PLC's: How to Do Them Right!

The article entitled, “The Parable of the Blind Squirrel” by Thomas W. Many, first starts off with a story. A grandfather and his grandson were outside one day watching a squirrel. The squirrel was old and blind but was able to find acorns. The grandfather explained to the boy that in life if you work hard for things, you will get them and good things will happen to you using the squirrel as an analogy. The author then goes on to explain how this story relates to him. He sometimes feels like the squirrel when leading school improvement. The faculty always tries hard and does all of the correct things although sometimes performances levels are uneven in grades and other times he faculty is unsure of why things were successful. The author wanted to not be part of the blind squirrel story, but instead wanted to work more efficiently not harder. The faculty then went and read a book entitled, “Professional Learning Communities at Work” by Richard Dufour and Robert Eaker. After reading this, the faculty realized that much of what the book spoke about was already in place. They then decided to focus more on creating these professional learning communities.
The article goes on to explain how the math program was lacking in the district. The high school teachers wanted more students to pass algebra in eighth grade. Due to this wanted change, the math curriculum would then need to be updated. A group of willing teachers worked on creating a new math curriculum. After much time and planning, the new curriculum was put into place. With the change, more than ninety percent of the elementary students now met or surpassed set goals in math. This was great news to the faculty who worked long and hard to make this happen. However, now there was a gap between math and reading scores and the math scores were now higher. This gap lasted for close to ten years and no one could figure out why. After this persistently long gap, the district decided in 2001 that by the 2003-2004 school year, they wanted ninety percent of all third graders to meet or exceed the state standards in reading. The administration continued to tweak their goals and kept referring back to the book they had read. With their research, the administration decided it was time for some changes. They adjusted goals, made common planning time for teams, added a standardized curriculum framework, and made a list of data that they collected from the year. Teachers also aided with this in that they researched and read books as well as attended summer courses on the topic. Learning had then become the main focus point for teachers, not teaching.
One year later the district saw improvement in reading scores. Two of the elementary schools had made it to their ninety percent goal with two more working on reaching that goal. This proved that the students could reach high goals in math and reading consistently. In comparing the reading and math goals, it took six years to reach the math goals, while it only took one year for parts of the district to reach the reading goal. This success is marked by becoming a better professional learning community. The district intends to continue the use of professional learning communities to align themselves and to become a better district.
I thought this article really showed how professional learning communities are suppose to work. It showed how there was a problem and how the district went about fixing it. It proves that PLC’s work if they are used correctly.
In all, I think the way this article researched a topic and pursued it to better students learning was the true way to run a PLC. If my county could work on something like that it would be better than the way we do PLC’s now. It would be a large undertaking and would be tough because within the county setting you have to worry about different living demographics that make each school different from one another. However, I think it would worth the effort and we could focus more on problems we have as county, solve them, and better ourselves as a county. I enjoyed reading this article and could relate to it. This article was definitely a worthwhile read and gave me some ideas of how our county could now use PLC’s. What do you think?