Professional Learning Community

I’m going to assume that the average person doesn’t think too much about teachers and what they do when they’re not teaching. All of our teachers have a daily planning time. That is a requirement of the local contract. Teachers need time to plan for the lessons to come. They need time to meet with parents, meet with the principal, prepare materials, make phone calls or send e-mails to parents, grade papers – you get the picture.

You may have heard that Delaware was one of the first 2 states to be awarded funds from the federal government under the Race to the Top (RTTT). Delaware gets about $110 million. This money will be helpful over the next 4 years but it comes with strings attached.

One of the attached strings built into the Delaware RTTT plan is to provide 90 consecutive minutes of weekly collaborative time for teachers. The 90 minutes of time for collaboration with peers – like all Math teachers or all 4th grade teachers – must be in addition to the already scheduled planning . We call this 90 minute time PLC for Professional Learning Communities. PLC time must happen during the regular work day.

You might imagine the challenge this represents.

Don’t get me wrong, the 90 minutes of time to collaborate with peers is well supported by the research. Teaching has for too long been an isolated activity. Teachers have for years planned alone, created exams alone, graded papers alone, studied alone. The research suggests that teachers who plan together are able to develop higher quality lessons; provide greater consistency between teachers; study new teaching practices; and hold their students to higher standards.

Each of our schools has managed to make a schedule giving all core teachers 90 minutes of PLC time within the school day except the high school.

The seven period schedule at the high school makes it difficult to free up an entire department (like all of the math teachers) for 90 minutes at a time one day a week and still allow for an individual planning period. So here’s what we’ll be doing this school year to create weekly PLC time at Lake Forest High School.

Each week that has five school days will have a 2-hour delay on Wednesdays for high school students only. This will give the high school faculty time to meet and plan collaboratively first thing in the morning. We did this last year about a dozen times and felt it worked well. The RTTT requirement to have PLC time each week seems a bit much, but we will make good use of it.

We appreciate the community’s past cooperation with these scheduled delays at the high school and thank you in advance for your cooperation this year. Now we owe you some good results.