PLC's and Team Meetings

Our district has been training all of us on the use of PLC's (Professional Learning Communities) over these past two years.  Heard of them?  It really is an awesome way to work together.  I feel extremely fortunate.  As we go through the norms that guide our team meetings. we find that we already do so much of the PLC routine.  There are four of us on the third grade team this year.  We are friends who truly love to be together, so staying on topic is sometimes hard and we "rabbit-trail" because we love to hear what is going on in each other's lives, and besides, lunch is 20 minutes long and we don't get to talk long enough there.  But the thing is, I'm the lead teacher, and I've got to keep us on track.  It's really hard because I like to talk as much as the rest but I've got to make sure we accomplish what we need to do.  We've decided meeting once a week isn't enough to cover everything, so we're going to two meetings per week, mainly because we are planning more and more together.  That is pretty new for us. Maybe if we become more efficient at PLC's, we can accomplish more in shorter time.  In order to meet the norms we've established for our meetings, it's just taking longer right now. We stay together on the objectives (as much as possible), or "TEKS" as we call them in Texas, and most importantly, are all giving the same assessments to the kids.  If a student isn't doing well on a certain objective, we can talk about what we do to help kids succeed in our own classrooms.  We share, share, share activities and plans.  Everyone brings something to the table and it's been really awesome.  Were you waiting for me to say, "but..."?  No but.  It's really working.  We are focused, planning together, assessing in the same way, collecting data, sharing data.  I'm very excited to watch our test scores go up because I really believe this can't do anything but help.

I shared my forms for monitoring progress in a post about a week ago.  I use these to stay on top of which kids I've helped in small group and for how long.  I also let my kids see their progress graph page after each assessment, especially if they retake it.  It goes up every time, so they like coloring in a higher score after we've worked so hard to improve. Here's a link to the Progress Monitoring pages in case you missed it.  Data, if you use it, will change the way you teach.

Please share how your team works together collaboratively.  I'd love to hear how other PLC's work!