Week+Four+5333

=Continuous Improvement=

Learning communities have a vital role as a professional development tool to improve student performance. They provide teachers with an outlet to express their concerns about the barriers they are encountering in the classroom and assist them in clarifying the goals they want to achieve. Learning communities allow teachers to learn from each other by asking questions and identifying areas where they could benefit from additional training or support. They expose teachers to new ideas and allow them to work collaboratively to solve problems. This enables teachers to become more involved in the process and begin actually forming and implementing a plan of action that will positively impact student achievement and ultimately affect school improvement. This means that in planning the professional development portion of the campus action plan, I need to provide opportunities to enable these activities to occur within the learning community.

I would be interested in knowing if the learning communities in your school districts are held in person at certain times and locations or if they are held online. I was surprised by the fact that many teachers in my small local school district were unfamiliar with the teachers in their same subject area on the various campuses. One school district I know has tech coaches who work with assigned campuses but they use wikis and blogs to provide professional development and to get teachers involved in learning communities. If teachers could network together between campuses as well as within their subject areas and grade levels I can envision this possibly promoting more collaboration within the district.

I liked the meeting format suggested by Wiliam in the article Changing Classroom Practice. He suggested that during the first 5 - 10 minutes of the meeting that participants each have a maximum of one minute to "whine" or sound off. The purpose of this activity is to allow them get rid of the negative so they be free to focus on the agenda and agree on the purpose of the meeting. Once this step is out of the way, participants can begin to focus on what is positive and then move toward developing new ideas for further improvement. This method reminds me of working with children. Sometimes you just have to let them work out their energy so they can settle down and focus on learning. Adults are no different. Sometimes we need an activity which will allow us to vent and get our frustrations out before we can move forward.


 * Action Planning and Professional Growth**

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