriented. The focus of their discussion comes from what their students can and cannot yet do, and the next steps are chosen to fit that exact context.  And teachers stay with it until evidence shows it has improved. This level of specificity, follow-through and classroom-linked learning is rarely possible in a teacher training workshop which usually focuses on broad ideas meant for everyone. For school leaders, this helps to build a culture of  high accountability and consistency. And finally, for students it leads to higher expectations and better outcomes. 

To sum up, a PLC for schools can be thought of as a way of working that the entire school commits to.

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Edition: 5.10