The Fulton High School PLC Story
Fulton High School did not move quickly nor easily toward the concept of professional learning communities. Our teachers struggled to see the benefits of collaboration and truly felt robbed of the time spent attempting to collaborate; each teacher had his or her own “stuff” and was quite happy to continue using it. The Leadership Team struggled as well. It seemed that everyone felt that PLC was one more required serving added to our already heaping plates. Still, many of us knew there was much to be gained from Professional Learning Communities and that it was going to take some creative thinking to find a way to take something else “off our plates” to make room for what mattered--the success of our students--and we all agreed we had some work to do in that area.
Our biggest breakthrough came in the form of an in-house professional development session that demonstrated the way all of our “requirements” fit together. This PD session also created an opportunity for the Leadership Team to make our vision of becoming a PLC school a reality. We began to examine the various tasks required of our teachers. At that time, every faculty member had to write an annual Professional Development Plan, prepare a Unit of Instruction, work toward achieving a building SMART Goal, and participate in regular professional development, department meetings, etc. It seemed overwhelming on top of our regular teaching load. Our Leadership Team thought, “what if we found a way to pull all those requirements together into one common focus, and what if that focus was improving student learning?” The Leadership Team began to align all our expectations to fit that common focus. We built common plan time into our schedules whenever possible so that instructional data teams would be able to meet during the school day (click here to see a screenshot of our teams’ meeting times, which are also available on the front page of the FHSPLC, on the individual team pages of the FHSPLC, and uploaded in Step 8 Addition Documentation/Additional Files), we wrote PD Plan options that centered around the work of the data teams, we created building SMART Goals that tied into the data team work, and, in doing so, we earned the trust of our faculty members as we made a concentrated effort to show them how collaboration could work to their benefit rather than become additional work for them. We provided PD support to inform and demonstrate how to work together in data teams and how to complete data cycles. Then, we asked our staff to commit to weekly data team meetings and soon requested each data team complete two data cycles per semester. We battled and successfully overcame some common stumbling blocks: dysfunctional teams, unwilling participants, and singletons (teachers who teach single section courses and have difficulty planning together for their non-alike courses). It might be one of our proudest moments when we, as a Leadership Team, realized that our teams had started meeting during the 2018-19 school year before we had even asked them to begin their annual team work!
In order to further provide support to our instructional data teams, we also created the FHSPLC (Fulton High School Professional Learning Community) website (also linked here at http://fhsplc.weebly.com/) to streamline our work. The FHSPLC gives teachers access to our Mission, our Vision, our Common Commitments, a Weekly Meeting Log (available here and from our individual team pages, which are accessible here) to document their work, and easy access to their past Weekly Meeting logs to provide consistency for their work (linked here). We also included a system by which teachers could easily share the products of their collaboration--their data cycles, their common assessments, their priority standards, etc. Within the FHSPLC, we provide a Resources page on which resources are linked so teachers can easily locate all past PD documents as well as access websites that detail the various aspects of PLC work. The FHSPLC also has a Portfolio where we share our practices and celebrate our successes. The response to our PLC-focused approach has been positive! We have evolved from a staff that questioned the value of teaming to a staff that begun meeting and submitting Weekly Meeting Logs as part of their regular routine! We believe that we built understanding and commitment to the PLC process by embracing change for the common good and designing a system that allowed that change to become part of what we do rather than something else to do!
FHS has worked hard to support our PLC work in both our faculty’s schedules and our students’ schedules. Most faculty members now have a common plan time during which they can meet to carry out their Professional Learning Communities’ work--instructional planning, sharing of best practices, data cycle planning and review, etc. A copy of our teams’ meeting schedules can be seen in this screenshot or here on our FHSPLC website. This calendar of meeting schedules allows our Leadership Team to attend as many data team meetings as possible and provide feedback to our teams using this Team Evaluation form. We have also considered our students’ needs in the evolvement of our seminar time. Beginning as far back as 2011, our building has offered a time during the day for intervention. Over the last few years, we have worked to improve this seminar time, to make it as valuable and practical for students as possible. Currently, students can meet with any of their teachers four days a week for a variety of reasons: to seek out a quiet place to study, to seek out additional help mastering instructional objectives, to make up assessments or re-assess, etc. On the fifth day of the week, students report to their academic advisor’s classroom to check grades, troubleshoot problem areas (missing assignments, low scores, difficulty with material) and brainstorm approaches to solving those problems. In addition, there is often material presented to students during their seminar time that can range from study skills, to test taking skills, to Internet safety, to employment skills.
