[Memo: PLCs at LIFE Prep]

Professional Learning Communities at LIFE

Prep
The following is an explanation of my vision for professional learning communities
at LIFE Prep. The purpose of this memorandum is to clarify and to formalize the
reasons for engaging in collaborative professional learning and to make the goals
for such work explicit to all.

The Purpose of PLCs

The purpose of professional learning communities (PLCs) is to improve student learning.
Every action that we take in our PLC meetings should be in response to specific students or
specific groups of students. At the end of our meetings, we should have a set of NEXT STEPS
that we will put into place tomorrow or even today.

To guide our work in PLCs, we will use the four essential questions posed by Richard
DuFour:
1. What is it we want our students to learn?
2. How will we know if each student has learned it?
3. How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
4. How will we respond when students have learned it?

What to Focus On
We only meet once a week, so it is important to choose student work that addresses an
important standard. Some educators use the term power standards to describe these
standards, which are connected to others and, once mastered by students, significantly
expand their abilities to engage with even more challenging tasks or perform at a much
higher level.

Lets look at the Minnesota reading standard category called Key Ideas and Details. An
important standard or power standard in second grade would be standard 2.1.1.1: Ask and
answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate
understanding of key details of key details in a text. This is different from the first grade
standard that is less specific about the types of questions students should be able to ask and
answer about key details in the text. The new transformative skill is a set of questioning
words that can be used in any interpretive situation.

Another example in the same category would be in fourth grade. MN reading standard
4.1.1.1 states that students will be able to: [r]efer to details and examples in a text when
explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. The
new transformative skill is drawing inferences from text.

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Professional Knowledge and Use of the Minnesota Standards

Implicit in this approach is an intimate knowledge of the Minnesota standards. Although
every discipline area has a different set of standards, the most comprehensive and difficult
to implement are the 2010 Minnesota English Language Arts (ELA) standards. The
Minnesota ELA state standards are more rigorous, robust, and based on more current
evidence-based research than the Common Core standards. The Common Core standards
were used as a guide for the Minnesota ELA standards, but are not the same.

We, at LIFE Prep, must base our teaching on the Minnesota standards and this may be a
large part of our effort in PLCs this year. Question One of DuFours four essential questions
for PLCs is: What is it we want our students to learn? Knowing the Minnesota state standards
is the first step to answering this question.

Once we have a familiarity with the standards, we can start to make informed decisions
about which standards we will focus on throughout the year. If we meet approximately
thirty times in a school year, we should be able to come up with twenty (or so) standards on
which to focus our efforts. In your teams, you may have some disagreement about which
standards are the power standards. I encourage you to give yourselves time to debate this
issue; this is important for developing your teams plan for moving forward. Once you agree
on a few, go ahead and start with these. You should eventually go back and conclude your
discussion with a definitive list of the twenty, or so, power standards on which your team
will focus its time.

The Goal is Mastery of All Learning Targets by All Students

Teachers determine which of the standards they will cover. Ideally, all teachers would cover
all standards every year and all students would master all learning targets associated with
those standards. Realizing that each year we have different students with different
strengths and weaknesses, we probably wont be able to cover all standards every year with
mastery on all learning targets.

Accepting this premise does not absolve us from trying to get all students to mastery on all
learning targets. At LIFE Prep, we may not be able to get through all of the prescribed
standards, but we will do two things every year:
1. Present and teach the most important grade-level standards to our students
2. Ensure student mastery of all key learning targets we teach

To be explicit and perfectly clear: our goal is to ensure that each student is proficient on
all the standards they encounter in our classrooms.

The Data Cycle Process

Here is an outline of how a data cycle might work

I meet with my grade level or specialist team members on Wednesday of Week One. We
have a list of power standards and decide that we will focus on for this data cycle. Lets say
Im a kindergarten teacher and our team decides we will work on the writing standard
0.6.2.2 under the category Text Types and Purposes. The standard states that students
will be able to Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose

[Memo: PLCs at LIFE Prep]

informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply
some information about the topic.

We decide to give the same assignment on Tuesday, which will be a writing prompt about a
picture of a familiar animal of their choosing. The name of the animal is written on the
picture. The prompt states: Draw the animal. What is it called? What does it do? The
learning targets are as follows:
1. I can draw a picture of an animal.
2. I can write the name of the animal.
3. I can write about something the animal does.
For some formative assessments, it may be helpful to establish a short rubric with a few
elements that would demonstrate mastery. In this case, we decided that a rubric was not
necessary.

