Tom Vander Ark
Tom Vander Ark is an education advocate, adviser, and author of Getting Smart: How Personal Digital Learning is Changing the World. He is Founder and Executive Editor of Getting Smart and a partner in Learn Capital.
What matters most is providing students with learning environments that foster high levels of learning and engagement for all students. By bringing students into the PLC conversation, we can truly give students the ability to take concrete and measurable steps to increase their learning." -- Personalized Learning in a PLC at Work
Tim Stuart is a big fan of professional learning communities (PLC). As a teacher leader, he’s used them to improve schools in New Mexico, Jakarta, Singapore and Ethiopia.
Popularized by Rick DuFour, the four critical questions of a PLC include:
- What do we want all students to know and be able to do?
- How will we know if they learn it?
- How will we respond when some students do not learn?
- How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
While leading innovation at the Singapore American School (see case study), Stuart had the chance to visit more than 100 of the best schools in the world. The schools that had excellent outcomes and progressive design shared three characteristics:
- They all have characteristics of high functioning PLC (even if they don’t use that term)
- They focus on essential disciplinary knowledge: incorporate transdisciplinary, future-ready skills; and cultivate student-agency behaviors.
- They teach students how to personalize their learning process.
Along the way, he had a hunch. What if PLC could move beyond promoting teacher effectiveness and engage students in the process? What if students owned their own learning and asked themselves the four questions? The PLC 2.0 questions include:
- What do I want to know, understand, and be able to do?
- How will I demonstrate that I have learned it?
- What will I do when I’m not learning?
- What will I do when I have already learned it?
Along the journey, Stuart connected with international educator Sascha Heckmann (head of school in Mozambique) and Response to Intervention (RTI) experts Mike Mattos and Austin Buffum. The four of them found that by asking students to engage in the PLC process, it boosts student agency and invites co-construction of personalized journeys.
Combining the two-way power of PLCs and the proven benefits of RTI, the four education leaders outlined a proven pathway to transformation in their new book, Personalized Learning in a PLC at Work: Student Agency Through the Four Critical Questions.
The practical guide, published by Solution Tree, includes a magic chart that shows how the key concepts come together combining personalized learning and a focus on essential skills.
The authors identified three organizational shift schools must make:
- From traditional classrooms to learning hubs with access to collaborating teachers, tools and resources;
- From lockstep curriculum to personalized pathways so students can co-construct learning journeys; and
- From a set pace to personalized progressions through cycles of inquiry.
The book profiles the journey of Singapore American School, NuVu (Boston), Hobsonville Point and Stonefields School (New Zealand), Futures Academy (Beijing), and i-LEARN (Ecuador).
As head of school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Stuart and his new colleagues have used PLC to to make learning more personalized. The last five weeks of the next school will be used for personalized learning time. A teacher team with some release time is visiting schools and developing plans. The goal is to not only be the best school in Africa but to be the best school with Africa.
For more, see:
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The opinions expressed in Vander Ark on Innovation are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsem*nt of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.
FAQs
What do we want all students to know and be able to do? How will we know if they learn it? How will we respond when some students do not learn? How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
What is the purpose of the four critical questions of a PLC? ›
What do we want all students to know and be able to do? How will we know if they learn it? How will we respond when some students do not learn? How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
What are the 4 essential questions for learning? ›
Question 1: What is it we expect students to learn? Question 2: How will we know when they have learned it? Question 3: How will we respond when they don't learn? Question 4: How will we respond when they already know it?
What are the four questions on the PLC solution tree? ›
Build a collaborative culture committed to learning for all
- What is it we want our students to know and be able to do?
- How will we know if each student has learned it?
- How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
- How will we extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?
Some advantages are that students are more motivated, more engaged in their learning, and take responsibility for their own learning. A major disadvantage is that it can be very time consuming to have to plan for many different students.
What is the main purpose of a PLC? ›
A professional learning community (PLC) is a team of educators who share ideas to enhance their teaching practice and create a learning environment where all students can reach their fullest potential.
What is a PLC and why is it important? ›
Fundamentally, a PLC's job is to control a system's functions using the internal logic programmed into it. Businesses around the world use PLCs to automate their most important processes. A PLC takes in inputs, whether from automated data capture points or from human input points such as switches or buttons.
What is the 4 question method? ›
Question One: What happened? (Narration) Question Two: What were they thinking? (Interpretation) Question Three: Why then and there? (Explanation) Question Four: What do we think about that? (Judgment)
What are the 4 basic components of questioning? ›
There are four major components of skills related to the process of questioning. These are: speed, voice, pause and style.
What is the purpose of the essential questions? ›
Essential questions are overarching or topical questions that guide the lesson plan. In terms of lesson planning, these questions promote conceptual thinking and add coherence to a lesson.
The 4 stages of the product life cycle are introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
What is PLC best answer? ›
What is PLC? PLCs, or Programmable Logic Controllers, are industrial computers that control automated devices and processes. These systems combine hardware and software components that allow them to monitor inputs and regulate outputs, such as turning them on or off according to their pre-programmed logic.
What are the four critical questions of a PLC PDF? ›
What do we expect our students to learn? How will we know they are learning? How will we respond when students don't learn? How will we respond if they already learn it?
How effective is personalised learning? ›
Personalized learning has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes, including higher retention rates and better assessment performance.
Why is it important to personalize learning? ›
Personalised learning has the potential to enhance engagement, comprehension, and retention for students, whilst providing teachers with a more effective teaching approach. Engaging school students is a core challenge facing educators and parents.
How does personalized learning help? ›
Together, IEPs and personalized learning can give kids the supports to work on weaknesses and a customized path that engages their interests and helps them “own” their learning. Personalized learning can also give students the chance to build self-advocacy skills.
What are the 4 pillars of the PLC process? ›
An effective PLC starts with establishing a foundation of four pillars: mission, vision, values, and goals.
What is the main purpose of common assessments in the PLC model? ›
Common assessments are tests that at least two teachers give to their students in their respective classrooms. The purpose of common assessments is to provide data so teachers can compare and analyze the results to improve student learning and teacher instruction.
What are the 4 characteristics of the PLC? ›
Main Characteristics of a PLC
- Reading signals from distributed sensors.
- They allow communication with the different teams in real-time.
- The interface that allows the use and dialogue with the operators.
- They can be connected to a supervisory system that facilitates the interface and monitoring of the process.
Whereas many schools operate as if their primary purpose is to ensure that children are taught, PLCs are dedicated to the idea that their organization exists to ensure that all students learn essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
