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THE NEXT LEVEL
Taking your PLCs to the next level with the Power of Collective Efficacy BY FELECIA EVANS
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here is an African proverb that states, “It takes a village to raise a child.” As educators, we are fortunate to be a part of the village that raises and educates young children every day. We provide them with a foundation of love, guidance, direction, skills, knowledge, and so much more. Often times we spend more waking hours during the week with our students than our own children at home. In high functioning schools, our village is our professional learning community (PLC). The notion that PLCs can support school reform efforts, increase student performance, and aid in teacher retention is widely recognized; in fact you would be hard pressed to find an educator who has not heard the term. A few years ago in the Mayfield City Schools, rather than start a new initiative, we recommitted to making PLCs a priority. Most recently we restructured our building leadership teams (BLT) into instructional leadership teams (ILT). Our ILT at Lander Elementary School includes a teacher leader representative from each of our six grade levels, as well as a representative from our specials team. Our ILT guides the work of our professional learning communities and provides much needed teacher leadership, teacher voice, and teacher ownership into our school. We also carved out time each Monday by creatively scheduling a silent reading time in every classroom and combined this with contractual staff meeting time. Two Mondays a month our teachers have an hour of collaborative time, and two Mondays a month they have a two hour block of collaborative time in addition to their weekly contractual planning time. The model of sit and get staff meetings has been transformed into time for teachers to collaborate, reflect, and plan instruction. In the Mayfield City Schools, we ask our teams to focus
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their PLC conversations on the following essential questions: 1. What do we want students to know, to be able to do, and to deeply understand? 2. How will we know students are learning? What evidence of student learning will we review? 3. What will we do differently when students are not learning? Do not understand? Cannot transfer? 4. What do we do for students that have mastered content? To extend learning? Develop talents? These guiding questions and this dedicated time allow us to advance our district mission and priorities. Many schools have successfully implemented similar PLC structures. So once you have dedicated the time for professional learning communities, you have set up a teacher leadership model to support the work of your teams, and you have provided them with a road map of how to best use this time, how do you take people to the next level? As a school leader, you must intentionally cultivate a shared positive belief that they can make a difference. This is the intersection at which John Hattie’s research collides with Robert Marzano and Richard DuFour’s research on PLCs. Hattie has conducted several large-scale, meta-analysis studies on the factors that impact student achievement; his most recent research from 2018 includes 252 factors. Of these factors he found that collective teacher efficacy (CTE) has a positive effect size of 1.57, which is the largest impact of all of the factors that he studied. In fact, collective teacher efficacy is three times more impactful than prior student achievement, classroom management, and socioeconomic status. According to Hattie, he defines CTE on his Visible Learning website as, “the collective belief of the staff of the school/faculty in their
