4 minute read
What Is a PLC?
attract top-tier, highly qualified, and experienced teachers from around the world who bring their worldviews and diverse pedagogical approaches to the classroom. All these factors can create a beautifully diverse and high-performing culture that can have a positive impact on a school’s culture. However, this collection of highly independent teachers can also lead to inconsistency in instructional and assessment practices. The quality of instruction, feedback, and interventions can depend entirely on the teacher a student happens to be assigned to, which is contrary to the concept of a guaranteed curriculum.
What follows is a brief overview of the PLC process. This is not intended to be a comprehensive treatise on PLCs as there are entire books on the topic, but rather to give insight into how to contextualize PLCs and personalized learning within the PYP context. As an international educator who has served in high-performing schools on four continents, I am more convinced than ever that PLCs are the single most powerful way to maximize learning for all students. Nothing else even comes close.
PLC at Work process architects Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker, along with experts Rebecca DuFour, Thomas W. Many, and Mike Mattos, define PLCs as “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research in order to achieve better results for the students they serve” (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016, p. 10). On a macro-level, the entire school is a PLC with specific systems and structures in place that allow all teachers to collaborate with other professionals to give students the opportunity to achieve at high levels. On a micro-level, PLCs are made up of collaborative teams of teachers who meet regularly to engage in learning-focused conversations designed to improve instructional practice and impact student learning.
There are a variety of ways schools can construct collaborative teams within a PLC at Work, the most common being teams of teachers who teach the same course or the same grade level. While some schools are large and have several teachers instructing a common course or grade level, some schools may only have one teacher per course or grade level. These schools must find creative ways to form teams of teachers with similar learning targets for their students. In short, high-performing collaborative teams are most effective when they have the same answer to the first of four PLC critical questions: What do we want students to know, understand, and be able to do? (DuFour et al., 2016). Identifying common learning targets when teaching
different courses is most easily accomplished when the learning target is elevated beyond discipline-specific content to transdisciplinary concepts, transdisciplinary skills, or even learning dispositions. In fact, these concepts, skills, and dispositions are what students should be learning in the first place.
The PLC process impacts student learning by ensuring teachers stay focused on what matters most: learning. The process prevents a collaborative team from becoming a gathering of teachers who work on a common task or study a book together, but never intentionally consider student learning.
The PLC process is organized on three big ideas: (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture and collective responsibility, and (3) a focus on results (DuFour et al., 2016).
A Focus on Learning
The first big idea of a PLC is a focus on learning (DuFour et al., 2016). This may sound obvious and simplistic, but many schools focus on teaching more than on learning. High-performing schools boast the ability to hire some of the best teachers in the world. While this is certainly a huge asset, it does come with a price. Great teachers often receive accolades because they are fun to work with, are the toughest teachers in the school, give the most amount of homework, or are the hardest graders. But sadly, schools rarely measure teachers by how much their students learn. Moving a school from being teaching focused to being learning focused is one of the first steps necessary to create a PLC culture.
The second big idea of a PLC is a collaborative culture and collective responsibility (DuFour et al., 2016). In his book Creating Innovators, Tony Wagner (2012), senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, suggests there is no innovation without collaboration; it is very difficult to generate new ideas working alone. This is true for teachers. When teachers work collaboratively to examine student results, they can collectively identify the best approach to teaching. When teachers work together, they learn together, teacher practice improves, and student learning increases. It’s simple, but teachers in high-performing schools are often hired because of their independent, nonconformist spirit. They may be teachers administrators consider experts in their fields and who do not require a whole lot of structure and supervision to get
