PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

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PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
Seminole County Public Schools Elementary Schools
Leadership Development 2009-10

• Seminole County Public Schools
• Elementary Schools

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Ro Educational Consulting, LLC
Ro
Mark T. Rolewski mark_at_roedleadership.org (520)
241-1705
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Foundations
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Resource
Learning by Doing A Handbook for Professional
Learning Communities at Work
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K-W-L

• Each person complete their own. (5 minutes)
• Each person share with their team. (10 minutes)
• Update table. (2 minutes)
• Turn into Mark.

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Purpose

• How would you like our meetings to be structured?

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Sense of Urgency
Quality Student Work Defined
Quality Pro Development
Quality Monitoring
Model Quality Teaching
Quality Instruction Defined
Meetings About the Data
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A team is not

• a group of people who meet on a regular basis,
  share ideas, and like each other.

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Working Group

• A Working Group is a group for which there is no
  significant incremental performance need or
  opportunity that would require it to be a team.

Members interact primarily to share information,
best practices, or perspectives and to make
decisions to help each individual perform within
his or her area of responsibility. A common
purpose or incremental performance goals are not
present.
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High-performing team
PERFORMANCE IMPACT
Real team
Working group
Potential team
TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Pseudo-team
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Assumption

• People working as part of a high functioning
  team collectively outperform individuals working
  in isolation from one another.

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So, what is a Real Team or a PLC?
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High-performing team
PERFORMANCE IMPACT
Real team
Working group
Potential team
TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Pseudo-team
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Team Definition

• 1.
• 2.
• 3

• List the characteristics of an effective team.

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Team Definitions
A Real Team is a small number of people with
complementary skills who are equally committed to
a common purpose, goals, and approach for which
they hold themselves mutually accountable. -Ka
tzenbach and Smith

• A group of people working interdependently to
  achieve a common goal for which members hold
  themselves mutually accountable.
• -Richard DuFour

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High-performing team
PERFORMANCE IMPACT
Real team
Working group
Potential team
TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Pseudo-team
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Scope of Project

• Do you want to develop PLCs for
• one group of teachers, multiple groups of
  teachers, or all teachers?
• a specific group (i.e., grade level(s),
  interested individuals, vertical team)?
• a specific content area?

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Lets build on what we know
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• If you had to create a Professional Learning
  Community to address 4th grade writing, what
  elements would you include?

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Three Big Ideas

• The professional learning community model
  requires the school staff to
• focus on learning rather than teaching.
• work collaboratively on matters related to
  learning.
• Hold itself accountable for the kind of results
  that fuel continuous improvement.

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What is collaboration?

• A systematic process in which we work together,
  interdependently, to analyze and impact
  professional practice in order to improve our
  individual and collective results.
• -DuFour, Eaker, DuFour

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• FLORIDA DATA DASHBOARD

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MUTUAL
ACCOUNTABILITY
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Curriculum
Assessment
Instruction
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The Learning Environment
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Four Critical Questions

• What do we want students to learn?
• How will we know they have learned it?
• What will we do if they dont?
• What will we do if they do?

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What do we want students to learn?

• Teachers of the same course or grade level
  should have absolute common agreement on what
  they expect all their students to know and be
  able to do.
• -Doug Reeves

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Focus on LearningCurriculum Practices

• Identify essential learning outcomes and learning
  targets for every course and every grade level
• Develop Pacing guides
• Teach at the same pace as much as possible
• Eliminate teaching non-curriculum units or topics

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Achieving Clearer Standards

• Are we teaching the Curriculum standards?
• Are we within the content limits?
• Are there thing that we are teaching that are not
  part of our curriculum standards?
• What can we eliminate from what we teach because
  it does not align with the standards?

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Common Assessments

• Are more efficient than assessments created by
  individual teachers
• Are more equitable for students
• Represent the most effective strategy for
  determining whether the guaranteed curriculum is
  being taught and, more importantly, learned.
• Inform the practice of individual teachers
• Build a teams capacity to improve its program.
• Facilitate a systematic, collective response to
  students who are experiencing difficulty.

