CFGs, PLCs, OEL, oh my!

November 22, 2009 at 6:43 pm (Standards 6 & 7. Communication & Collaboration) (best practices, data driven decisions, EDU 6600, planning, professional development, Professional Learning Communities, standards, teacher beliefs, teacher leader)

I spent the week at the National Academy of Curriculum Leadership designing a professional development action plan for science in our district with 9 amazing people. As part of our plan we would like to see Professional Learning Communities throughout our district. Our reading and discussion for this week could not have been more timely. In fact, I am now in charge of summarizing our work in this class to help better inform our decisions about the type of professional development we would like to see in our district.

No matter what professional development we have we need to see student learning increase. Our NACL PLC has been looking at data to try to make decisions to best impact student learning. We learned that the first thing that needs to happen is for teacher beliefs to change. Teachers need to believe that all students can learn to a high standard. Part of our plan is to raise up and train more teacher leaders so that leadership is shared. This way more teachers can see that they have a role in changing our school/district climate for the good.

I have a lot of information to digest and will be returning to school for a short week after being gone at the conference for 5 days of class. I am hoping that the passion we have for making our district better will not diminish too much when we get back in the swing of things. At the very least we will have our OEL groups for another 2.5 years so we can develop a protocol for looking at student learning and hopefully by the end people will crave the collaborative work we are doing and demand time for it from our union and district.