Advantage Music Academy
“The three words explain the concept: Professionals coming together in a group—a community—to learn.” (Hord, 2008).
There’s a growing body of education research that suggests that, if we want to increase student learning, we must provide quality opportunities for teachers to learn and develop their practice together. Many schools have adopted the professional learning community (PLC) as the model for facilitating this process.
What exactly is a PLC and why is it important?
Who is involved in our PLC and where and when does it happen?
What's involved in being a part of a PLC and how do we build it?
How do we build our PLC?
Members of the PLC are all professionals who are passionate about the craft of teaching music. The PLC provides a structure through which teachers elevate each other as serious practitioners of that craft.
Members of the PLC support each other in learning. We are all involved in a continuous process of shared learning, including the facilitator and the director.
The PLC is a community of teachers, not a place or an event. It consists of a network of professional relationships between teachers, rather than a bunch of individual teachers ‘going it alone’.
Our PLC exists to improve student learning. Any time we do work as part of our PLC, it’s essential that we direct our focus, efforts, and conversations towards furthering the goal of improving and increasing student learning. We keep asking ourselves questions like:
Will what we’re doing now lead to more or better student learning?
How will this affect student outcomes?
What can we do differently to make sure our students learn even more?
Our PLC is at its healthiest and most effective when we are all together in regular learning meetings at the Academy. The more we have gathered together at the same time, the more potential there is to build knowledge.
Our context as a private educational institution requires that we be flexible in coordinating the various activities of our PLC. We want to work together to try and create opportunities for everyone to participate in whatever way they can. So, if you can’t attend regular learning meetings, understand that you’re still an indispensable part of our PLC and there are many ways in which you can participate.
Everyone who teaches at the Academy is an integral and equal part of the PLC. During learning meetings, there will be a lead facilitator whose role involves organising discussions to push conversations to a deeper level, and ensuring that all voices are heard and respected. The role of the facilitator—and of the director—in the context of learning meetings is not to instruct, evaluate or criticise.
At the heart of our PLC are regular learning meetings. At learning meetings, we:
analyse and discuss education literature;
analyse and discuss student work such as exam reports and portfolio entries;
analyse and discuss teacher work volunteered by teachers such as lesson recordings, strategies, and lesson plans;
investigate the fundamental issues of our struggles and strategise together.
In addition, our PLC is active through:
We seek advice for working with a difficult student, ask for an opinion on the best approach to teaching a specific concept or skill, or create and share lesson materials together.
Our professional learning platform on Podia hosts handcrafted courses relating to topics such as student motivation and behaviour management. As it relates to the PLC, what’s important is the shared experience of reading, discussing and implementing the content within—like any learning, it extends beyond the immediate context.
We share questions, examples of student work, success stories, and more on the Podia community page.
The PLC process aims to improve student learning by building authentic professional relationships. When the PLC is at work, its members must always:
The best teachers always maintain a curious disposition, and make it a practice to critically examine and reflect upon their own teaching and their own students’ learning.
We come to our colleagues in the PLC to learn from their expertise and consider their advice in good faith. We come to our PLC expecting to learn from each other.
We have to push each other to be the best we can be, and that sometimes means asking questions that cut right to the heart of our teaching practice. The activities of the PLC are intended to create a safe environment and support structure for teachers to have those conversations without creating resentment.
It’s a truism that accepting conventional wisdom without critical inquiry gives rise to the proliferation of such demonstrable misconceptions as ‘heavier objects fall faster’ and ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. We don’t know where such misconceptions may crop up—we have a responsibility to seek them out.
References
Hord, S. M. (2008). Evolution of the Professional Learning Community. Journal of Staff Development, 29(3), 10–13.