We finish the meeting by talking about how we will prepare the students to master each of
the learning targets before we give them the assignment, which we will come to call a
common formative assessment. My colleague next door proposes to have students look at
the picture of a house cat as a practice activity. I decide that I will use a similar strategy, but
I will use the example of a Frisbee dog in a short video clip.

The gap between giving the common formative assessment and the data team meeting
should be as short as possible. Teachers will not feel comfortable waiting around for the
meeting while they could be re-teaching skills and concepts. Try to plan to give your
common formative assessment no more than a day or two before your team meeting.

On Wednesday of Week Two, we bring our sorted formative assessments to our PLC
meeting. On Friday, my partner gave the practice assignment with a picture of her cat as a
scaffold for the formative assessment given on Tuesday. On the Tuesday formative
assessment, her students showed the following proficiency levels:
13/20 (65%) students mastered all three learning targets. (GREEN)
4/20 (20%) students mastered two of the three learning target. In this group, the
students were able to draw the picture and rewrite the name of the animal, but were
unable to write about something the animal did. (YELLOW)
3/20 (15%) students mastered one or zero learning targets. None of them were able
to write about something the animal did. Two of them were able to demonstrate the
ability to draw the picture of the animal. None were able to rewrite the name of the
animal. (RED)

I brought my students results after attempting to scaffold the learning using a short video
clip of a Frisbee dog on Thursday. I also gave the formative assessment on Tuesday. My
students had the following results:
9/21 (43%) students mastered all three learning targets. (GREEN)
10/21 (48%)students mastered two of the three learning target. In this group, the
students were able to draw the picture and rewrite the name of the animal, but were
unable to write about something the animal did. (YELLOW)
2/21 (9%) students mastered one or zero learning targets. Neither of them able to
write about something the animal did. One of them was able to demonstrate the
ability to draw the picture of the animal. Neither successfully rewrote the name of
the animal. (RED)

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We discussed our classes results and why her students fared better than mine. With both
yellow groups, we decided to try to reteach the skill using pictures of animals. We both
agreed that talking about the animal with other students before attempted to write about
them was a step we thought would increase their schema and provide them with a mental
palette of ideas from upon which they could take ideas. We also needed them to feel more
comfortable writing words that they didnt necessarily know how to spell. We stressed that
writing words how they thought they sounded was an important skill to practice.

For the red groups, we noticed that the two most common problems were the need to
practice writing letters and phonemic awareness. We worked on these skills in pull-out
groups. In addition to this, we put them in the re-teaching groups with the yellow group.

For the green groups, we decided to extend their learning to what would be expected for the
same element of writing in first grade. We looked at standard 1.6.2.2 and saw that the next
step was for students to add closure to their statement. We decided that this would mean
describing a process that the animal had completed, such as eating or running. This would
be evident in the picture we would provide to the students.

We decided that we would report back on the students progress on this standard on
Wednesday of Week Three. We felt confident that we would be able to move nearly all of the
yellow students to green and would talk about any students not at mastery at next weeks
meeting.

Finally, we chose to pursue our next standard as the main focus of our PLC work for Week
Three. We chose another writing standard in the category called Research to Build and
Present Knowledge. Standard 0.6.7.7 states the following: Participate in shared research
and writing projects (e.g. explore a number of books by a favorite author and express
opinions about them).

Using the Curriculum Series as a Guide to Learning the Standards

Teachers make the difference in the lives of students. Whether the subject is mathematics,
literacy, or science, there are numerous textbooks and/or curriculum resources that are
very helpful for teachers. Choosing the best textbook series for each subject is a great start
toward ensuring student mastery because there are quality learning activities and
numerous teaching resources built in and readily available to teachers. But, regardless of
the curriculum used, it is the teacher, ultimately, that moves the students to proficiency by
making key instructional decisions.

Part of the work of PLCs is to determine which of the curriculum resources available are
useful and where there are gaps that we, as teachers, need to fill in. Here again, we come
back to knowing the standards. The intentional decisions we make about what to teach and
how to teach it determine the success of our students. This year with a new literacy
curriculum package, teachers are learning what is in the basal readers and the
accompanying resources. This is the time to think about how the curriculum aligns with the
Minnesota state standards. This will make your PLC work much easier.

[Memo: PLCs at LIFE Prep]

The Crosswalk Between Q-Comp Practices and Data Cycles

Many of you have asked what the difference is between Q-Comp PLCs and DuFour PLCs.
While both are highly valuable to professional growth, there is a distinct difference. Q-Comp
shares teaching techniques and strategies that teachers can put into their repertoires. If you
think of teaching as finding the best way to engage students in learning and that these
methods of engagement are like tools in a tool box, then Q-Comp helps teachers adopt new
tools and place them in their toolboxes. The collaborative piece of Q-Comp allows teachers
to discuss similar student skills and knowledge and offer best practices to others. Student
work is shared with other teachers to show examples of sound practice. In doing so,
teachers are able to share their best tools and give them to other teachers. In this way,
collaboration is raising the quality of teaching as the best teaching strategies proliferate
throughout LIFE Prep.

