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.