PLC Basics
The foundation of PLC rests on these four pillars.
What are mission, vision, values, and goals?
The critical skills, knowledge, and dispositions each student must acquire as a result of each course, grade level, and unit of instruction.
What is Essential Learning?
A schoolwide plan that ensures every student in every course or grade level will receive additional time and support for learning as soon as he or she experiences difficulty in acquiring essential knowledge and skills.
What is a systematic intervention / multitiered intervention?
This can be reached when all points of view have been actively solicited and the will of the group is evident even to those who most oppose it.
What is a consensus?
An assessment informs the teacher regarding the effectiveness of instruction and the individual student regarding progress in becoming proficient.
What is a Formative Assessment?
The quality that defines knowledge, skills, and dispositions students are expected to retain over time as opposed to those they merely learn for a test (Reeves, 2002).
What is Endurance?
To become a stronger PLC so that we can improve student achievement.
What is the number one focus for the Discovery team this year?
A quick and simple way to determine the will of the group.
What is a Fist to Five strategy?
These assessments are typically administered three to four times a year.
What are Benchmark or Interim Assessments?
A leadership concept in which leaders encourage autonomy and creativity within well-defined parameters and priorities that must be honored.
What is simultaneous loose and tight leadership.?
This states how we will behave in order to achieve the shared vision for our school or district.
What are Collective Commitments?
An assessment typically created collaboratively by a team of teachers responsible for the same grade level or course.
What is a Common Formative Assessment?
This outlines what we want students to learn during the course of the year.
What is an instructional calendar or pacing guide?
The ongoing cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting designed to improve results—constantly.
What is Continuous Improvement Process? In a PLC, this cycle includes gathering evidence of current levels of student learning, developing strategies and ideas to build on strengths and address weaknesses in that learning, implementing those strategies and ideas, analyzing the impact of the changes to discover what was effective and what was not, and applying the new knowledge in the next cycle of continuous improvement.
This is Discovery's mission.
It is the mission of Discovery Elementary School to ensure high levels of learning for each student.
This is what we do when students don't learn.
What is Response to Intervention?
A curriculum that (1) gives students access to the same essential learning regardless of who is teaching the class and (2) can be taught in the time allotted (Marzano, 2003).
What is a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum?
An ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.
What is a Professional Learning Community?