For students, the lessons teachers come up with may seem boring or tedious. However, the work that goes behind them is a collaborative effort to ensure students are successfully learning.
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are when educators within a school collaborate and analyze data for improvement.
CHS9 Dr. Principal Greg Axelson acknowledges the dedication from educators that went into gaining the recognition.
“I’m proud of our teachers because they are the ones who are doing the work,” Dr. Axelson said. “All we can
do is try to help support them, make sure they have time, the tools and any other resources they need, but they are the ones who are actually going in and doing the specific work of monitoring student progress.”
Implementing and following PLC strategies, such as educators collectively agreeing to determine what students need to learn from a course and collaboratively designing assessments in order to collect data has resulted in a growth in student performance.
Dr. Axelson acknowledges the STAAR test is not a perfect assessment to use data to help students in real time, but it does give comparison data. The scores after spring assessments have shown considerable growth in certain areas.
According to Dr. Axelson, student subpopulations, including low socioeconomic status households, emergent bilingual students and students receiving special education services, that tend to underperform or struggle saw passing scores increase considerably.
“The percentage of students in those groups who mastered those tests went up in some areas 9%, 10% and in one instance 30%,” Dr. Axelson said.
CHS9 social studies teacher Brittany Scruggs thinks PLCs can benefit students. She has seen student improvement in both unit exam scores and the AP Human Geography exam scores.
“The PLC process has really been great in ensuring that no matter what teacher a student has, they’re going to get the same high quality experience,” Scruggs said. “Every student is going to see growth regardless of what teacher or classroom they end up in.”
CHS9 science teacher Laronna Doggett said implementing Solution Tree’s strategy takes effort and teamwork.
“There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Doggett said. “It’s a continuous process that we’re doing, and we are getting better as a group of doing PLC stuff and what the expectations are.”
One of Dr. Axelson’s goals for CHS9 is to become a model PLC school, or a school that has demonstrated a commitment to PLC at Work concepts and implemented those concepts for at least three years.
According to the Solution Tree, to reach this status, schools must demonstrate a commitment to PLC at Work concepts, implement those concepts for at least three years, present clear evidence of improved student learning and provide data on a yearly basis that demonstrates the school continues to meet the criteria of the PLC at Work process.
“To get from Promising Practices to Model PLC, you have to improve again, so you have to evaluate your system,” Dr. Axelson said. “Is this the most efficient way to do it? Is it working for every team?”
Not only will this goal encourage CHS9 to reevaluate what works for its students and teachers, but also create opportunities to delve into what needs improvement.
“It’s really going to challenge us and force us to go back and really look at our data,” Dr. Axelson said. “Not just celebrating what is working, but looking at it with a critical eye and try to find these things that still maybe are not working as well and try to develop systems or practices that can help improve us in those areas as well.”
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