Professional Learning Communities

Course Description

This course is designed to assist teachers and administrators in public and private schools to create a clear and compelling vision of how an organization must shift in order to help all students learn. Members of Professional Learning Communities use results-oriented action steps to clarify exactly what each student must learn, monitor each student's learning on a timely basis, provide systematic interventions, and use collective inquiry/feedback to create a collaborative atmosphere of continual improvement. The self-assessments and reflective exercises contained in the book, Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many, will form the foundation for the course.

Objectives

• Evaluate a school or organization for Professional Learning Community readiness.
• Investigate how the creation or expansion of Professional Learning Communities relates to curriculum, assessment, attitude, and professional/personal development.
• Explain how Professional Learning Communities are an essential element of today’s Knowledge Economy and broader Conceptual Age.
• Evaluate the importance of Systems Thinking within schools.
• Convert  a mission statement into an action plan for continuous improvement.
• Co-create a shared vision for the organization.
• Confront the issue of time management and Profession Learning Communities.
• List and discuss items for a learning team agenda.
• Consider the Ladder of Inference concept and how preconceptions can impede or promote progress and change.
• Review the seven steps for breaking through organizational gridlock.
• Evaluate how Professional Learning Communities focus more on what is learned rather than what is taught.
• Review the process of creating consensus on essential learning and developing common formative assessments.
• Compare and contrast roadblocks to student learning and create a system to collectively and systematically intervene in a timely fashion when all students are not learning.
• Develop action strategies for addressing the emotional component of PLC’s in defining and building consensus and responding to resistance.
• Discover the protocols for effective advocacy and inquiry.

Curriculum Design & Time Requirements

This course will outline the parameters of Professional Learning Communities and the importance of educator essential learning on student achievement while providing participants the opportunity of developing a school action plan specific to their school site and classroom or area of expertise. The following methodologies will be used during the course: lectures, readings, group and individual discussions, applied practice assignments, and papers. This is forty-five hour, 3 graduate credit course taught in the classroom and online.

Course Materials

The required text for this course is Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many. In this text, educators will learn to embrace Professional Learning Communities as an integral part of school reform and organizational management for both the organization and classroom setting.  This comprehensive resource discusses the changing role of school restructuring and learning practices, as well as the conceptual framework and research behind implementing programs and practices that lead to highest student achievement and staff development in the most progressive educational settings. Case studies, journal articles, sample action plans and a CD-ROM are included. In addition students will receive a Gregorc Style Delineator self assessment instrument to explore their learning style and how it impacts professional team dynamics and student/ teacher rapport for essential learning. Participants will be provided with a student guide for supplemental information related to class activities.

Session Outline

Session 1: Introduction and Overview
Objective: How Professional Learning Communities relate to curriculum, assessment, attitude, and personal and professional development. Identifying the six characteristics of professional learning communities and how school reform has evolved over the past thirty years.
Contents:

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

Session 2: A Sense of Purpose and Mission
Objective: Clarifying our purpose as educators and developing an action-based mission statement.
Contents:

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

Session 3: Systems Thinking and Constructivist Teaching
Objective: Evaluate the importance of Systems Thinking and Constructivist Teaching within our schools.
Contents:

1. Defining Systems Thinking/Constructivism
2. Why Systems Thinking is important to classroom and school culture
3. Strategies for Systems Thinking
4. The Ladder of Inference
5. Constructivist teaching in theory and practice
6. Assignments

Session 4: Establishing Essential Learning in the School Culture
Objective: To clarify and reach consensus on what the students must learn.
Contents:

1. An introduction to Essential Learning
2. Clarifying questions regarding Essential Learning
3. How to create PLC's that focus on student learning
4. Identifying roadblocks to student learning
5. Clarifying questions regarding monitoring student learning
6. Guidelines for creating common formative assessments
7. The power of common assessments
8. Assignments

Session 5: Personal Learning and Communication Styles
Objective: To underscore the importance of meshing personal learning styles and creating a safe environment for effective communication in a Professional Learning Community.
Contents:

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

Session 6: The Dynamics of Team Learning
Objective: To assist educators in moving from independence to interdependence.
Contents:

1. Glasser's Reality Therapy
2. The Two Universal needs
3. The 8-step approach to problem solving
4. The building blocks of collaboration and a focus on feedback
5. The Genius of "And" versus the Tyranny of "Or"
6. How to leverage brain power for maximum

Session 7: Shared Vision
Objective: Creating and translating the vision of your school into action.
Contents:

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

Session 8: Addressing Consensus and Conflict in a PLC
Objective: To anticipate and manage issues related to creating consensus and handling conflict.
Contents:

1. Reaching consensus on the concept of consensus
2. Elements of crucial conversations
3. Gardner's 7 factors of changing thought patterns
4. The inner conflict of knowing and doing
5. The importance of team norms
6. How to create explicit team norms
7. Assignments

Session 9: Systematic Interventions to Keep All Students on Pace
Objective: To develop PLC-based intervention strategies for students who do not keep pace.
Contents:

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

Session 10: Your Personal Growth Plan and PLC Action Plan
Objective: To create both short and long range goals and develop a plan of action driven by results.
Contents:

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

Grading

		Assignment	Points			Grading Scale
		Group & Classroom Participation	30			100 – 93	A
		Reading Assignments	20			92 – 85	B
		Website Review Research Project	20			84 – 77	C
		Final Integration Project	15
		Final Exam	15
		Total Points	100

Student Requirements

	1.	Attend all class sessions for the requisite number of hours (45) and actively participate in all class activities.
	2.	Complete all reading assignments.
	3.	Complete contemporary website research review project.
	4.	Complete the final integration project. Review research and literature on effective strategies of creating Professional Learning Communities and devise a written model Professional Learning Community action plan for the participants’ individual school or professional organizational setting.
	5.	Pass a final exam.

Student Academic Integrity

Participants guarantee that all academic class work is original. Any academic dishonesty or plagiarism (to take ideas, writings, etc. from another and offer them as one's own), is a violation of student academic behavior standards as outlined by our partnering colleges and universities and is subject to academic disciplinary action.

Register

To register to take TEI's Professional Learning Communities course, go to the Course Registration page.