The Common Core anchor standards provide high schools with a clear destination—college and career readiness—and working in collaborative teams, focusing on student performance, and using common assessments are steps in the right direction on the path. If you or your collaborative team members think the Common Core’s outcomes are unrealistic, read them through the lens of a parent. Would you want your child to know and be able to do what is described? Do you want your child challenged by these rigorous expectations? If the answer is yes, as school teachers, we need to want the same goals and to work toward the same goals for all our students. Let Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey lead the way.
—Carol Jago, Past President, National Council of Teachers of English;
Associate Director, California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA
INTRODUCTION
The investment of time and expertise by schools and districts to make the transformation into an effective Professional Learning Community (PLC) at Work™ is about to pay off once again. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS ELA) represents a significant change in how the education profession looks at curriculum, instruction, and assessment. In addition, the implications for implementation of the CCSS ELA will have ramifications for years to come. As new research on best practices related to the Common Core State Standards is conducted and disseminated, educators will need to interpret these results and determine how best to put them into practice. The PLC process offers an ideal foundational system for doing so. This process provides the necessary conditions and support to accomplish the work of ensuring continuous improvement. Ongoing professional development is embedded into the process, because teachers work as members of high-performing collaborative teams. Becoming a PLC is a process of reculturing a school; the concept is not just another meeting (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008; Frey, Fisher, & Everlove, 2009). Effective districtwide or schoolwide PLCs have the following six characteristics (DuFour et al., 2008; DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010).
1. Shared mission, vision, values, and goals all focused on student learning: The mission defines why the organization exists; the vision defines what the organization can become in the future; the values consist of demonstrated attitudes and behaviors that further the vision; and the goals are markers used to determine results and assess progress. A thriving PLC immerses itself in the behaviors necessary to the development of these concepts.
2. A collaborative culture with a focus on learning: Collaboration, an essential ingredient in the PLC process, enables people to work interdependently to improve teaching and learning.
3. Collective inquiry into best practice and current reality: Collective inquiry is the process through which PLC educators strive to build shared knowledge about research and what works in their classrooms.
4. Action orientation: An action orientation is characteristic of successful PLCs that learn by doing and recognize the significance and necessity of actions that engage their members in planning learning tasks, implementing them, and evaluating results.
5. A commitment to continuous improvement: Continuous improvement is a cyclical process that PLCs use to plan, implement, and check to determine the effectiveness of their efforts to improve teaching and learning.
6. Results orientation: Results are what count for PLCs; they are the measurable outcomes that reveal the success of the collaborative efforts to improve teaching and learning. Results outweigh intentions.
Visit www.allthingsplc.info for a glossary of PLC terms.
These six characteristics must be woven into the fabric of the school; they have to become part of the air that teachers, parents, students, and administrators breathe. In creating this culture, PLCs must reach agreement on fundamental issues, including (DuFour et al., 2008):
• What content students should learn
• What common and coherent assessments to develop and use in order to determine if students have learned the agreed-on curriculum
• How to respond when students do or don’t learn the agreed-on curriculum
To accomplish these three tasks, teachers need adequate time to collaborate with their colleagues. We are not suggesting that scheduling time for teachers to collaborate is easy, but without dedicated time, teams will not develop the collaborative structures needed to support student learning, especially if teachers are going to address the Common Core State Standards in grades 9–12. As part of their collaborative team time, teachers in PLCs engage in inquiry into student learning. The following four critical questions of a PLC highlight and provide a foundation for the work of collaborative planning teams (DuFour et al., 2008).
1. What do we want our students to learn?
2. How will we know when they have learned it?
3. How will we respond when some students don’t learn?
4. How will we extend and enrich the learning for students who are already proficient?
Professional Development and Professional Learning Communities
Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) summarizes the research on effective professional development as follows:
Effective professional development is sustained, ongoing, content-focused, and embedded in professional learning communities where teachers work overtime on problems of practice with other teachers in their subject area or school. Furthermore, it focuses on concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, observation, and reflection, looking at how students learn specific content in particular contexts…. It is often useful for teachers to be put in the position of studying the very material that they intend to teach to their own students. (pp. 226–227)
In other words, effective professional development is often the opposite of what most teachers receive—it is sustained and embedded within the work of professional learning communities and is focused on the actual tasks of teaching using the material teachers use with students. Professional development practices have moved beyond stand-alone workshops to ones that are tied to a school’s chosen area of focus. Through the work of researchers like Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers (1983) and others, educators began to understand that professional development could be linked to the change process. In particular, the value of an agreed-on focus, the need for continued support after the session, and a plan for measuring success have become expected elements of any school’s professional development plan. To succeed as a high-performance school, professional development should be part of a teacher’s overall involvement in a learning community.
The link between professional development and school change has been further strengthened through PLCs (Eaker, DuFour, & DuFour, 2002). PLCs recognize that teacher collaboration lies at the heart of learning and change. Collaborative planning teams within PLCs are able to bridge theory to practice as they convene regularly to examine student performance data, discuss student progress, develop and implement curricula, and coach one another through meaningful collaborative work between meetings.
The evidence of PLC effectiveness is mounting. A study of elementary teachers in PLCs identifies a strong statistical correlation between their participation in professional learning communities, their classroom cultures, and their use of formative assessments to advance learning (Birenbaum, Kimron, & Shilton, 2011). Robert Bullough and Steven Baugh (2008) find that the conditions created to foster a schoolwide PLC in turn deepened a school-university partnership. In an analysis of nearly four hundred schools as PLCs, Louise Stoll, Ray Bolam, Agnes McMahon, Mike Wallace, and Sally Thomas (2006) note