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Professional Learning Communities


Course Outline


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 a sixty-hour, three credit graduate level course completed over a thirteen-week period.

Hardward & Computer Skill Requirements


Students may use either a Macintosh computer or a PC with Windows 2000 or higher. Students should possess basic word processing skills and have internet access with an active e-mail account. Students also are expected to have a basic knowledge of how to use a Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla Firefox etc.

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 manual 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 " Big Idea" 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 by understanding the four building blocks of Learning Communities and how to apply them in their schools and classrooms.
Contents:
  1. "Four Wheels" of a Learning Community
  2. "Wheel One" Purpose Equals Mission Statement
  3. Common Perceptual Roadblocks to Mission Completion
  4. "Wheel Two" Our Vision Equals Our Purpose: How to Develop Vision for Learning Communities
  5. "Wheel Three" Our Values Create Our Behavior: How to Develop Value Statements for Learning Communities
  6. "Wheel Four" Our Goals Equal Our Targets: How to Create Effective Goals for a Learning Community
  7. The Importance of Celebration in the Learning Community
  8. What this Means for the Classroom: How We Apply What We Know
  9. Assignment

Session 3: Systems Thinking and Constructivist Teaching
Objective: Evaluate how systems thinking and constructivist teaching influence identification of essential learning within schools, how classrooms operate and how the professional learning community functions.
Contents:
  1. Defining Systems Thinking
  2. Why Systems Thinking is important to classroom and school culture
  3. Key Points of Systems Thinking
  4. Strategies for Systems Thinking: The Ladder of Inference: How Our Beliefs Impact Our Learning and the Change Process
  5. Constructivism in Education and PLC's
  6. What this Means for the Classroom: How We Apply What We Know
  7. Assignments

Session 4: Personal Tools for Learning Communities
Objective: To understand the importance of meshing personal leaning styles to create a safe environment for effective communication in a Professional Learning Community and how to apply this knowledge in schools and classrooms.
Contents:
  1. An Introduction to Personal Learning and Communication Styles- Identifying Our Personal Tools in Our Toolbox's
  2. Tool #1- Maslow's Hierarchy
  3. Tool #2- Gregorc Mind Styles Delineator
  4. Strategies for traveling with different drivers: How to communicate and work with different styles
  5. Tool #3- Kohlberg's Moral Reasoning: How Our Reasoning Affects Our Ability to Communicate and Problem Solve
  6. Summary of Tools in the Toolbox
  7. What this Means for the Classroom: How We Apply What We Know
  8. Assignments

Session 5: The Dynamics of Team Learning
Objective: To assist educators in understanding the benefits of interdependence, versus independence, and strategies to achieve effective team organization (structures), communication and problem solving within the PLC and classroom.
Contents:
  1. Four Characteristics of a "Learning" Team
  2. Characteristic Number One: Time Allocation & Scheduling Strategies for Creating Team Time
  3. Characteristic Number Two: Purpose-Key Communication Questions for Teams
  4. Characteristic Number Three: Training and Support for Team Building
  5. Skills Required for Being On an Effective Team: Two Universal Needs & Alignment
  6. Communication As a Skill: Eight Step Problem Solving Approach & Protocols for Inquiry and Advocacy
  7. Team Structures for Learning Communities
  8. Characteristic Number Four: Team Responsibility
  9. What this Means for the Classroom: How We Apply What We Know
  10. Assignments

Session 6: 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 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  
  Forum Participation   20      100 – 93 A
  Class Assignments   50       92 – 85 B
  Final Integration Project   30       84 – 77 C
  Total Points 100    

Student Requirements


1. Participation: Actively participate in all Forum activities.
2. Reading assignments: Complete all readings and reflection assignments.
3. Complete contemporary website research review project.
4. Students are required to synthesize and construct a final project using the methods and protocols outlined in this course in creating a professional learning development plan that specifically addresses key issues in their school and/or workplace. The project will be due by the end of the Module 10 assignment period.

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 Online course, go to the Course Registration page.