I remember reading Professional Learning Communities at Work in my first year of graduate school over a decade ago. Having spent time in a district where collaboration was commonplace, I didn’t foresee the potential for it to be as seminal as it has become. I clearly remember telling my classmates that the text was “nothing earth-shattering”.
Fast forward and now the PLC machine seems unstoppable. It seems that for a moment in education we perhaps are all thinking similarly. Whether this is a great-minds-think-alike moment or an if-everyone’s-thinking-the-same-thing-someone’s-not-thinking one, I encourage my fellow principals to proceed with caution.
Why proceed with caution?
Because the “Copyright PLC” machine seems unstoppable too.
Attending a PLC training is costly. (As a side note, there’s no denying that the main PLC trainers deliver consistent, quality content that is well-facilitated and learning that is relevant and important for all educators). However, when a district makes an effort to bring PLCs “to scale”, there may be little money left in the budget for other endeavors because of the cost. This wouldn’t be a huge problem because focus is good. But when the money’s tight and the training is sparse, it’s convenient for us to use the absence of formal PLC training as an excuse for not making progress toward working collaboratively.
Because we use “PLC” as a noun, a verb, and an adjective but it’s mostly a state of mind.
Every teacher in our school is part of a PLC.
That work doesn’t seem very PLC.
On Wednesday there’s a faculty meeting but on Thursday we’ll PLC.
Principals, it’s our job to ensure the kind of culture where teachers see students’ success as an interdependent endeavor. We can use PLC as whatever part of speech you want but without a doubt: if we don’t figure out how to work and learn together, there’s a percentage of students in every school who will fail. With an established collaborative culture, we can withstand such setbacks and potential delays as losing our “PLC time” or new staff needing “PLC training”.
Because what seems to be the typical work of most PLCs is only a portion of the necessary work of schools.
We want very much for our work in collaborative groups to be as efficient and objective as possible and, consequently, teams functioning within the guidance of the Four Questions of PLCs often examine data that can be analyzed efficiently. They select strategies that can be calibrated efficiently. They consider structures that can be established efficiently. This is good news. But it’s just a portion of the work that we need to get good at.
The other half involves rich conversation about more sophisticated pedagogy and authentic learning. This takes more time, more complex training, and more conversation.
