Professional Learning Community

"Educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Professional learning communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators." Learning by Doing (2016)


What Are Professional Learning Communities?

At the very core of a learning community is a focus on and a commitment to the learning of each student. When we function as a PLC, our educators embrace high levels of learning for all students as both the reason we exist and the fundamental responsibility of us all. In order to achieve this purpose, we create and are guided by a clear and compelling vision of what we must become in order to help all students learn. We must make collective commitments clarifying what each of us will do to create and maintain our district, and use our results-oriented goals to mark our progress. We work together to clarify exactly what each student must learn, monitor each student's learning on a timely basis, provide systematic interventions that ensure students receive additional time and support for learning when they struggle, and extend and enrich learning when students have already mastered the intended outcomes.

While this work is going on it is also essential that we commit to an additional assumption. This assumption is that if the organization is to become more effective in helping all students learn, the adults in the organization must also be continually learning. Therefore, we set the priority to create structures to ensure staff members engage in job-embedded learning as part of their routine work practices.