Leveraging the PLC Potential—HOW to Sustain Growth | Origin: EC119
This is a general discussion forum for the following learning topic:
Professional Learning Communities (PLC)—How to Reach Transformative Change --> Leveraging the PLC Potential—HOW to Sustain Growth
Post what you've learned about this topic and how you intend to apply it. Feel free to post questions and comments too.
I started the pandemic in China as I worked at an international school there. It is only by having established PLC's that the school where I worked was able to maintain and complete its practice. Staff and students were distributed around the globe, in multiple time zones, and we were all grappling. However, by having this group established, we were able to pull together and to address the needs of our students and families. I believe this is the possibility embedded in believing staff is a learning community, and not simply a group of poeple who share contract days. There is more power in the collective group than in any individual.
Leveraging the PLC Potential – How to Sustain Growth
Culture of sharing best practices
- The fly wheel effect ( momentum)
- Norms of collaboration
- Hard on ideas, soft on people
- Paraphrasing & speak affirmatively
- Watch your speech patterns
The nuts & bolts of feedback
- Be careful, feedback can be taken negatively.
- Must use effective communication
- Use directive feedback as it leads to the listener taking action.
- Descriptive feed back points out detail with next actions taken by the listener on their terms.
- Must be criteria related
Prompts for peer feedback
- What I heard you say was?
- Want to brain storm together?
- What I understood was …..
- Is there another way to convey this ?
How data supports PLC teams
1) It provides reciprocal accountability
2) Base them on the SMART model
- Be specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Results oriented
- Time bound goals
- Clear expecations
It is important to be a productive member of the team and give proper feedback. It is also essential that you are able to accept the feedback as a postive and not a negative.
Times of great change have provided excellent insight into the additional benefits of PLCs during those times. While adapting to online learning environments (2020-2021) many found these communities essential to becoming comfortable maneuvering new tech, standards, and expectations. Having strong PLCs established and working productively before the next inevitable big change will help to ease whatever transition that we are faced with.
The prompts for peer feedback is super helpful because a lot of times it is a simple mis communication or bias that is brought into the conversation.