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Purposes of Assessment

• Determine grades
• Identify if students have mastered particular
  skills in the standard(s)
• Evaluate the effectiveness of instructional
  strategies
• Help students learn content through application
  and other reasoning skills
• Communicate to parents what students presently
  know and can do

• Give students feedback about what they know and
  can do
• Show students what they need to focus on to
  improve their understanding
• Encourage student self-evaluation
• Motivate students to be more engaged in learning
• Help students develop positive attitudes toward a
  subject
• Communicate expectations to students

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Common Assessment

• Agreement on essential skills
• Agreement on the method of assessing those skills
• Agreement on the standard of measurement
• Agreement on level of proficiency
• Created in collaboration with team members
• Agreement to examine results to form instruction
  and design interventions for mastery

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Focus on LearningInstructional Practices

• Select appropriate strategies and materials to
  connect to learning targets
• Reflect on and share best practices
• Collaboratively design varied approaches, when
  necessary, to address a variety of learning
  styles and abilitiesdifferentiating instruction

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Timeline

• By the end of
• the second week of school we will present our
  team norms.
• the fourth week of school we will present our
  team goals
• By the sixth week of school we will present our
  list of the essential knowledge, skills, and
  dispositions our students will acquire during
  this semester
• By the eighth week of school we will administer
  our first common assessment.
• By the tenth week of school we will present our
  analysis of results.

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Lets be pragmatic!
Creating a schedule sends the message that
teacher collaboration and student learning are a
priority for the school. Create a yearlong
schedule for your PLC(s).
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Barriers

• List the barriers to developing PLCs in your
  school.

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Assumption

• People working as part of a high functioning
  team outperform individuals working in isolation
  from one another.

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Three Big Ideas

• The professional learning community model
  requires the school staff to
• focus on learning rather than teaching.
• work collaboratively on matters related to
  learning.
• hold itself accountable for the kind of results
  that fuel continual improvement.

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The Five Dysfunctions of a TeamPatrick Lencioni
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Creating Team Norms

• Give each team member 5-7 Post-It Notes.
• Give team members five minutes to identify norms
  and write them on the Post-It Notes.
• Place all Post-It Notes in the middle of the
  table.
• Give team members 5-10 minutes to group the
  Post-It Notes in silence.
• Give the team 10-15 minutes to discuss groupings
  and prioritize norms.
• Write prioritized norms on chart paper for
  posting during team meetings.

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Norms of the National Staff Development Council
Board of Trustees and Staff

• We will work together as a community that values
  consensus rather than majority rule.
• We will be fully present at the meeting by
  becoming familiar with materials before we arrive
  and by being attentive to behaviors which affect
  physical and mental engagement.
• We will invite and welcome the contributions of
  every member and listen to each other.
• We will be involved to our individual level of
  comfort. Each of us is responsible for airing
  disagreements during the meeting rather than
  carrying those disagreements outside the board
  meeting.
• We will operate in a collegial and friendly
  atmosphere.
• We will use humor as appropriate to help us work
  better together.
• We will keep confidential our discussions,
  comments, and deliberations.
• We will be responsible for examining all points
  of view before a consensus is accepted.
• We will be guided by the NSDC mission statement,
  which focuses on organization and professional
  development to enhance success for all students.

Used with permission from the National Staff
Development Council, www.nsdc.org, 2006. All
rights reserved.
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PURPOSE
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Case Study

• Select a team (i.e, grade level, department,
  horizontal team) to work with this year.

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• A Pseudo-team is a group for which there could
  be a significant, incremental performance need or
  opportunity, but it has not focused on collective
  performance and is not really trying to achieve
  it.

• no focus on performance goals
• may call itself a team
• weakest of all groups in terms of performance
  impact
• interactions detract from individual performances
• sum of the whole is less than the potential of
  the parts

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• A Potential Team is a group for which there is a
  significant, incremental performance need, and
  that is really trying to improve its performance
  impact.

• usually requires more clarity about goals or
  common approach
• has not yet established mutual accountability

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Linguistics of Teams

• I
• Me
• My
• Mine

• Us
• We
• Our

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Team Characteristics

• Common Purpose
• Common Goals
• Common Approach (Strategy)
• Mutual Accountability
• Complimentary Skills Technical, Interpersonal
• Problem-Solving, Decision-Making Skills

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Variance
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TASK
IMPACT
SELF
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Common Purpose
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Common Goal

• NO GOAL.
• NO TEAM.

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Common Approach

• What we teach
• How we teach
• How we assess
• Time

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Mutual Accountability

• Cascade data

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Complimentary Skills

• Technical Skills
• Interpersonal Skills

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Identify Critical Success Factors
Evaluate Interventions
Continuous Improvement Process
Define Current Performance Levels
Identify Problems
Implementation
Determine and Verify Root Causes
Identify Interventions