Rick and becky dufour biography for kids

Second, do your teachers have the information and skills they need to engage successfully in collaborative work? It can continue throughout the year and even during team meetings themselves. Ongoing learning about PLC collaboration throughout the year can be a barrier-buster. Third, how do teachers feel about PLCs? Negative feelings can create barriers of resistance and apathy.

There are several ways to address that barrier, including providing incentives like frequent feedback to teams, high visibility, professional development credit, time trades, tie-in with personal growth plans, take away some non-instructional duties, etc. Rick DuFour: Administrators should create the structures and parameters to ensure the collaboration remains focused on those issues that have the biggest impact on student learning.

For example, a leadership team could create a timeline for teams that clarifies topics and establishes expectations regarding what teams should produce as a result of their dialogue. By the second week, I would like you to present your team norms - the commitments you have made to each other regarding how you will operate as a team. By the eighth week I would like to see the essential standards you have agreed your students should achieve this semester.

Teams should not have to guess about what they are expected to do. Initially leaders can monitor through products created by the team, but once the team becomes familiar with the process, it will take on more responsibility for making the process work. Question from Brad Niessen - Instructional Technology Specialist: How would you address principals and teachers who say that they do not have time for learning communities?

What are some examples of schedule changes that other schools or districts have used to build in time for learning communities? Becky DuFour: We absolutely agree that time, during the contractual day, must be provided for teacher collaboration - just as principals, schedule lunch and teaching and learning time, time for techer collaboration must also be scheduled.

We share about ten different ways time can be provided without requiring schools to keep the students at home, spend more money, or significantly shorten instructional minutes. How do schools get enough time in a schedule the first year to get people working together? What are some of the different ways of putting this extra time into an already packed and long school day?

Anne Jolly: Well, Lee, my favorite answer for this one would be - redesign the entire school day so that teachers have a minimum of two hours a day dedicated to collaboration, and instructional planning. However — back to the land of school-based reality! Here are a few ways other schools have handled this. Some buy time for teachers by hiring teams of rotating substitute teachers or using paraprofessionals to release teachers from classrooms for an hour a week.

Middle and high schools might use common planning time during the school day. Early start days and late dismissal days have worked well for some schools. These schools lengthen the school day for four days and bank that time. Then they release students early one day per week and teachers use that time to meet. Another options might be to allow teachers to during pep rallies and assemblies.

Some schools hold PLC meetings in lieu of faculty meetings. One school I worked with paid the entire staff of 80 teachers for staying after school two hours per week to work in PLCs. After school is my last choice for meeting time, but it certainly beats not meeting at all. For more ideas, you can go to www. Thanks for a highly relevant question!

Question from Ryan Olson, School Psychologist, West Elementary: How do you approach and begin a professional learning community in a culture of high resistance? Anne Jolly: Oh boy — have you hit a pervasive issue, Ryan! A negative culture has to be tackled one rick and becky dufour biography for kids at a time. A couple of quick ideas.

First, be sure everyone knows exactly what the expectations are and what the teams should accomplish. Then set up a communications process that involves team logs being sent electronically preferably to the principal and other team members. Build in small successes so that when Mrs. Be sure to have the team members talk about behaviors they value in other team members, and to turn this into a set of team norms.

I could go on but these ideas should help to get you started. Thanks and be persistent! Can you tell me the history on Professional Learning Communities? I am not finding specific information concerning when they first began to develop. Also, what is the most important aspect of PLCs? Thank you, Kathy. That is they believe the purpose of the school is to ensure students learn rather than they are taught.

A collaborative culture to support student and adult learning. Frequent monitoring of student achievement and hunger for evidence of student learning, and then using that evidence to support students who need additional time for learning and to inform teacher practice as part of a cycle of continuous improvement. Anne Jolly: Hi Pat! First, do an upfront analysis to take stock of the current situation.

What supports are in place, what do teachers, the principals, and others in the schools need to know about PLCs? How will they get that information? What are the current school cultures in terms of collaboration? Then develop a plan for how to proceed based on those results. The first steps in actual training involve providing the research-based rationale for PLCs and an overview of how PLCs are different from traditional professional development efforts.

Good luck with your PLC work! We are in the process of changing our schedule to include an extended lunch period and have concerned parents, mostly of high achieveing students, that do want to their students to lose instrucional time. Rick DuFour: If the analogy we use for schools is the factory, it makes sense that we would not want to slow down the assembly line.

We would want every available minute to keep pouring in information and pounding in facts. If we think of schools as learning organizations, we would value time spent considering how to work smarter not just harder or longer. I would point out that when your students graduate from high school, if they elect to pursue higher education, they will probably only be in class 12 or 13 hours per week as opposed to the 30 or 35 you have in high school.

Who would argue they will learn less during those 12 or 13 hours. IN terms of enrichment, if our students were being highly successful we simply encouraged them to pursue richer and more rigorous curriculum.

Rick and becky dufour biography for kids

We were perfectly willing to let successful students relax with some free time rather than feeling they had to be on task every second. Our adults are given some down time, why not the kids? Question from Sammy Parker, former teacher: What are 1 the most serious barriers and obstacles to creating and, more importantly, sustaining PLCs and 2 your suggestions for overcoming those?

Becky DuFour: The research on PLCs indicates two barriers educators must overcome when making the shift from traditional school cultures to professional learning communities - from our own experience in leading and working with schools, we think the research is correct! The first barrier is overcoming our tradition of working in isolation.

PLCs overcome this barrier by assigning staff into teams and providing teams with time, support, resources, and training every step of the way. Teams are expected to engage in collective inquiry and action research into questions focused on learning - teams generate products i. All of Ricks books are great for providing information and motivation.

These books might focus on providing research-based strategies for content and instructional strategies. Good luck with your coaching! Question from Dr. You may be thinking…what the heck does that mean? Quite simply put, changing the label does not change the outcome! We all should be able to agree with that statement, and yet, I am amazed at how many times I encounter settings where labels change, but practice does not.

It was May ofand our district was searching for a pathway to improved outcomes for our students. The message delivered in those two days provided a clear picture of the pathway we would need to walk, the structure we would build, and who we would need to become to make this our reality. Learning became our central focus, and results the key driver.

We developed a collaborative culture that was cultivated daily until it defined us. Every step of the journey resulted in improved learning outcomes for our kids, and those results became the motivator that made us seek continuous improvement on our learning and doing journey; we became a Professional Learning Community. Unfortunately, our journey is not always the case, as different systems embark on the same pathway.

Fullan is not labeling PLCs as a failed concept; he is calling out, in many cases, the implementation failure to change anything other than a label. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean. All too often when implementing, the only change that occurs is we call our meetings something different. Grade level or department teams have been the norm in schools all across America for decades.

In the words of my principal, "we aren't just going to have people 'mail it in. No more after-school tutoring! Celebrating is like voting: do them both early and often. Have a Good Life. Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. Subscribe in a reader. Subscribe via email Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner. Awards [ edit ].

Death [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved Solution Tree. ISBN Maine Department of Education. Retrieved February 8, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation. Education Dive.