The Leadership Team continues to strive for improvement and always focuses its goals and PD around our next steps--we started with the data team process, moved into weekly data team meetings, revisited the process of identifying priority standards (now linked on each team’s webpage--click here for a sample), and requested regular data cycles (samples have been uploaded in Step 8 Addition Documentation/Additional Files). This year, as we continue to evolve in our focus on improving student learning through the PLC model, we are working on developing better grading practices, creating common assessments, and developing systems within which students learn to self-assess. We have requested that our data teams create and share at least one common assessment and develop and share at least one example of a student self-assessment process this year. With full-fledged immersion into the PLC process, our building is now on par with the other buildings in our district. We are an active member of our District Leadership Team, which is comprised of one individual who serves on the Leadership Team of each building in our district. We are now able to contribute our various processes and approaches within our district to provide other buildings with assistance in/models for the various PLC elements. This year our District Leadership Team is working to develop a digital PLC binder, which will allow each building to share every step of their PLC process through narratives and examples. The binder, upon its completion, will serve as both a valuable resource and an inspiration for continued growth. During its completion, the binder has become a source of valuable conversation and collaboration between our buildings, as each representative shares his or her building’s approaches to the various elements of Professional Learning Community work. It is our hope that this binder, which will be accessible to all our staff members, will serve as a resource and an inspiration to facilitate continual growth for each of our buildings as they journey toward improving student learning.
Additionally, our Leadership Team is committed this year to providing feedback to our instructional data teams by regularly visiting their team meetings. Each time we observe a team meeting, we complete this Team Evaluation form. It is our hope to continue to develop and improve this feedback process. Another way that we communicate with our teams is by first sharing the agendas for our Leadership Team meetings via email, then posting those minutes as well as the minutes from our District Leadership Team meetings on the Leadership page of our FHSPLC website (also accessible here).
In the spirit of that ongoing improvement, many of our teachers seek professional development and then share what they’ve learned with our staff. Our Fulton High School Leadership Team has continued to educate themselves by not only sending representatives to the Missouri Powerful Learning Conference each year, but by also branching out and sending a team to the Solution Tree Conference in St. Charles, MO this past summer as well. This year, we are excited to be presenting “PLC: Succeeding at the Secondary Level” at our Missouri Powerful Learning Conference.
We are firmly immersed in the PLC process and ready to challenge ourselves further. We have completed a mock site review through Missouri PLC and identified areas for growth (our Missouri PLC Rubric Artifact Collection Tool is linked here). It’s clear that improvement is an ongoing process, and we are ready for the challenge!
Our biggest breakthrough came in the form of an in-house professional development session that demonstrated the way all of our “requirements” fit together. This PD session also created an opportunity for the Leadership Team to make our vision of becoming a PLC school a reality. We began to examine the various tasks required of our teachers. At that time, every faculty member had to write an annual Professional Development Plan, prepare a Unit of Instruction, work toward achieving a building SMART Goal, and participate in regular professional development, department meetings, etc. It seemed overwhelming on top of our regular teaching load. Our Leadership Team thought, “what if we found a way to pull all those requirements together into one common focus, and what if that focus was improving student learning?” The Leadership Team began to align all our expectations to fit that common focus. We built common plan time into our schedules whenever possible so that instructional data teams would be able to meet during the school day (click here to see a screenshot of our teams’ meeting times, which are also available on the front page of the FHSPLC, on the individual team pages of the FHSPLC, and uploaded in Step 8 Addition Documentation/Additional Files), we wrote PD Plan options that centered around the work of the data teams, we created building SMART Goals that tied into the data team work, and, in doing so, we earned the trust of our faculty members as we made a concentrated effort to show them how collaboration could work to their benefit rather than become additional work for them. We provided PD support to inform and demonstrate how to work together in data teams and how to complete data cycles. Then, we asked our staff to commit to weekly data team meetings and soon requested each data team complete two data cycles per semester. We battled and successfully overcame some common stumbling blocks: dysfunctional teams, unwilling participants, and singletons (teachers who teach single section courses and have difficulty planning together for their non-alike courses). It might be one of our proudest moments when we, as a Leadership Team, realized that our teams had started meeting during the 2018-19 school year before we had even asked them to begin their annual team work!
