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Sarah's Project

Page history last edited by Sarah Hillyard 10 years, 2 months ago

Sarah’s Project

Setting up a PLC (Professional Learning Community)

Problem:

Teachers lack a sense of shared vision and work alone when planning programmes, lessons and teaching strategies.

Project goal:

To create a Professional Learning Community in which teachers feel part of a team of mutual support so as to share a vision, ideas, experiences and direction.

WHEN: To start implementing in March 2014 and lasting throughout the year.
WHO: Coordinator with teaching staff
WHERE: School staff room
SCOPE: One PLC for the teaching staff (4 teachers) + Coordinator
WHAT: A PLC for teachers to be able to share and work together as a team.

SMART objectives:

To create a meeting space for teachers to come together once a month to share ideas, resources and experiences, reflect and work towards shared goals.
For the four kindergarten teachers to work together to plan lessons and work on the syllabus and its progression from one level to the next.
To discuss the progress of individual students during the academic year.
To discuss profesional development topics of interest and need and for coordintor and teachers to lead staff development sessions.
To carry out individual action research and peer observation amongst staff members and share experiences and findings in the meetings.

Tasks and activities:

Present the idea of setting up a PLC at next board meeting.
Talk to the board about providing teachers with one paid meeting a month to use for a PLC.
Have a staff meeting to introduce teachers to the idea of a PLC.
Perform a needs analysis about PLC issues and professional development topics of interest.
Collect and analyse responses to decide which topic/s will be dealt with.
Create a rough Action Plan and Schedule of topics and issues to be addressed during PLC meetings (allowing time for informal talk and issues that arise on the spot).
Create an agenda template to be used for monthly meetings (professional development topics, student progress, informal sharing of ideas, resources and experiences, reflection, action research findings and peer observation feedback).
Create a feedback form for teachers to complete in the middle and end of the year to consider changes to be made in the future.

Stakeholder	Their interest or requirement from the project	What the project needs from them	Perceived attitudes and/or risks	Actions to take
- Heads	- Teachers will be more committed to their work. - Teaching will be improved. - Students will benefit from teachers’ improvement.	- Their approval to add one paid meeting a month.	- Not willing to pay teachers for one meeting a month.	- Negotiate another strategy: perhaps short meetings so that the pay is not as high, try to fit in meetings in teachers’ schedule as it is (during one of their planning periods), create a virtual platform to do it online.
- Teachers	- Participate in meetings that will allow them to work together, rather than in an isolated way. - Get ideas, experiences, techniques, strategies from peers. - Develop their team skills. - Become more committed to their work. - Build a strong relationship with peers. - Share a vision and direction to work towards. - Become involved in research and discussion to grow as teachers and learners.	- Willingness to stay on for one meeting a month (paid). - Accept to participate in group discussions, professional development workshops, lead workshops themselves, share ideas, take part in action research projects. - Be open to work with others.	- Not being able to stay on for one meeting a month. - Stating that the pay is not high enough as to stay on for meetings having to refuse to personal or social activities. - Refusing to participate in discussions and activities. - Not being open to work with others.	- Convince teachers of the benefits of being part of a PLC. - Talk to Board of Heads to increase pay. - Motivating teachers to take part. - Creating a safe learning environment for team work.


- Parents	- Teaching standards should increase. - Student learning should be improved.	- Nothing.	- None.	- None.
- Students	- Will see their teachers more motivated and with more and new ideas for lessons. - Will enjoy lessons more.	- Nothing.	- None.	- None.

Comments (13)

Elena Iarkova.
Dear Sarah, your goals sound very clear and achievable, you are a very smart manager! How many teachers are going to join your PlC? What kind of students do you have and what kind of joint teacher development sessions have you arranged before the project?

Hi Elena! Thanks for your comments! It's great to get positive feedback from peers.

There are only 4 teachers in the staff so not many, which I suppose makes my project easier to implement :)
These are kindergarten teachers, which here in Argentina, and in this specific school, means teachers of children from 3 to 5 years of age.
The staff only usually has a few meetings a year to talk mainly about "problems" we're having and how to solve them. Most teacher development is done at sessions external to the school (going to conferences, workshops, talks, etc, that the school pays for) but not INSET in the school itself.
Thanks again for your questions!

