Professional Learning Communities

Information for this page was gleaned from a variety of books written by Rick Dufour. The primary source for information is from: Dufour, R., Dufour, R., & Eaker, R. (2005). On Common Ground: The Power of Professional Learning Communities. Chicago, IL: National Education Service.

Big Ideas of a Professional Learning Community

Big Idea #1: Ensuring that Students Learn

• The core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn.
• The simple shift - from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning - has profound implications for schools.

Big Idea # 2: A Culture of Collaboration

• The powerful collaboration that characterizes professional learning communities is a systematic process in which teachers work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice.
• Teachers work in teams, engaging in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep team learning - which in turn leads to higher levels of student achievement.
• Collaborative conversations call on team members to make public what has traditionally been private - goals, strategies, materials, pacing, questions, concerns, and results

Big Idea #3: A Focus On Results

• Schools & teachers typically suffer from the DRIP syndrome - Data Rich/Information Poor. The results-oriented PLC not only welcomes data but also turns data into useful and relevant information for staff.
• Educators must begin to embrace data as a useful indicator of progress. They must stop disregarding or excusing unfavorable data and honestly confront the sometimes brutal facts.
• Educators who focus on results must also stop limiting improvement goals to factors outside the classroom, such as student discipline and staff morale, and shirt their attention to goals that focus on student learning.
• They must stop assessing their own effectiveness on the basis of how busy they are or how many new initiatives are launched and begin to ask, “Have we made progress on the goals that are most important to us?”

The Major Principles of Professional Learning Communities (PLC)

The construct of a professional learning community has been anointed as the most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement. Dufour lists the following characteristics as defining aspects of a professional learning community

• Shared mission, vision, values, goals
• Collaborative teams FOCUSED ON LEARNING
• Collective inquiry into “best practice” and “current reality”
• Action orientation/experimentation
• Commitment to continuous improvement
• Results orientation

Dufour proposes that leaders in a PLC need to pursue the following questions:

• To what extent are the students learning the intended outcomes of the course?
• What steps can I take to give both students and teachers the additional time and support they need to improve learning?

Dufor argues that the biggest obstacle that schools need to overcome in their quest to build a PLC is the culture of teacher isolation that permeates most educational settings. Dufour cites a number of experts when describing the importance of overcoming the culture of isolation:

Improving schools requires collaborative cultures...Without collaborative skills and relationships, it is not possible to learn and to continue to learn as much as you need to know to improve. - Michael Fullan

Throughout our ten-year study, whenever we found an effective school or an effective department within a school, without exception that school or department has been part of a collaborative professional learning community. - Milbrey McLaughlin

If schools want to enhance their capacity to boost student learning, they should work on building a collaborative culture...When groups, rather than individuals, are seen as the main units for implementing curriculum, instruction, and assessment, they facilitate development of shared purposes for student learning and collective responsibility to achieve it. - Fred Neumann

Learning must be shamelessly integrated into the work to create an ongoing cycle of reflection, experimentation, and action. Learning should be so integrated into work that it will be difficult to see where the “work” ends and the “learning” begins. - Peter Senge

Collaborative Team Process - Dufour

1. Clarify common outcomes by course or grade level.

• 8-10 “power standards” per semester - consensus on the important things
• A guaranteed and viable curriculum regardless of whose class you’re in

2. Develop common assessments.

• Develop at least 4 common assessments per year and score them collaboratively
• Set the target - the cut scores that establish proficiency - and answer...how good is good enough?

3. Establish Specific, Measurable Goals

• SMART protocol for design

4. Analyze Results

• How many kids didn’t meet the target?
• Data help us see how the students are learning, not how the teacher is teaching.
• Don’t focus on just averages in a learning community, look at individual students

5. Identify Improvement Strategies

• What are we going to do for the kids who didn’t meet the standard?
• Diagnostic and timely intervention strategies

Keys to Effective Teams - Dufour

1. Embed collaboration in routine practices of schools

• You can’t invite people to collaborate or make it optional - it needs to become what the school does.
• Create a schedule where people are required to talk about learning and teaching.

2. Time for collaboration is built into the school day and the school calendar

3. Teams focus on key questions

• Centered on gains in student achievement
• What do we want students to learn?
• How will we know they learned?
• What happens when they don’t learn?

4. Products of collaboration are made explicit

• Intended course outcomes (power standards)
• Alignment with State Standards
• Assessment instruments
• Criteria for judging the quality of student work
• Data Analysis & Improvement Plan

5. Team norms guide collaboration

• Honest discussions that enable everyone to participate and be heard.

6. Teams pursue specific & measurable performance goals

• Strategic, Measurable, Attainable, Results-Orientated, Timebound

7. Teams have access to relevant information

• Data that informs teacher practice
• Absent a basis of comparison there is no data analysis

If the purpose of school is truly to ensure high levels of learning for all students, schools will:

• Clarify what each student is expected to learn,
• Monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis,
• Create systems to ensure students receive additional time and support if they are not learning,
• Align all resources to support student learning,
• Examine all of the practices, policies, & procedures of the school in light of their impact on student learning.

Recurring Themes of PLCs & The Assumptions They Challenge

1. Learning for All v. Teaching for All

• The very purpose of schooling is to ensure that all students acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions essential to their future success.
• Their emphasis is not on raising test scores, but on schools making a positive difference in the lives of students and thereby fulfilling a fundamentally moral purpose.
• The PLC concept is grounded in the making-a-difference sense of moral purpose, but if the PLC model is to take root in school, it must supplant the deeply entrenched traditional assumptions that have guided schools for over a century.

2. Collaborative Cultures vs. Teacher Isolation

3. Collective Capacity vs. Individual Development

• Capacity building is the daily habit of working together - and you can’t learn this from a workshop or a course, you need to learn it by doing it and getting better at it on purpose.
• The PLC concept is specifically designed to develop the collective capacity of a staff to work together to achieve the fundamental purpose of the school: high levels of learning for all students.

4. A Focus on Results Vs. A Focus on Activities

• Schools continue to operate under the old factory model that assumes if the inputs are correct - if teachers are provided with the right curriculum, the right textbook, the right schedule, and so on - the results will take care of themselves.
• Intentions are fine, but they will not impact results unless and until they are translated into specific concrete actions and collective commitments.

5. Assessment for Learning vs. Assessment of Learning

• Assessment for learning - assessments that are used both to identify students who need additional support and to inform teacher practice.
• Assessment which are: 1) Timely; 2) Give teachers and students frequent, ongoing feedback on the extent of student learning; 3) Are standards-based; they help teachers answer the question, “How do we know if each of our students is acquiring the knowledge and skills we intended.”; 4) Are formative - they are used as tools to identify where a student might be experiencing difficulty so that the student can receive additional time & support until he or she has mastered the skill; and 5) Share data which is easily accessible between teachers who then assist each other in addressing areas of concern

6. Widespread Leadership vs. The Charismatic Leader

• The PLC concept operates from the premise that leadership should be widely dispersed throughout a school, and thus developing the leadership potential of all staff members is imperative.
• To become a PLC, as school must transcend its dependence on a single leader and develop a culture that sustains improvement despite the departure of key individuals.

7. Self-Efficacy vs. Dependency

• Educators within a PLC are willing to acknowledge that many of the factors that result in improved student learning do lie within their sphere of influence
• Will educators be able to move from an “if only” culture (if only we had more resources, if only the kids were motivated) to a “can do” culture?

PLC Resources

Click the links below to access documents that Sweet Home administrators have used to build understanding around the concepts presented in School Leadership that Works.