In order to further provide support to our instructional data teams, we also created the FHSPLC (Fulton High School Professional Learning Community) website (also linked here at http://fhsplc.weebly.com/) to streamline our work. The FHSPLC gives teachers access to our Mission, our Vision, our Common Commitments, a Weekly Meeting Log (available here and from our individual team pages, which are accessible here) to document their work, and easy access to their past Weekly Meeting logs to provide consistency for their work (linked here). We also included a system by which teachers could easily share the products of their collaboration--their data cycles, their common assessments, their priority standards, etc. Within the FHSPLC, we provide a Resources page on which resources are linked so teachers can easily locate all past PD documents as well as access websites that detail the various aspects of PLC work. The FHSPLC also has a Portfolio where we share our practices and celebrate our successes. The response to our PLC-focused approach has been positive! We have evolved from a staff that questioned the value of teaming to a staff that begun meeting and submitting Weekly Meeting Logs as part of their regular routine! We believe that we built understanding and commitment to the PLC process by embracing change for the common good and designing a system that allowed that change to become part of what we do rather than something else to do!
FHS has worked hard to support our PLC work in both our faculty’s schedules and our students’ schedules. Most faculty members now have a common plan time during which they can meet to carry out their Professional Learning Communities’ work--instructional planning, sharing of best practices, data cycle planning and review, etc. A copy of our teams’ meeting schedules can be seen in this screenshot or here on our FHSPLC website. This calendar of meeting schedules allows our Leadership Team to attend as many data team meetings as possible and provide feedback to our teams using this Team Evaluation form. We have also considered our students’ needs in the evolvement of our seminar time. Beginning as far back as 2011, our building has offered a time during the day for intervention. Over the last few years, we have worked to improve this seminar time, to make it as valuable and practical for students as possible. Currently, students can meet with any of their teachers four days a week for a variety of reasons: to seek out a quiet place to study, to seek out additional help mastering instructional objectives, to make up assessments or re-assess, etc. On the fifth day of the week, students report to their academic advisor’s classroom to check grades, troubleshoot problem areas (missing assignments, low scores, difficulty with material) and brainstorm approaches to solving those problems. In addition, there is often material presented to students during their seminar time that can range from study skills, to test taking skills, to Internet safety, to employment skills.
The Leadership Team continues to strive for improvement and always focuses its goals and PD around our next steps--we started with the data team process, moved into weekly data team meetings, revisited the process of identifying priority standards (now linked on each team’s webpage--click here for a sample), and requested regular data cycles (samples have been uploaded in Step 8 Addition Documentation/Additional Files). This year, as we continue to evolve in our focus on improving student learning through the PLC model, we are working on developing better grading practices, creating common assessments, and developing systems within which students learn to self-assess. We have requested that our data teams create and share at least one common assessment and develop and share at least one example of a student self-assessment process this year. With full-fledged immersion into the PLC process, our building is now on par with the other buildings in our district. We are an active member of our District Leadership Team, which is comprised of one individual who serves on the Leadership Team of each building in our district. We are now able to contribute our various processes and approaches within our district to provide other buildings with assistance in/models for the various PLC elements. This year our District Leadership Team is working to develop a digital PLC binder, which will allow each building to share every step of their PLC process through narratives and examples. The binder, upon its completion, will serve as both a valuable resource and an inspiration for continued growth. During its completion, the binder has become a source of valuable conversation and collaboration between our buildings, as each representative shares his or her building’s approaches to the various elements of Professional Learning Community work. It is our hope that this binder, which will be accessible to all our staff members, will serve as a resource and an inspiration to facilitate continual growth for each of our buildings as they journey toward improving student learning.
Additionally, our Leadership Team is committed this year to providing feedback to our instructional data teams by regularly visiting their team meetings. Each time we observe a team meeting, we complete this Team Evaluation form. It is our hope to continue to develop and improve this feedback process. Another way that we communicate with our teams is by first sharing the agendas for our Leadership Team meetings via email, then posting those minutes as well as the minutes from our District Leadership Team meetings on the Leadership page of our FHSPLC website (also accessible here).
In the spirit of that ongoing improvement, many of our teachers seek professional development and then share what they’ve learned with our staff. Our Fulton High School Leadership Team has continued to educate themselves by not only sending representatives to the Missouri Powerful Learning Conference each year, but by also branching out and sending a team to the Solution Tree Conference in St. Charles, MO this past summer as well. This year, we are excited to be presenting “PLC: Succeeding at the Secondary Level” at our Missouri Powerful Learning Conference.
We are firmly immersed in the PLC process and ready to challenge ourselves further. We have completed a mock site review through Missouri PLC and identified areas for growth (our Missouri PLC Rubric Artifact Collection Tool is linked here). It’s clear that improvement is an ongoing process, and we are ready for the challenge!