Where are we going? To PLC or not to PLC?

Where are we going?

(What you are about to read is my attempt to "think out loud" about where we are and where we might go, as a school and as professionals. I am trying to weave together my thinking on a number of readings, staff meetings, and group and individual conversations over the last 4 months. I'm not sure I am as coherent as I would like to be, but it's an attempt to extend the dialogue. Please, as you read, keep that in mind. And please join in the conversation by commenting at the end. Thanks.)

In the last couple of days, I've had a series of conversations with staff about our professional learning community efforts. I got the sense from those conversations that at least some staff members were not yet clear about what I have been trying to accomplish in our recent staff meetings. As I reflected on that feedback, I had to wonder if maybe I wasn't being explicit enough. And then I wondered, what's the danger in being more explicit about what my goals are and what I am trying to lead us to consider? 

Since any dangers I could identify didn't scare me very much, I thought I'd use this space to try to be clearer. So here goes: 

We need to build shared understanding of what a PLC is. It is my opinion, built on six months of observation, that the majority of the professionals working in the high school do not know what a PLC is. That's a problem. We have no common definition of what a PLC is. When asked, in our last staff meeting, to rank your experience of our school as a professional on a number line from 1 (independent contractor) to 5 (integrated member of a highly functional team) the answers were all over the place. The average of the 51 responses was 3.16, slightly above the median of 3. But the mode, the most frequent answer, was 4. Meaning a ton of answers were also 1s and 2s. Fifty-one professionals having such divergent views about their experience of collaborative work, by definition means that we have not become a PLC. Third, a central concept of becoming a PLC is striving to eliminate the "depends" factor from schooling. (As in what happens when a student struggles? "It depends...on the student, the teacher, the subject, the hour of the day, who the parents are, etc.) Substitute the question "How does your team collaborate?" and I think we can reasonably assume from the above, that the answer is depends.

The smart folks at allthingsplc.info, the people behind the PLC movement, have this to say about the danger of not fully understanding what a Professional Learning Community is:

What Are Professional Learning Communities?

It has been interesting to observe the growing popularity of the term professional learning community. In fact, the term has become so commonplace and has been used so ambiguously to describe virtually any loose coupling of individuals who share a common interest in education that it is in danger of losing all meaning. This lack of precision is an obstacle to implementing PLC processes because, as Mike Schmoker observes, “clarity precedes competence” (2004a, p. 85). Thus, we begin this handbook with an attempt to clarify our meaning of the term. To those familiar with our past work, this step may seem redundant, but we are convinced that redundancy can be a powerful tool in effective communication, and we prefer redundancy to ambiguity.

We have seen many instances in which educators assume that a PLC is a program. For example, one faculty told us that each year they implemented a new program in their school. In the previous year it had been PLC, the year prior to that it had been “understanding by design,” and the current year it was “differentiated instruction.” They had converted the names of the various programs into verbs, and the joke on the faculty was that they had been “UBDed, PLCed, and DIed.” The PLC process is not a program. It cannot be purchased, nor can it be implemented by anyone other than the staff itself. Most importantly, it is ongoing—a continuous, never-ending process of conducting schooling that has a profound impact on the structure and culture of the school and the assumptions and practices of the professionals within it.

We have seen other instances in which educators assume that a PLC is a meeting—an occasional event when they meet with colleagues to complete a task. It is not uncommon for us to hear, “My PLC meets Wednesdays from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.” This perception of a PLC is wrong on two counts. First, the PLC is the larger organization and not the individual teams that comprise it. While collaborative teams are an essential part of the PLC process, the sum is greater than the individual parts. Much of the work of a PLC cannot be done by a team but instead requires a schoolwide or districtwide effort. So we believe it is helpful to think of the school or district as the PLC and the various collaborative teams as the building blocks of the PLC. Second, once again, the PLC process has a pervasive and ongoing impact on the structure and culture of the school. If educators meet with peers on a regular basis only to return to business as usual, they are not functioning as a PLC. So the PLC process is much more than a meeting.

So, what is a PLC? We argue that it is an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Professional learning communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators. (Emphasis is the original authors'.)

My observation is that we have people who fit into every category mentioned here. We have a handful, literally 4-6 people who are doing collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. (Some of those don't have the "collective" part, but are working in isolation.) We have three dozen who believe that PLCs are the time we meet, from 1:55 - 3:30, six times a year. We have some people who think that PLCs are a program that we adopted and that the new programs, whether that be Educator Effectiveness or the Common Core have supplanted that. And we have some people who don't have an opinion on what a PLC is, because they believe that if they keep their head down and don't attract too much attention, then they can keep doing what they have done for their entire career and no one will bother them. (And they have decades of experience proving that belief correct.) Also, this is a common place for people to land on the journey to becoming a PLC; it's mentioned as one of the pitstops in the reading I asked you to do last month. And that's where we are. Stuck in a pit-stop. It's not anyone's fault; it's just where we are.

The question I'm asking us to consider is "are we comfortable with this pit-stop?" "Is this where we want to stay?" I know we took a simple vote about opening up this line of inquiry. And the consensus was, let's reexamine what a PLC is. But it is hard work to become a school where PLC processes are embedded in the work we do. Hard, hard work. That's why so few schools have developed into a "real" PLC and so many of them have settled into a rough approximation instead.

allthingsplc.info offers sample schools as exemplars. These are schools around the world that you can look at to understand the power that PLCs have had in those schools and how you might replicate that in your school. To be listed as an exemplar, you have to meet criteria. (You can find those criteria here.) The thing is, it's been 15 years since the first PLC book was published. And here is a map of the schools that have gone through the process to become one of the model schools on the PLC website:

Image url - http://www.allthingsplc.info/plc-locator/us

What is that? 168 schools in the United States are model PLC Schools? In 2009-10, there were 105,500 schools in the US. So .16% of US schools have managed to become Model PLCs in the roughly 15 years that's been an option. (Sure some schools might be "model" schools, but they haven't gone through the process of being verified by the PLC folks; even if only 1 in 100 model schools bothered to get verified, that puts the total PLC schools at 16%!) And just about every one of those 105,000 schools have spent at least some time in the last 15 years working on PLC concepts.

I won't hide the fact that I am not comfortable stopping where we are. I want to work in a school where PLC processes are embedded in what we do. Where we move from "doing" PLCs 6 times a year, to "being" a PLC all the time. I believe it is the best way for you to do the challenging work you need to as educators. Holding you accountable to the mutual commitments you make to each other and to our students, seems like the best way for me to lead. I want to be the principal of a school that embraces collaboration, a focus on student learning, a "whatever it takes" attitude, and that uses real data about students to make all those decisions.

Which brings us to where we are now, I think. I want to work in a PLC school. I don't believe we are a PLC school. Some of you think we are a PLC school. Some of you don't. Some of you want to work in a PLC school. And some of you don't. And last but not least, some of you don't know what a PLC school is.

This is the point I arrived at in the conversations I've had recently: Why don't you just tell us we are going to be a PLC school? (Translation, why don't you just make an authoritarian, top-down decision, forcing us to comply with your will?)  Mainly, because the work of becoming a PLC requires a deep commitment from a significant plurality of the staff. The work is hard, and the road is marred by numerous way-points, pit-stops, and obstacles. It is high-level, cognitive work; and I don't believe that can be accomplished by administrative fiat and rule compliance.

So, where do we go from here?