Effective Professional Learning Communities (PLC)

Professional learning communities (PLC) are when groups of teachers, either within the same school or within the same school district, gather and engage in discussions and share teaching methods while collaborating with one another to gather more insight (Watson, 2014). There are many benefits for professional learning communities within teachers’, some examples being, being able to reflect on professional opinions on student learning with other educators, collaborating with others while focusing on personal learning, and promoting individual professional learning (Watson, 2014). One challenge for teachers is the ability to make sure all students have mastered the outcomes being taught and continue to cover the course content (DuFour, 2014). To teachers, it is hard to find a comfortable medium in this regard. It does not matter what direction the teacher goes; students will suffer in one way or another (DuFour, 2014). Professional learning communities are beneficial; teachers can use their struggles, ideas, and reflections as examples to collaborate with other teachers who can then maybe share their thoughts on similar instances. As teachers, we can get opinions from a bunch of different teachers and help them overcome their struggles. As a newer teacher, this is an area I struggle in because it is hard for me to know how much assessment is enough to honestly know when all the students have a strong understanding of the concepts I am teaching before moving on to new concepts. We have a curriculum for each grade from the provincial government here in Canada to follow and teach accordingly. At the beginning of our school year, as teachers, we must take our curriculum and make a year plan on when we will teach what subjects and units, and we are required to make this plan in a September to June format. PLC has allowed me to ask other teachers in my school how they plan out their curriculum content by seeing examples of other year plans made by teachers that I work with.

In my school, we have a PLC day every month, and the entire day is dedicated to professional learning within teaching. Our admin team makes collaborative groups at the beginning of each school year, and we collaborate with the same colleagues for the entire year. The groups are a mixture of teachers from all different grades, so we do not just collaborate with our grade partners. Participating in professional learning community meetings with schools also gives teachers an excellent way to practice their reflective dialogue. In this case, the reflective dialogue is the teachers’ in-depth conversations with other teachers participating in the PLC meeting about different educational issues like curriculum, instruction, behavior, and student learning (Valckx, Vanderlinde, Devos, 2020). I will always advocate for professional learning communities within teaching because I know from experience that it is a fantastic learning opportunity for all teachers. Whether we have been teaching for two or thirty years, we are all still learning, and collaboration with colleagues should continue to happen throughout our careers.

If I were to form a PLC in my current school, I would continue to make sure we had these meetings monthly, but I would also switch the groups so that we do not have to collaborate with the same group the entire school year. I would make the groups rotate so that we all get a chance to collaborate with our students to help them succeed to the best of our ability. I would also set some ground rules about how the PLC time should be focused on our students and how we can learn new ways to make sure they are getting the high-quality education they deserve. Teachers like to use collaborative time with other teachers to vent and discuss issues that are not related to the students and their learning. They could be about other issues happening in the school but not focused on our students’ success. Teachers need time to vent about unrelated issues, but that does

not need to be done during PLC time. I am also a huge advocate for mental health, so I don’t want to take that away from anyone, but there is a time and place for specific topics and thoughts.

DuFour, R. (2004). Schools as learning communities: What is a “professional learning community?” Educational Leadership, 61(8), 6–11.

Valckx, J., Vanderlinde, R., & Devos, G. (2020). Departmental PLCs in Secondary Schools: The Importance of Transformational Leadership, Teacher Autonomy, and Teachers’ Self-

Efficacy. Educational Studies, 46(3) , 282–301.

Watson, C. (2014). Effective professional learning communities? The possibilities for teachers as

agents of change in schools. British Educational Research Journal, 40(1) , 18–29.

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