Day 3 of the PLC At Work Institute was all about Mike Mattos for me. I have SO much swimming around inside my head from what he had to say that I am going to write a blog very soon just about RTI.
Instead of tackling RTI today, I would like to reflect about the PLC process in general. I've purposely reserved any blog posts about professional learning communities until I had a chance to take it all in and let the concepts marinate inside my head for a bit.
PLC's can be a complicated issue within school districts and schools. People seem to have caught on that PLC's work to improve learning, but the implementation isn't always effective. Unfortunately, I think that leaves many educators really confused as to what they are supposed to be doing. PLC's end up seeming like another meeting that you have to go to and more acronyms you have to learn. Tim Brown said it best. "PLC's should not be one more thing you are adding to your plate. Instead, they should simply be the way we operate." Professional learning communities should be a way we go about teaching that allows for high levels of learning. Period.
For me, one of the major downfalls of most PLC's that I've been a part of is that no one seemed to have the roadmap as to what we were supposed to be doing. Let's be honest. We're process people. We math teachers enjoy our steps, and when we know the process, we can get anything done. So here are the "Steps to actually doing this PLC thing people have been talking about so that our students will actually get something out of it" according to one math teacher who has done a couple PLC's and attended the PLC Institute. Catchy title, huh? Keep in mind that all of this is done is cooperation with your team of teachers that also teach the same subject/grade level.
Step 1: Know what you are supposed to teach. This seems so obvious, and yet not everyone knows exactly where their content should start and where it should stop. Identifying this and making for sure that everyone is on the same page is critical.
Step 2: Figure out which concepts your students absolutely have to know to be successful the next year. Basically, we have to pick our "hills to die on". Which concepts are so important that without them our students are doomed to fail the next grade? These concepts are your essential standards.
Step 3: Decide what order you are going to teach your standards, and how long you are going to teach each standard. When doing this, keep in mind the essential standards? These are the standards we should be spending the majority of our time teaching. All of the teachers on the team need to be in agreement and teach the standards in the same order to allow the next steps of the process to work.
Step 4: When you are beginning a unit on an essential standard, set a goal as a team for what you expect to accomplish during your initial teaching of the subject.
Step 5: Create a common assessment that measures students understanding of the essential standard.
Step 6: Teach. Every teacher teaches the concept in whatever way they choose within the timeframe given.
Step 7: Give all of the students the common assessment. It's important to be sure that each teacher is giving the assessment in the same way. Otherwise, data becomes invalid.
Step 8: Sit down with your team and analyze the data. Look for strengths and weaknesses in teaching practice. The goal of this is not to figure out whose "best" and look down on the "failures". The point of this conversation is to unite together to decide which strategies are going to best fit the needs of the students you have so that every child can learn the concept.
Step 9: Intervention and Extension. Refer those students who need help to whatever RTI is available and allow those who showed proficiency to demonstrate their knowledge with a task-based application of the content learned. This is going to look different depending on how your school has their RTI program set up. However, it can be as simple as one teacher taking those students needing help and providing re-teaching, and another teacher taking those students who have reached proficiency.
Step 10: Reassess those students who were given interventions to see if they now have an understanding of the concept. Without this step, the team has no way of determining if what they are doing in the intervention is working or not.
Once this process is completed, the team starts over at step 4 with the next standard being taught. It becomes a continuous cycle of learning and improvement for the students and for the teachers. Teams that are functioning well can truly support each other and ALL students to reach our ultimate goal: learning!
Professional Learning Communities Flow Chart
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