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Best Practices for Professional Learning Communities

  • Topic: K–12 Education, Student Success, Teacher Recruitment & Retention

As part of its instructional framework planning process, a Hanover Research member district is revisiting and revising their Professional Learning Community (PLC) practices in the district. District leaders are already examining various literature around PLC strategies, but they would like more resources to support the implementation of their PLC work in the future. The district has specific needs around implementing their next PLC framework which can benefit from a best practices research review. Specifically, district leaders would like to understand the research and best practices around scaling PLC work for a larger district, the cultural change required to shift into a more formal PLC meeting structure, and how to make data-driven decisions through the PLC framework. To support this goal, the district has partnered with Hanover to create this report which provides a review of academic literature as well as district best practices on PLCs.
 
This report is comprised of two sections:

  • Section I: Building a Successful PLC Framework overviews best practices for creating district conditions and frameworks to support effective PLCs. This includes practices for directing the mission of PLC work, fostering teacher leadership and collaboration, and supporting data usage throughout the district.
  • Section II: Scaling PLC Implementation Across the District overviews best practices for implementing cohesive PLC strategies across the district. This includes designing PLCs and defining roles, and how to scale these efforts district-wide.

Key Findings

  • Research on effective PLCs indicates that administrators and teachers must work together to create PLC procedures that work for their school
  • Establishing a strong common mission is the first important component for creating a framework and instructional culture conducive to effective PLC work
  • Collaboration is fundamental to the success of PLCs and requires that teachers share successes and failures; school administrators can foster a culture of collaboration by improving conditions to support teacher leadership, commitment, and time for collaboration
  • Effective PLCs focus on improving results using data; therefore, a coherent approach to assessing student performance and to collecting and analyzing data across the district can help to increase the effectiveness of PLCs
  • Efforts to scale PLC implementation across the district should include identifying PLC leads
  • PLCs benefit from both informal internal feedback and external evaluations, and in scaling PLCs across the district, district leaders need to regularly monitor outcomes and provide opportunity for feedback loops

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Recommendations

Create a Guiding Coalition, comprised of representatives across the district, to lead climate and culture changes in the district and to build the PLC framework and expectations

Empower teacher leaders at schools to lead PLC practice and to increase collaboration and encourage teacher buy-in

Establish protocols for monitoring and evaluating PLC implementation fidelity and effectiveness

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