PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

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Personal goals ? What is it we always say is important but we never have time for ? When my school started our PLC work , the administrators wanted to give the community a sense of autonomy and freedom to decide what was most important to us . Additionally , they wanted us to either be the creators of PLCs or to have the choice to be active participants . Faculty and staff created a plethora of options to choose from that first year . They ranged from beginning-career-teacher groups to investigations into project-based-learning programs . These PLCs became my incentive to develop the empowHERment team , a group of dedicated teachers who are committed to supporting gender equity on campus ( our mission statement is included at the end of this article ). It was born out of the early days of our PLC programming .

my incentive to develop the empow- HERment team , a group of dedicated teachers who are committed to supporting gender equity on campus .

The important lesson that I recognize from my professional learning communities is that if they are overly prescriptive , they will not work . They must fit the needs of the school community . Faculty and staff must be the architects of these PLCs . You need to be able to have the time , space , and freedom to explore the topics that your group deems to be most important for your PLC . For some , that might be redesigning a math placement system . Others might want to focus on faculty and staff wellness . And finally , other educators might want to test the waters of mastery grading , going pointless , or even ungrading . ( Yes ! Folks at my school have done all these !) Mielke ( 2015 ) also urges administrators to allow these PLCs to try out ( in real spaces ) what they have been working on in their learning communities . He says , “ Give us the freedom , the opportunity , and most of all the safety to try new strategies we ’ ve discussed in our PLC .”

Mielke hits the nail on the head . Meeting and working together as a community is one thing . An important first step , but action must follow . Bryk et al . ( 2015 ) describe how the use of improvement science methods in commercial industries can be used in schools to , as they say , “ get better .” They specifically describe the use of rapid testing cycles , or PD- SAs ( plan-do-study-act ) to guide the development , revision , and fine-tuning of processes , relationships , and programs ( Bryk et al ., 2015 ; Lewis , 2015 ). PLCs can provide the space for educators to carry out these improvement cycles or PDSAs by using three basic grounding questions for improvement science .