Monday, November 28, 2011

November 28 PLC Meeting

Our group diverted from our normal PLC topic of discussion of IPI data and held a very meaningful discussion about the meeting Ronda is having with Department of Education Director, Dr. Jason Glass, and other arts educators this afternoon in Des Moines.

We discussed things like the economic development that the arts can (and do) bring to the state, as well as how even more of an emphasis on the arts (beginning at PreK on up) could foster even more economic development. Studies have shown that when businesses look to relocate or open in a new area, they will often first look at a family friendly community with a strong arts base, such as community theater, band or arts center, as well as strong arts programs within it's schools. (On a related, but side note...We talked about a number of the previous graduating valedictorians and salutatorians and noted that nearly all of them were a leader in one of the arts areas in our school.)

Monday, November 14, 2011

November 14 - PLC Meeting

We reviewed the article e-mailed out by Mr. VanderPol on November 2, "Five Dysfunctions of a Professional Learning Community" (http://whatworks.wholechildeducation.org/blog/five-dysfunctions-of-a-professional-learning-community/#.TrFPCZtFKA4.gmail)

Dysfunction #1: Lack of Norms
Our PLC does have norms, but perhaps they need to be revisited more regularly or be more detailed.

Dysfunction #2: Lack of Team Goals
Our PLC has clearly defined goals. We feel that we need to either focus on one content area (or one teacher's work) at a time or have longer lengths of time to focus our work on more than one.

Dysfunction #3: Lack of Trust
We feel that we are cohesive and are not afraid to bring our problems to the group and help one another problem solve concerns in our content areas.

Dysfunction #4: Lack of Communication
Something that might be beneficial is that we all comment on the blog entries as things arise. With PLC members in two different buildings, we don't always have a common start time for our PLC. Ronda will forward e-mails from Mr. VanderPol to Heidi and Bev; Heidi will forward e-mails from Mrs. Miller to Ronda to disseminate to Emily and Andrew.

On a related, but slightly separate note, we miss seeing the agenda and minutes from the SIT meetings this year. We would like to have more information about the team's topics of discussion and at how decisions are determined. We discussed that there is not a fine arts content area representative on the team.

Dysfunction #5: Lack of Essential Learning Outcomes
Our PLC could possibly be used as a time for "up-downs" between the elementary and middle school in our content areas to share information about student skill ability levels.

After discussing the article, Emily and Ronda shared that they were unable to attend a scheduled IPI training in Forest City last week. Mr. VanderPol is looking for other training opportunities. We believe it will be helpful to have members of the fine arts content staff trained in IPI.