As I have previously discussed, the DuFour PLCs focus on individuals or groups of students
that you teach every day. If we go back to the toolbox analogy, once a teacher knows that
students need different types of teaching based on their levels of mastery of learning
targets, it is up to the teacher to find the proper tools in the toolbox to help each group of
students. Through collaborating with others in the data cycle team, teachers will also
develop some new tools that work well. These successful techniques can also spread
throughout the school and benefit other students. One way to help these new best practices
spread is to plan celebrations a few times a year to showcase the work of each PLC and
share best practices with others.

The Q-Comp teacher leaders are working with me to try to streamline our professional
learning communities so that eventually what is happening with Q-Comp and what is
happening in your DuFour PLCs work together seamlessly.

The School-wide Goals for Reading and Mathematics

LIFE Prep has two school-wide academic goals for the school year; one is for reading and
one is for mathematics. The goals were developed by the instructional leadership team
(ILT) and the Q-Comp teacher leaders. These goals are what we are all striving to achieve
and include every student at LIFE Prep. The Q-Comp PLCs and the DuFour PLCs are both
pointed at the same targets. These goals are the goals of all of our professional academic
learning this year and all of our support structures we have put into place for struggling
students. The goals are as follows:
LIFE Prep Reading SMART Goals
Growth Goal
Seventy percent (70%) of LIFE Prep students who have been continuously enrolled from
October 1st, 2014 until June 3rd, 2015 will be at grade level in the spring of 2015 according
to their scores on the NWEA MAP reading test or show at least one-years growth on the
NWEA MAP reading test from the fall of 2014 to the spring of 2015.
Proficiency Goal
Fifty-three percent (53%) of LIFE Prep students who have been continuously enrolled from
October 1st, 2014 until June 3rd, 2015 will be proficient (meeting or exceeding the standard)
on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment for reading.

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LIFE Prep Math SMART Goals
Growth Goal
Seventy-six percent (76%) of LIFE Prep students who have been continuously enrolled
from October 1st, 2014 until June 3rd, 2015 will be at grade level in the spring of 2015
according to their scores on the NWEA MAP mathematics test or show at least one-years
growth on the NWEA MAP mathematics test from the fall of 2014 to the spring of 2015.
Proficiency Goal
Sixty-one percent (61%) of LIFE Prep students who have been continuously enrolled from
October 1st, 2014 until June 3rd, 2015 will be proficient (meeting or exceeding the standard)
on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment for mathematics.

LIFE Prep Standard Practices for DuFour PLCs

The following is a list of things we should all be doing and documenting during our DuFour
PLC meetings:
Keep a running record of notes from your discussions in the Google document
provided for each PLC
Identify the Minnesota state standard that you are currently focusing on, or
For specialists, please indicate the strategy or best practice techniques you will be
working on
Identify learning targets to accomplish mastery of the standard
Select or develop a short common formative assessment to distribute to students on
the same day
Divide student work from formative assessments into three groups: GREEN,
YELLOW, and RED
Report the number and percentage of each group in each class
Discuss plans for each group
What are the next steps?
Report back during the following weeks meeting about the results of the
differentiation
The goal for each learning target should be 100% mastery
Gallery walk of most important PLC work in December and May

[Memo: PLCs at LIFE Prep]

Ongoing Support
The purpose of all of this work is to improve student learning. I have heard many of your
concerns about the time constraints and the need for support. I will be attending your
meetings regularly to help get you going. The key is that we start moving. The Law of Inertia
states that: An object at rest stays at rest unless a net force acts upon it. Please take that first
step to get the ball rolling. Once we are moving, everything will get easier.

It will take time for all of us to get comfortable with collaboration and making our teaching
more public. It will take time to get comfortable trying new ways of doing things. It will take
time to develop a scope and sequence of standards and power standards that spans K-6 in
literacy and math. It wont happen all in one year, so lets keep plugging away at it and give
ourselves three years to make it happen. The critical point is that we need to make it
happen in order to maximize our learning time with our students and be able to respond to
their needs with data-driven instructional decisions.

I see the potential for greatness in our school. We have the teachers and support staff at
LIFE Prep who can make student achievement soar. I know that all of you have the will and
the skill to do what it takes to get there. Lets work together to make it happen!

Please let me know if you have any questions or needs for support. I am here to help.

Sincerely,





Bart