Education's Professional Learning Communities, Through Private Sector Eyes

Professional learning communities are widely described, debated, prescribed, and codified in the literature of education. That's not the PLC I'm writing about. Those PLCs are organized structured initiated empowered and sanctified by school board policy, district priorities, school improvement plans and department goals. I'm not writing about that kind of PLC. PLCs are years in development, maturing and refinement. They have longevity and inevitability. They are rigorous, egalitarian, inviting, responsive, fully documented, ponderous creations. One earns (or is assigned) one's place in a PLC. (link to S Hord)

I'm writing about a different kind of professional learning community, one that is self-structured by the participants, answers to no one but the participants, and exists in response to an urgent unmet student need. These students need and deserve the best we can possibly give them, today. They can't wait for policy to become procedure to become an initiative to drive a goal.

In my most recent private sector assignment, I worked on contracts for the United States Marine Corps, providing them with a rapid-development, globally deployed ground equipment readiness reporting tool. There are many parallels between the kind of software engineering we provided for the Marines, to meet their warfighters' urgent needs, and the kind of professional learning community I am describing. In both cases, there is a more formal, better documented, thoroughly optimized approach that will, eventually, serve the needs of the ultimate benificiary more robustly than the solution we implemented in 2008. In both cases, the implementing teams served two simultaneous purposes. First, to do the best we could for today's Marine/student; second, to lay the groundwork as well as we could for the better, “more professional” solution that is years away. See How are the professional situations of teachers and engineers similar? on this blog for more comparisons.

Our teaching plc was created mid-year to serve ninth grade pre-algebra students. Three teachers, one right out of student teaching, one with 6 months' experience, and one with ten years' experience, found themselves with about 120 students who needed to be ready for algebra in the fall, and who were failing. We teachers needed to coordinate and learn from one another to get through the second semester. The curriculum was not engaging, student participation was low, they didn't seem to have any math to call on or any confidence in success. Paper and pencil work, which was reading-intensive, supplemented by self-paced (also reading-intensive) lab practice, was not helping students and didn't engage the teachers' desire to excite students, provide hands on lessons, or be memorable for next year.

Over the course of the second semester, we took time to share ideas and student work. We designed and implemented hands-on tasks where students actually constructed knowledge and described problem-solving processes (see separate post: Getting the math off the paper). We energized student effort in completing the lab work. We sustained our own energy and creativity and achieved our goal for students. Many students passed. Many were better prepared for Algebra in the fall.

Our plc differs from Hord's PLC in two key ways: we weren't responding to a program initiated or authorized by "higher ups" and we were opportunistic rather than methodical in our actions.

Here are some other important aspects of our plc.

We made time to work together – but we didn't force it. We appreciated each others' contributions – and maintained ownership of our own classrooms. We offered, received, and asked for help in pacing, alternative explanations, differentiation, and prioritization of content.

We treated one another with good humor, trusted each others intentions, input, and reactions, and presented a united front to students, colleagues, counselors and administrators.

We used face-to-face meetings, voice messages, email, handouts. We saw each other in class, out of class, and after school, in between our many other commitments. We discussed specific students, specific content and specific assessments based on observation, speculation and experimentation.

I belive our plc was just as much an expression of professional teaching practice as a PLC according to Hord. We collaborated, observed, experimented, learned, and consolidated our learnings, to the benefit of this year's students and as a basis for an enhanced approach next year. I also believe that detailed and rigorous planning can co-exist with seat-of-your-pants done-this-before planning.

For a detailed account of how we developed one lesson, please read Getting the math off the page, on this blog.