A professional learning community, or PLC, plays a crucial role in the field of education as it serves as the vehicle for teachers to learn and grow together, ultimately contributing to the continuous improvement of educational organizations.
Have you tried running a professional learning community before? If you’ve struggled with getting the PLC off the ground, or making it a good use of time, this post is for you!
In today’s post, I’m going to show you step by step how to run an effective PLC with a simple structure that can be tailored to the unique needs of your school.
After going through this guide, you will know exactly how to implement a professional learning community in your school.
If you get stuck or have questions, simply send me a message and I will do my best to help you out.
Let’s get started!
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Step 1: Define Your Professional Learning Community Goals
Many people fail in implementing a professional learning community for the simple reason that they don’t have a clear plan for how the PLC will work and what its purpose will be.
You should always clearly define the goals for the PLC so that you can measure how well the process is working and whether you are making an impact on the school.
How you set goals is important too because it will help you know what to focus on – are you using the PLC to look at student achievement and success, or to address problems of practice within the school itself?
And ultimately, if you don’t have a clear vision for the professional learning community’s purpose, it will feel like another useless meeting that everyone could just skip.
I recommend starting out by getting clear on the driving purpose of the PLC, and then define the roles and responsibilities of the people collaborating in the PLC. Will the PLC be implemented school-wide or for certain grade levels or content areas? Is the focus on academic and behavioral supports, or a self-selected problem of practice?
Then, gather information about your current reality.
Where are you now in relation to the PLC’s guiding purpose? What do you need to know? What data sources can you use to understand your current reality? Are there data points that are missing and need to be collected?
To make this step go as smoothly as possible, make sure you also think about future trends that may impact your PLC vision by applying the following tips:
- Predict what we are going to see in the future. What current events might have a future impact? What do employer surveys say about the desires for the future workforce? What are the new hot topics education leaders and leaders from other fields are talking about now?
- Look for flags that we need to be aware of. What legislative or political trends may impact our work in the future? Are there big debates happening in higher education that will impact teacher prep programs or curriculum development?
Step 2. Clarify Logistics and Success Measures
Another critical step to effective implementation of a professional learning community is to have clarity on how the PLC will operate and how you will define success. This step is important because it helps you keep your work laser focused on the driving purpose of the collaboration.
Before I realized how important this step was, I made some rookie mistakes that stopped me from having effective PLC meetings.
We weren’t clear on when and how our PLC would meet, so our meetings often got sidetracked by other work. We didn’t protect time or get full support from administration, so the PLC work got put on the backburner as we dealt with other more urgent needs.
Once we agreed on dedicated time to do the work of the professional learning community, we were able to regularly look at our data, make informed decisions, and implement new strategies more quickly than ever before.
When you really nail this step, you’ll have a much better idea of where to focus your energies to impact student learning and school effectiveness.
As part of this step, you will want to set norms for how the PLC does its work. Think about logistics such as:
- Expectations for attendance and active participation
- Frequency of meetings
- Accountability for the work
- How to document the work (agendas, minutes, attendance, etc.)
- What training to provide participants
- What resources will support the PLC work
Finally, identify how you will measure the success of the PLC. What data or evidence will you need to demonstrate your success? How will you respond to successes? What will you do if approaches don’t work?
Step 3. Implement the Professional Learning Community
The next step is to implement.
This is where the real work happens. Once the logistics are set, it is time to deploy the plan. Begin meeting as scheduled, fulfilling the identified roles and responsibilities, and engaging in the strategies towards success.
To get started, engage in training to provide all participants with the needed resources to be an effective contributor. If staff need additional training related to content and pedagogy, the PLC can inform the school professional development plan.
This is also the stage where you are building acceptance and stakeholder buy-in. School leadership can provide key messaging to stakeholders around the importance and value of the PLC and its work. Seek out additional support as needed.
Communicate regularly with stakeholders, and seek their input to inform your work in the PLC. Share data as you have it, and monitor and adjust your actions as you gather data.
For example:
One elementary school identified goals around improving student achievement, specifically increasing the percentage of students scoring proficient on state math assessments by 10% over the year.
The PLC gathered a variety of student data, including standardized test scores, classroom assessments, and attendance records. The professional learning community met weekly to examine the data and discuss student performance in order to identify trends and share best practices. The PLC brainstormed strategies and resources to address areas where students were struggling.
The team implemented the strategies and interventions through small group instruction and inclusion of interactive math software. Throughout the year, the team monitored student progress with formative and summative assessments. They adjusted their strategies based on ongoing analysis of student data.
As the year progressed, the PLC celebrated incremental successes and shared challenges, which allowed for additional successful strategies. By the end of the year, the PLC saw significant improvements in student achievement, as well as a positive culture of collaboration as a result of the PLC work.
The structured implementation of professional learning communities helps teachers collaboratively identify areas of concern, implement targeted strategies, and monitor progress.
Step 4. Evaluate Professional Learning Community Effectiveness
A great thing about implementing PLCs is that there are many different ways you can go about reaching your goals. So you can try a few strategies and see what works best for you.
As you go about testing out strategies, you’re going to want to monitor them for effectiveness..
Once you evaluate how well a given strategy is working, you can adjust actions as needed and look at new data points that can be considered for a fuller picture.
I recommend starting with some guiding questions: Are we making progress as a school? Are we increasing opportunities and outcomes for students? Are we fulfilling our vision and mission?
In this video, you can see how one school has implemented their PLCs and how they’ve made adjustments along the way to improve their effectiveness.
A few ways you can approach this:
- Method #1: Evaluating program effectiveness. “How well are we meeting our goals?” Examine changes in identified data sources over time to gauge impact. Compare current results to baseline data to assess progress.
- Method #2: Stakeholder engagement. “What do our stakeholders say about how we are doing?” Gather feedback from teachers, students, and community members through surveys on the quality of collaboration and perceived impacts on the PLC goal areas.
- Method #3: Evaluating implementation structures. “What level of fidelity did we have to our plan?” Use self-assessment rubrics or checklists to evaluate effective PLC practices. Members can evaluate themselves against these criteria to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
Step 5. Sustain the Process
Once you’ve completed your evaluation step, it’s time to rinse and repeat. And since you’ve already learned a lot about the successful implementation of your professional learning community and seen some results, it’ll be much easier to complete the process again, with new or continued goals.
This step is important and one that most people overlook. But it’s incredibly important because sustaining effective practices helps to embed the process into the school culture.
In fact, when I was starting out, I didn’t realize this was the key step.
I didn’t always take the learning from each PLC cycle into the next. And sometimes, my school just stopped the PLC process entirely because we got the desired results from the initial implementation (or we didn’t, and did not make course corrections). We didn’t go into a new problem of practice once we had results from the previous one.
Keep these tips in mind for maximum results:
- Return to the goal setting step for the next implementation cycle. This sustains momentum and helps to build collective efficacy.
- Formalize the PLC process through SOPs or other documentation once you’ve learned what works for your school. This helps to embed the process into the school’s culture.
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Wrapping it up
If you plan your goals and PLC logistics and then implement your strategy, you’ll be well on your way to professional learning community success. Keep in mind that the steps I just shared build off each other.
You’ll get the best results if you incorporate them all in this order.
Over to you! Let me know which step you’re working on in the comments.
