Professional Learning Communities: Creating Cultures of Success
By: Aaron Harwood
Tags: Education, Culture, Classroom, Professional Development, Teaching And Learning

Committing to Learning

After educators commit to advancing student success and outline peer and colleague behavior, PLC participants can begin to define learning expectations. This portion of the PLC process addresses the first and second essential questions: “What do we want students to learn?” and “How do we measure student learning?” Fortunately, most states in the United States provide content standards that guide instruction. These standards help to address the “what” portion of the PLC process. In Georgia, where I teach, the state defines learning expectations via the Georgia Standards of Excellence, or GSE Standards.

While states provide the standards of learning, the curriculum still needs some refinement.

For example, the GSE High School Mathematics standards are so broad that it is difficult to effectively teach them in their entirety. To address this issue, PLCs can develop “Power Standards.” Power standards are those that have the most impact on student success by leveraging performance in cross curricular contexts, enduring from one unit of study to the next in the same class, and promoting student readiness as prerequisites for later classes. As an example, feel free to view Ware County High School’s GSE Geometry Power Standards.

After defining what a PLC wants students to learn, participants can address the second essential question of PLCs: “How do we measure student learning?” Creating common assessment calendars facilitates this portion of the PLC process. This is not to say that every teacher participating in the PLC will have to give assessments on the exact same day, rather it ensures similar pacing among classes of common content. Further, assessment calendars and common assessments guide teachers as they endeavor to match the rigor level of state mandated tests, thereby increasing their own understanding of what standards mastery may represent. This transparency is an important characteristic if we are to engage in honest self-reflection.

Committing to Differentiation

Professional learning communities use frequent formative assessments to adjust instruction. PLC teams use data to identify students that struggle with proficiency, and which team members appear to have the most success teaching particular standards. This transparency allows teacher leaders to address two dispositions found in Hattie’s Effect Size List (Killian, 2017), Teacher Estimates of Student Achievement (1.62) and Collective Teacher Efficacy (1.57).

Teacher Estimates of Student Achievement refers to how teachers view the abilities of their students. If teachers set high, yet reasonable expectations, their students can rise to the occasion with effective teaching practices. Formative assessment data communicates whether or not our instruction has been effective. If teachers find that instruction has not been impactful, this should lead PLC members to discuss alternative teaching and differentiation strategies.

Collective Teacher Efficacy is a disposition that refers to how groups of teachers feel about their collective ability to impact student learning. John Hattie found that strong feelings of group efficacy lead to greater impacts on student learning. Constant data analysis provide teachers with a continuous feedback loop that reinforces teacher efficacy. Teachers will be the most impactful when they feel like their efforts are making a difference in the lives of students.

Differentiation is an organic outcome of professional learning communities. George Couros reminds us in The Innovator’s Mindset, the premise behind professional learning communities is the idea

that the abilities, talents, and intelligence of students and teachers can be developed so as to lead to the creation of new and better ideas. (Couros, 2015, p. 33)

The process of continuous reflection of teaching practices develops teachers into lifetime learners.

In reality, professional learning communities are not so much about student learning as they are about the impact of teacher learning on student achievement.