Professional Learning Communities

Objectives:

• The participants will understand a brief history of educational reform and how these approaches have been unsuccessful in addressing student achievement
• The participants will understand and evaluate the conceptual characteristics (Six Big Ideas) of a Professional Learning Community and how these characteristics can be translated to classroom practices (ie. Dufour’s Six Components of a Professional Learning Community from course text)
• Investigate research regarding the efficacy of professional learning community implementation on student achievement

Contents:

• Course registration, requirements, and expectations
• Introductions of class members
• General Course Overview
• Exploring the concept of school reform and how it has evolved over the past thirty years
• Defining the who, what, when and where of Professional Learning Communities: PLC's Six Characteristics
• Developing a common vocabulary and a consistent understanding of key concepts
• Setting personal goals for the course
• Table-group team building exercise

Objective:

• Clarifying our purpose as educators and developing an action-based mission statement.

Contents:

• Building consensus from the start, a case study reflection
• Good is the enemy of great
• Confronting the issue of time and time management
• Rediscovering your own purpose in education
• Creating and living an action-based Mission Statement
• How your school's educational mission incorporates vision, values and goals
• Assignment

Objectives:

• Investigate and evaluate how systems thinking theory and constructivist teaching practices influence the identification of essential learning within schools
• Consider the Ladder of Inference concept and how preconceptions can impede or promote progress and change
• Analyze and evaluate how systems thinking theory and constructivist teaching practices influences how the professional learning community functions
• Evaluate the importance of Systems Thinking within the schools

Contents:

• Defining Systems Thinking/Constructivism
• Why Systems Thinking is important to classroom and school culture
• Strategies for Systems Thinking
• The Ladder of Inference
• Constructivist teaching in theory and practice
• Assignments

Objectives:

• The participants will understand the importance of meshing personal leaning styles to create a safe environment for effective communication in a Professional Learning Community
• The participants will understand how thinking styles affect student learning in the classroom and how these styles influence professional collaboration amongst adults on a PLC
• The participant will understand and evaluate how Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning promote or hinder a Professional Learning Community’s ability to meet its mission, vision, values and goals

Contents:

• An Introduction to Personal Learning and Communication Styles- Identifying Our Personal Tools in Our Toolboxes
• Tools in Our Toolbox’s
• Tool #1- Maslow’s Hierarchy, Tool #2- Gregorc Mind Styles Delineator
• Strategies for traveling with different drivers: How to communicate and work with different styles
• Tool #3- Kohlberg’s Moral Reasoning: How Our Reasoning Affects Our Ability to communicate and problem solve
• Summary of Tools in the Toolbox
• What this Means for the Classroom: How We Apply What We Know
• Assignments

Objectives:

• Communicate the four characteristics of a learning team in a PLC and differentiate PLC team learning and collaboration from “group work”
• Investigate the benefits of interdependence, versus independence, for working in teams in a Professional Learning Community
• Experience and evaluate team-building strategies to achieve effective team organization (structures), communication and problem solving within the PLC and classroom
• Distinguish effective skills demonstrated by high functioning teams in a PLC
• Identify and explain strategies for effective communication and team building (Discover the protocols for effective advocacy and inquiry)

Contents:

• Identify personal learning and communication styles using the Gregoric Indicator
• How different learning styles affect group performance
• Maslow's Hierarchy and Professional Learning Communities
• Protocols for effective inquiry and advocacy
• The Four Keys for Incorporating Celebration
• The risk/reward emotional component of a PLC
• Strategies for creating cohesive group structure
• Assignments

Objectives:

• The participants will investigate and discover that common formative assessment is greatly enhanced by collaboration with peers and encouraging students to begin to take steps toward self-assessment
• Clarify and reach consensus on what the students must learn (Essential Learning)
• Establish guidelines for creating common formative assessments

Contents:

• An introduction to Essential Learning
• Clarifying questions regarding Essential Learning
• How to create PLC’s that focus on student learning
• Identifying roadblocks to student learning
• Clarifying questions regarding monitoring student learning
• Guidelines for and creating common formative assessments
• The power of common assessments
• Assignments

Objectives:

• Create the protocols for both developing and translating the vision and/or mission statement of your school into concrete action
• Investigate the stories behind the structure and culture of their schools and understand how to begin the process of re-culturing

Contents:

• The logistics of how to build the foundation of a PLC
• Assessing the current reality of each school/district
• Linking the Change Initiative to current practices and assumptions
• Co-creating a new educational environment
• Establishing a results-based orientation in a PLC
• Addressing necessary cultural shifts
• Assignments

Objectives:

• Anticipate and manage issues related to creating consensus, changing minds, and handling conflict within their professional learning communities
• Develop a greater understanding of team building and the importance of and guidelines for creating team norms

Contents:

• Reaching consensus on the concept of consensus
• Elements of crucial conversations
• Gardner's 7 factors of changing thought patterns
• The inner conflict of knowing and doing
• The importance of team norms
• How to create explicit team norms
• Assignments

Objective:

• Discover how the framework for systematic academic interventions are created, put into action and reviewed and maintained

Contents:

• Case study: Systematic Interventions versus an Educational Lottery
• Brainstorming ideas for the creation of an intervention system
• Clarifying questions to guide the development of Systematic Interventions
• Assessing intervention strategies
• Overcoming the barriers of existing culture and/or precedent
• S.P.E.E.D. intervention criteria
• How to support and sustain systematic interventions (no teachers left behind)
• Assignments

Objectives:

• Initiate goal-creation and goal-setting as it relates to Professional Learning Communities
• Discover how other schools and districts create, collect and manage data

Contents:

• Creating short term goals to serve as benchmarks
• Developing S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Attainable goals and Stretch goals and why both are important
• Using relevant information to improve results
• Moving beyond the DRIP syndrome of being data rich, but information poor
• Course Evaluation