Episode 1: Podcast Recap

In this episode, we talk about our PLC, which is a professional learning community. We are the art team leaders for the elementary art team which means we are in charge of leading our PLC. Two years ago, our current leader decided to step down, so we took over. We knew we didn’t want to do it alone because it was a lot of work, so we told our district we wanted to be partners in leading our team and they went for it!

A lot of districts do PLC, but some don’t, and we know it doesn’t always look the same. In our district, we meet with the other elementary art teachers once a week to focus on student learning and growth. In Hayley’s past district, she met occasionally with the other grade level art teachers and her PE and music teacher in her building. PLC doesn’t always have to look the same. It could be you simply  meeting up with other professionals and connecting with other teachers.

When Hayley joined the team, there were several other art teachers new to the district, so we did a lot of sharing of projects and ideas. Prior to that, a lot of data was shared in the same format focusing on grades…helpful, but not as beneficial as it could be.

We took over leading our team halfway through a school year and kept PLC the same. We had a lot of curriculum work that we did the first full year, so we took care of that stuff…BUT! That isn’t really what PLC is supposed to be dedicated to, so we were told to find other times to work on it (which, as we all know, is difficult). Luckily for us, we were almost done so we divided up our last tasks and knocked them out.

When we hit the one-year mark of being leaders, we knew we needed PLC to be something different. We did a lot of research, spoke with our administrators and instructional coaches and came up with our current format which we personally are really happy with. To be exact, we nailed this all down at a McAlister’s over dinner while Laura was on maternity leave!

PLC is often based around the DuFour’s four questions. If you’re like “I’m sorry…what?!”, us too! Our district was so far into PLC by the time both of us joined we weren’t really taught about the four essential questions.

DuFour’s four questions are:

• What do students need to learn?
• How will we know students learned it?
• What will we do if they don’t know it or haven’t learned it?
• How will we respond if a student knows or has learned?

Based on that, we figured out what that should look like for us in our PLC. Classroom teachers typically have rotations of their core subjects (math, reading, writing). We decided that would be helpful for us to have categories to target our topics and conversations. We included these categories on our PLC form. Our form is where we take our meeting notes and turn them into our administration. 

Speaking of our form, here are the areas we have on our PLC form:

• celebrations (great way to start meetings—these can be personal or professional)
• review
• topic (main discussion)
• what we need next time
• boxes to mark which category from our rotation we are discussing that day. Currently, these are professional development, instructional, and differentiation.

In this podcast epidsoe, we also discussed data a little but… but we dive deeper into that in our data podcast, check it out 😉

Bottom line…we have super supportive admin that we are so grateful for and have let us try different things to make PLC work for US AND THEM. If PLC isn’t beneficial for you, talk with your team, your admin, whoever you feel like will help you get to where you need and want to be!

Keep Blending,

Laura and Hayley