Hello, and thank you for joining me for a summary of evaluating professional learning communities. In today's tutorial, we're going to discuss what were the learning objectives for this unit, how are these learning objectives connected, and why do these learning objectives matter.
So in this unit, we analyzed how PLCs improve student performance and enhanced teacher effectiveness. We developed a PLC plan that incorporates technology. We analyzed theories related to PLCs. And we reflected on PLCs and student performance and teacher effectiveness. Let's look at each of these objectives in depth and review what we did.
When we analyzed various ways that PLC improves student performance and enhances teacher effectiveness, we looked at student engagement and performance increase. This just means the students were more engaged, and their performance increased when schools had PLCs. This is because teacher effectiveness improves. The reason teacher effectiveness improves is because they're more committed to their school as well as they have a larger tool bag to draw from when teaching their students. What I mean by this is they're collaborating more. They have more tips and tricks to help the learning go well.
Additionally, the teachers are taking more ownership in the school, which is going to lead to their students performing better, because the teachers are going to maybe understand the fuller goals of the school or help write a goal of the school. With PLCs, we're also going to take time to look at what our assessments are looking for and whether or not these are in line with what our students can do. When we can align these things, we're going to have performance increase. And there are numerous studies that we've talked about throughout the unit that reinforce this.
We also developed a PLC plan using technology. One of the ways we did this was talking about collaboration and calibration. Remember this is when we talked about how teachers across a curriculum, or across a grade level, or across a content area can grade the exact same assignment the exact same way. The way we use technology for this was using Google Docs to share items and Google Forms to look at where our similarities and differences occurred.
We also discussed learning walks. And remember learning walks are where a building team will walk around the school in classrooms, whether they have students or not. There are three different types of walks we discuss. And then they will debrief with the entire school about what they saw. When these face to face meanings aren't possible, we look at using technology to make them possible.
And then we looked at shared and distributed leadership. Again, nobody wants to have meetings for meetings sake, especially after a long day of teaching. This is one of the reasons many teachers don't belong to leadership teams because they still have tons of grading to do. A teacher job is not nine to five. A teacher job doesn't end when the school day ends. So if we can take away these face to face meetings, or at least some of them, and replace them with technology, then that is a really good way to get teachers more involved. And that's exactly what we did with our plan.
We also analyzed theories related to PLCs. We looked at Social Learning Theory and Adult Learning Theory, and we looked at how these related PLCs. Remember that Social Learning Theory is just how groups learn together. This is important for things like collaboration and calibration, or shared and distributed leadership teams. We also looked at Adult Learning Theory for the PD where we come together and we debrief as a whole team. How do adults learn best?
Then we reflected on PLCs and teacher effectiveness as well as student performance. We look specifically at Marzano and we looked at his domain four. We asked ourselves some questions, and then we were able to answer those based on how we were doing.
We also want to base our PLC and teacher effectiveness on student achievement. Are our students actually meeting their goals? Remember what becomes of PLCs, whether we do walk throughs or not, or we set goals for our school, SMART goals are goals that use the PDSA as a format. And it's all about student achievement. If the students aren't achieving, then we might as well not have our PLC, because we're looking at ongoing or continuous achievement.
And then we also discussed how PLCs can affect our community in a positive way, our school community or our district wide community. Hopefully it's clear to you that the information you learned from this unit can be taken out of the school and placed anywhere. In most businesses, there is collaboration. And in fact, PLCs originated in the business communities.
It's also important to have consistency in any sort of job that you have, whether it be grading student essays or working at a bank. We want people to be going through the same steps to get the same end result. Ownership and a sense of efficacy is also extremely important, as are leadership opportunities that arise from being a member of the PLC.
We're going to talk now a little bit about the connections between everything that we have in our unit. So we definitely have a student achievement rising is going to equal better teacher commitment. And then better teacher commitment is going to equal higher student achievement.
Specifically, when you have a PLC in your building, your student achievement is going to go up. So one of the reasons this is is because of the sorts of goals that we're going to set. And when we set these goals, it's important to have the caliberation and collaboration sessions, so that the goals are implemented consistently across the board.
Today, we talked about what were the learning objectives for this unit and how were these learning objectives connected. Why do these learning objectives matter? I hope you enjoyed this unit as much as I enjoyed presenting it to you. Happy teaching.
Overview
(00:00-00:13) Introduction
(00:14-00:32) Learning Objectives Overview
(00:33-01:39) Analyze Various Ways PLC Improves Student Performance and Enhances Teacher Effectiveness
(01:40-02:56) Develop a PLC Using Technology
(02:5703:20)-Analyze Theories Related to PLCs
(03:21-04:08) Reflect on PLCs and Teacher Effectiveness and Student Performance
(04:09-04:40) Real –World Connections
(04:41-05:10) Concept Connections
(05:11-05:25) Conclusion