This is great Sarah. Really nice project.
In terms of objectives, one of the things that is often a slight difficulty is that we use this word objective in different ways in different contexts. In some cases it really answers the question "why?", whereas in project design it actually (broadly) answers the question "what?". (In fact in lesson planning we tend to use it in this way too).
In your objectives I sort of feel that you are straddling this line a bit, and they are a bit why-ish and a bit what-ish :-)

So, for example, with the objective "To discuss the progress of individual students during the academic year.", that is something that will help with the development of the PLC, but you probably need to be a bit more specific about what exactly the project will do to make this happen. " To set up a system whereby individual students' progress is tracked through the academic year by the teachers involved, by the beginning of the next academic year" for example? (The time I've given is just off the top of my head, and refers to the time limit for the creation of the system rather than actual implementation of it, if you see what i mean.

Does that make sense?

I've been giving this a lot of thought. It's not as easy as it sounds!!
So, Andy, would this be better?

SMART objectives:
To create a meeting space for teachers to come together once a month to share ideas, resources and experiences, reflect and work towards shared goals.
To allow time for the four kindergarten teachers to work together to plan lessons and work on the syllabus and its progression from one level to the next.
To set up a system whereby individual students' progress is tracked through the academic year by the teachers involved, by the beginning of the next academic year.
To give teachers one meeting a month for both coordintor and teachers to lead staff development sessions.
To carry out individual action research and peer observation amongst staff members and share experiences and findings in the meetings.

I'm not really sure…. Help!! :)

Hi Sarah

I just wanted to add to Elena and Andy H's feedback on your project, which I agree is very worthwhile and very useful, as teaching can be a surprisingly isolating activity, and creating a PLC is great way to address this particular challenge. In terms of establishing a baseline, which you can use to help you assess if your objectives were achieved, I'm assuming that the kinds of activities that you list under your Smart Objectives do not currently take place. If so, one question to ask is why those activities are not already happening. There can be many good reasons for that, such as lack of time, space (such as a place to meet), conflicting teaching schedules, etc.

So, if you decide to go ahead with the action research part of the project, is can be useful to start by looking at the present situation and what constraints might need to be addressed or overcome in order to bring about the changes you would like to help happen.

Yes, Andy. You're right. It's mainly lack of time and conflicting teaching schedules. Some of these actually do take place, however in a very disorganized and isolated way (for instance, teacher development does occur, but in the manner of individual teachers enrolling on courses or workshops and none of that gets shared with the rest). It would surely be useful to look at what is happening and overcome these constraints for this plan to be successful!

Dear Sarah,
it sounds very challenging to teach kids from 3 to 5. I wonder what subjects you teach? I have two grandchildren at the age of 3.5 years old. They attend a kindergarten, where groups are very overcrowded, how many children do you have in your teaching groups?

Hi Elena. I teach English as a foreign language in a bilingual school in Argentina. There are 25 girls (it's a girls school) in each class. So 25 3 year olds, 25 4 year olds and 25 5 year olds!! Difficult to handle those large groups, so teachers need good strategies!
How many are you talking about when you say "overcrowded". I've heard there are schools with even 30 or 35 in the group!

Great Project, Sarah!
You have a very focused approach towards your goal.

Thanks Talat! I'm glad you find it organized!

Dear Sarah,
I like the way you consider all stakeholders and the project itself. -the great thing about having many eyes on aproject is that different people add different insights. In my personal case, your agenda called my attention. You mention: Create an agenda template to be used for monthly meetings (professional development topics, student progress, informal sharing of ideas, resources and experiences, reflection, action research findings and peer observation feedback). It is a lot and of a varied nature all and to be applied at the same time. I would leave student progress out until it becomes part of the dat of action research. Why? because its very presence might alter your TLC goal into another version of a coordination meeting and then the very nature of your project would change.. My twopence today.
A question, is the staff stable or do you have yearly changes? This would certainly shape the goal as well. According to your description it doesn't seem to be the case but I wanted to check.
Best,

Dear Sarah,
This is a great project!!! In fact, both of us are facing similar difficulties to solve. Haven´t you consider the chance to use online tools for sharing materials and comments? I think that this might avoid the risk of head´s objection to paid meetings. A pleasure to meet you here, I´m also from Argentina. Hugs. Cristina

Hi Sarah: As two of the recurring themes in your project are 'reflective practice' and 'action research', I've put a link to an article below, titled: 'Action Research and Reflective Practice: Towards a Holistic View. It's by a couple of researchers in the UK, and although you wouldn't need to read the whole thing, it has some ideas that you might find useful for your project.

http://www.tamamproject.org/documentation/forum/share_your_resources/selection_post/action_research_reflective.pdf

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