Dulce Schools

Characteristics of a Professional Learning Community

admin — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:26:27 +0000

Characteristics of a Professional Learning Community: Thoughts of Richard Elmore As schools transition into becoming professional learning communities, the school culture encourages involvement and ownership of the processes. Teachers begin to hold one another accountable for reform implementation and peer pressure served to promote buy-in. “By this we mean that there is a high degree of alignment among individual teachers about what they can do and about their responsibility for the improvement of student learning. Such schools also have shared expectations among teachers, administrator and students about what constitutes good work and a set of processes of observing whether these expectations are being met (Elmore, 2002, p.21).

Continuous Improvement Systems Team (CIS): Mission:

admin — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:54:07 +0000

Continuous Improvement Systems Team (CIS): The purpose of the Dulce Elementary School CIS Goal Team is to provide support and training in data driven instruction and to facilitate the Continuous Improvement Process in order to become a highly performing school.
A Systems Approach to learning is built on organizational best practices to improve learning results. There are seven systems components. Each of these components, to some degree, is in place and in use in your child’s classroom. Over the course of the next several newsletters, an introduction and examples of each of these seven components will be published. Encourage your child to share with you how they are using each of these components in their classroom. (Resource: Teacher and Student Partnerships, 2007, Jim Shipley and Associates) CCI Systems Component #1: Leadership: High performing classrooms are characterized by teachers as leaders that establish clear, consistent focus and a commitment to increased student achievement through the practice and modeling of continual improvement. Example: The teacher works with students to develop and improve a classroom mission statement that is focused on learning.

Professional Learning Community

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:35:34 +0000

“Somebody has got to say to the community, to the parents, to the state legislature ‘in order to teach your children better… we need to have time to figure out how to do it better, how to improve. We need time to sit down with each other, with children, to find out what’s working and what isn’t….’ Somehow [we] will need to find the courage and commitment to say, ‘We will find the time for teachers to spend doing this reflective work…’ It will take courage because, for the community at large, quality improvement often translates into increasing ‘contact days’ in the classroom. Somehow the community must be educated to the need for increative time for thinking, planning, communication and problem solving”, (Lezotte & McKee, 2000, p.54).