Reform” for a sampling of the research on PLCs.
• See “Cultural Shifts in a Professional Learning Community” for information on the cultural shifts that take place when a traditional school embraces the PLC process.
This information should be provided to all staff members. They should also be encouraged to identify additional data they feel are pertinent to understanding the school and to present any research they can find regarding promising practices.
It is important that this process engages the entire staff in reviewing all information. If the principal or guiding coalition does the analysis and merely reports findings to the faculty, staff members become passive recipients of someone else’s conclusions rather than active participants engaged in a process to build shared knowledge. If people are to feel ownership in a decision, they must be engaged in the decision-making process. As Stephen Covey (1989) admonishes: “Without involvement there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment” (p. 143, emphasis in original).
Too often schools make decisions on the basis of opinion, anecdotes, appeals to mindless precedent, or authority. In a profession, however, there is an obligation to seek out and apply the most promising practices. A principal in a PLC will ensure that decisions are made on the basis of evidence rather than whimsy and will engage the entire staff in the review of that evidence.
Build the Foundation of a Professional Learning Community
Building shared knowledge about the current reality in the school as well as the research on the most promising practices in school improvement is a prerequisite for establishing the foundation of a PLC. Think of this foundation as resting on four pillars—(1) mission, (2) vision, (3) collective commitments, and (4) goals, each of which staff members understand and endorse. The mission pillar articulates the school’s purpose, the vision pillar addresses what the school must become to fulfill that purpose, the collective commitments pillar clarifies how each person must act in order to move the school toward the shared vision, and the goals pillar establishes when certain specified benchmarks will be accomplished to mark progress on the journey toward the vision. Let’s examine those pillars in more detail.
Establish the Fundamental Purpose of the School
Although educators in many schools use the terms mission and vision interchangeably, those terms represent two different aspects of the PLC foundation. The mission establishes the very reason the school exists, and on this issue, principals of PLCs must be clear and unequivocal: “the purpose of this school is to ensure high levels of learning for all students.” When a staff embraces this purpose, every practice, policy, and procedure of the school is assessed on the basis of how it will impact student learning. Every aspect of the PLC process flows from this fundamental premise regarding why the school exists.
Help Staff Members Clarify the School They Are Attempting to Create
One of the intended outcomes of building shared knowledge during the early stages of the PLC process is the creation of a facultywide understanding of the indicators of the most-effective schooling practices. Based on that understanding, staff members are called on to describe what their school will become. Principals recognize that they must know and clearly articulate where they want to take their schools if they expect others to join them on the journey. So they work with the staff to develop a shared vision—a desirable and credible future for the school that vividly describes what people are working to create and what it will look like when they get there.
A vision, however, will influence a school only to the extent that it is shared. The process we have described thus far is specifically intended to result in a shared vision. Instead of saying, “Listen to me, I know what this school must become,” a principal is able to say, “I have listened to you, and I understand the school you hope to create. Let’s begin to examine all of our current and proposed practices, policies, and procedures to see if they align with our shared hopes for our school.”
See “Why Should We Describe the School or District We Are Trying to Create?” for a sampling of research on developing a shared vision. Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks to download this reproducible.
Clarify the Commitments That Are Vital to Creating the School
A shared vision describes what a school will become. Collective commitments describe the specific behaviors that individuals throughout the school must demonstrate in order to move the school in the desired direction. These commitments serve two purposes. First, they move the conversation from the discussion of what a staff hopes to create someday to the specific steps that must be taken today to bring the vision to reality. Second, articulated commitments help clarify how an individual can contribute to the school improvement effort. Whereas a shared vision focuses on the organization, collective commitments focus on people. The conversation moves from “What is the school we hope to create?” to “What must each of us start doing now to move us forward?”
The collective commitments should be specifically aligned with the vision statement, and the principal should model this important step by publicly stating the explicit commitments he or she is prepared to make to contribute to the achievement of the shared vision.
See the Schaumburg School District 54 “Mission and Goals” to download examples of collective commitments for principals, teachers, students, and parents. Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks for a link to this reproducible.
See “Why Should We Articulate Collective Commitments?” for a sampling of the research on collective commitments. Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks to download this reproducible.
Establish Indicators of Progress and Strategies for Monitoring Those Indicators
One of the most powerful ways leaders communicate their priorities is by creating a process for monitoring progress of those priorities. Effective principals will work with a leadership team to:
• Translate vision statements into specific actionable steps for making progress
• Establish a timeline for when the steps should be completed
• Monitor each step
• Intervene to provide support when staff members are struggling to move forward
• Identify specific benchmarks the staff can reference to keep track of improvement
• Set clear schoolwide goals and ensure that every collaborative team has translated one or more of those goals into a goal for the team that is strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound (SMART)
In later chapters, we will have much more to say about the importance of SMART goals in implementing the PLC process. For now, we will simply assert that if a shared vision is to impact student achievement, principals must help people throughout the school identify and achieve strategic and specific, measurable short-term and long-term goals that serve as milestones of progress toward the vision.
When a staff has answered these questions—Why do we exist? What kind of school must we become to fulfill our purpose? What collective commitments must we make to create that school? and When do we
