Episode 041: PLC Plus with Nancy Frey & Doug Fisher
Join us for this discussion with the potent pair Doug Fisher & Nancy Frey! We learn about their new book, PLC+ and the five questions that get to the heart of what collaboration time should look like in schools. Stay tuned until the end for a special promo code for our listeners for the PLC+ Institutes the authors will be hosting in Colorado in October!
Connect with Fisher & Frey
Website: www.fisherandfrey.com/ | Twitter: @DFisherSDSU; @NancyFrey | Newest Book: PLC Plus, Corwin Press
Connect with Vrain Waves
Website: vrainwaves.com | Twitter: @VrainWaves | Becky Twitter: @BeckyEPeters | Ben Twitter: @mrkalb
Links & Show Notes
- Out of Our Heads & Into the Classroom: (01:30)
- Introduction to Fisher & Frey & PLC Plus (08:12)
- Their School: Health Sciences High & Middle College in San Diego
- Questions: Where are we now? & the importance of pre-assessments
- Side note: common questions for PLC work come from DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010 as a PLC foundation: Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work; we acknowledge this foundational work when discussing PLCs :
What do we want students to learn? (essential standards)
How will we know if they have learned? (team-developed common assessments)
What will we do if they don’t learn? (systematic interventions)
What will we do if they already know it? (extended learning)
- Collective Efficacy
- Graham Nuthall, Hidden Lives of Learners
- Students already know between 40-50 percent of what the teacher is teaching (Nuthall, 2007)
- Equity: Removal of Barriers vs. intervention as responses to student data
- Activator: Someone to guide the group
- What are PLCs getting wrong? (13:21)
- Emphasis on the structural conditions can overwhelm the focus and mission of the group
- PLC must continually reinvest in itself
- Lack of attention to instruction - “How do we move learning forward?”
- Curriculum / Instruction / Assessment
- Recent research that ~20% of in-class tasks are on grade level TNTP’s The Opportunity Myth - and an article from EdWeek
- PLC+ Protocol - Assignment analysis (from The Education Trust) (19:34)
- Trust and the importance of Relational Conditions (21:18)
- Activator helps keep the conversation moving
- Protocols provide consistency
- PLC+ / PD (22:57)
- Roughly a 1 to 3 ratio - Full staff Professional learning to PLC+ Time
- Credibility & Efficacy (24:33)
- Teacher Credibility: Trust, Competence, Dynamism, Immediacy
- Self-Efficacy and Collective Efficacy (27:17)
- Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy -
- From Leading Impact Teams, by Bloomberg & Pitchford (& based on Bandura’s research, as well as Goddard, Hoy, & Hoy): Efficacy = Mastery Moments, Vicarious Experience, Feedback, and Trust
- “Where are we going?” and “Where are we now?” (31:08)
- 5 Questions in PLC+: Where are we going? Where are we now? How do we move learning forward? What did we learn today? Who benefited and who did not benefit?
- Bringing data to the PLC+ (33:22)
- Equity / Cognitive Bias / The Decisions we choose to make: (35:52)
- Quote from PLC+: “Underlying every decision about what we choose to gather data on is an unspoken decision about what we won’t look at.”
- Data should be aligned to team’s common challenge; then did we impact learning or not?
- Invite students to PLC+ times for feedback
- Protocols for learning walks
- What did we learn today? Every single day we should be formatively assessing
- Scheduling logistics (44:56)
- Two PLC+s - Grade level & Content level
- Vertical & Horizontal conversations are necessary
- Grading at their school (48:19)
- Competency-Based / Mastery of Standards
- Formative homework & classwork
- All Learning is Social Emotional (50:41)
- Social Emotional Academic Learning
- Removing institutional barriers vs. Intervention (54:27)
- Support each learner individually - help them find a way to mastery
- Special offer for Vrain Waves Listeners!! (58:50)
