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Attachment 1-Doing Differently 3-24-15

The document discusses implementing a Professional Learning Community (PLC) model in schools to improve student learning outcomes. It argues that reconstructing how professional learning is organized, delivered, and embedded in teachers' daily work is necessary. This requires narrowing the scope of professional learning so that new skills can be fully learned and implemented. Principals, central office staff, lead teachers, and all educators must embrace new roles and skills to collaborate continuously through an inquiry-based cycle aimed at better serving students. When done well, the PLC model can create a collaborative school culture where teachers are motivated by constant learning and discussion to help all students succeed.

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303 views2 pages

Attachment 1-Doing Differently 3-24-15

The document discusses implementing a Professional Learning Community (PLC) model in schools to improve student learning outcomes. It argues that reconstructing how professional learning is organized, delivered, and embedded in teachers' daily work is necessary. This requires narrowing the scope of professional learning so that new skills can be fully learned and implemented. Principals, central office staff, lead teachers, and all educators must embrace new roles and skills to collaborate continuously through an inquiry-based cycle aimed at better serving students. When done well, the PLC model can create a collaborative school culture where teachers are motivated by constant learning and discussion to help all students succeed.

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Doing Differently

By Dr. Timothy Mitchell


Superintendent-Rapid City Area Schools
Creating a district and schools that are fiscally responsible and
that embrace the current research as to what is the best way for
leaders and teachers to act is not for the faint of heart. It requires
reconstructing the entire way in which professional learning is
organized and delivered. Everything teacher evaluations,
professional learning opportunities, and teams, have to be
coordinated for maximum positive effect. Additionally, the scope
of professional learning is narrowed so that what is learned can be
learned well first by lead teachers and administrators and
eventually by all teachers in a school. There should be no gap
between learning and doing. As Michael Fullan (2008) says, the
learning is the work, and everyone learns so that they can do a
better job.
Leading these types of schools asks a lot of everyone in the
school. Principals need to embrace being instructional leaders,
and they must develop the self- and project-management
strategies that allow them to make instruction their top priority.
Central office staff must make instruction a priority and become
actively involved in the nuts and bolts of professional learning.
Lead teachers and team facilitators must master a host of new
skills and attain a deep, practical understanding of all the
practices. Teachers and all other educators need to learn,
implement, and master the new teaching practices and engage in
honest conversations about what is working and what is not
working.
A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is an ongoing process in
which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of
collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for
the students they serve. A PLC operates under the assumption
that the key to improving learning for students is continuous, jobembedded learning for educators. I am proposing a restructuring
of the Instructional Calendar with the addition of regular early
release times to facilitate this model.

The PLC model demands that everyone works together to create a


new kind of school culture, one based on partnership and
collaboration. In this model, a fundamental assumption that
teachers are smart, good people who more than anything else
wants to help their students succeed.
The work is hard, but the rewards are great. When fully realized
these districts and schools are characterized by the quality and
respect of the conversations taking place and they embody a love
of learning that is modeled by everyone in the district. Love of
learning is infectious; it is energizing, joyous, and humanizing. In
districts and schools where professional learning is at the core,
teachers come to work excited by the prospects of what new idea
or practice they might do every day. In this way, each day, a
school district moves closer to the goal: every student learning at
a high level, every day, in every class.

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