Teachers take part in professional development

A recent teacher in-service day provided local administrators and educators with the opportunity to attend a workshop about developing a Professional Learning Community (PLC), led by Janel Keating. The workshop took place on Oct. 5 in Gilson Gymnasium during regular school hours.

Keating is the co-author of the book, “Every School, Every Team, Every Classroom: District Leadership for Growing Professional Learning Communities at Work,” and is the superintendent at the White River School District, in Buckley, Wash.

While the workshop was optional for faculty and board members, the majority attended the daylong workshop with hopes to strengthen the working relationship between both districts.

The PLC concept is based around an idea of Richard DuFour that colleagues should collaborate together and use the opportunity to learn from one another. For DuFour, the PLC model in schools succeeds by ensuring that students learn, having educators collaborate, focusing on results, and through hard work and commitment.

Keating, who uses the PLC model at White River, encouraged all in attendance to embrace the model, as it is currently being implemented in the school district. Keating began explaining that PLC’s make structural changes that ensure the entire district is moving in the same direction.

Keating explained that the White River PLC is based around four questions: what do we want each student to learn, how will we know if each student is learning it, how will we respond when a student is experiencing difficulty learning it, and how will we respond if the student already knows it.

Superintendent of Lind-Ritzville Schools, Rob Roettger, has been working with teachers to implement these four questions into regular conversations during work periods. Both school districts have switched to late start Monday’s for the current school year, and teachers in both districts use the extra time to collaborate.

The teachers in both districts have been broken into teams, and the teams work together to do analysis on the subject matter and results the students are providing. The late start Monday’s provide teachers the opportunity to communicate effectively on issues, concerns and benefits each individual educator is witnessing in the classroom and in the district.

Keating showed a video of opening day at the White River School District and the discussions that teachers and administrators are having during the collaborative learning periods during late starts. Keating stressed the importance of realizing that while times are changing, the importance of teaching and learning never changes.

Keating encouraged faculty to continually be asking questions of themselves and one another for how to strengthen the amount of learning for students. Each teacher teaches differently, she explained, and that is the art of teaching.

“If we set a high bar for the kids, there’s things in the system the adults have to do,” Keating said. “You have to talk about things how you want your child to be talked too.”

For Keating and Roettger, the most important part of their job as educators and administrators is to remember that every student is somebody’s child. As parents of young children, both discussed the value in using their experience as a parent to help effectively teach all of the students in the district and create a positive learning environment.

“It’s a culture: how you work together, how the kids greet you ­–

you’re in control of that,” Keating explained.

Keating described that data, such as test scores, is always beneficial because it proves “we can get better,” and the district can always be improving and moving forward. She also cautioned faculty about terminology used in the classroom and in the school, and encouraged them to not refer to students as “at risk” but rather as “underserved.”

“It calls us to see what else we can do, what else the district can do,” Keating said about the word choice. “Your practices should make an impact in the classroom.”

The first steps to creating an effective PLC is through collaborative learning by faculty and school-wide assessments, Keating explained. She also said it is going back to basics, and making sure teachers know the standards expected for each subject and grade level.

The faculty teams for the Lind-Ritzville school district is based around the subject matter of the educator.

During the workshop, Keating spoke about the importance of creating and maintaining an effective team, even through issues of personal conflict or opinions.

Keating urged those in attendance to never stop asking questions and to maintain the “relentless, passionate focus on learning” that each individual in the room possessed.

At the workshop, Keating provided each member in attendance with an 80-page workbook, with examples of worksheets used in the White River School district and assessment forms. The packet provides each educator with necessary information and reference material they can use during collaboration periods within their teams.

The general feedback from the workshop was extremely positive for both educators and school board members. During the regularly scheduled school board meeting on Oct. 22, board members discussed the value of the workshop in terms of realizing how much work educators are putting into the school system, and being a reminder to their purpose as school board members.