Implementing Professional Learning Communities and Communities of Practice

EDUO 686—Reframing Learning
Name: Serena Calderon
Date: October 6, 2025

Week 6: The Power of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

Assignment: Implementing Communities of Practice

Background Information:
PLCs within an organization are often based on “communities of practice,” as described in the assigned video in this module. They are an important component or model of professional growth that focuses on the collaborative efforts of a group to promote student success, which should be the ultimate goal for all professional learning experiences (in addition to individual growth through professional learning, which is also directly related to student success).

Communities of practice may be based on grade level, an instructional strategy, a curricular department within an organization, a specific educational goal, or another identified, common focus.
Instructions:
For this assignment, you will complete this template. Your responses to the prompts (listed below) should be based on the assigned readings and other resources in this course. Your responses to the prompts should be a synthesis and interpretation of that information, considering what is relevant to your unique professional situation—not simply a reiteration of what is contained in the resources. Personalize the responses to your context, being mindful to include research-based information for support, as well.

The response to each of the two prompts below should be a minimum of 300-500 words each, for a total of 700-1,000 words in the overall narrative on this template.


Prompt 1: Based on research and the assignment resources in this module, what effective professional learning community strategies for implementation and/or refinement do you believe are most salient, and why? You may consider your own professional experiences, context, and situation in your response (e.g., classroom teacher, instructional coach, school leader, etc.), relating it to the research and course content.

Please provide at least four important points with a narrative description of why and how each is of importance. Be sure to include appropriate citations to support your thoughts, where applicable.


Based on my research and personal experience I agree with the article that outlined the fact the genuine professional learning communities follow 5 established tenets. (Brown, B. D., Horn, R. S., & King, G.) Those tenets are as follows:

1. The group of educators has to work as a team, not individuals, and take responsibility for the students learning. If you can not collaborate as a team then you can not come to a consensus on what needs to be accomplished and how to attain that goal.
2. You must work together to design curriculum that will meet the learners where they are at. You have to look at what they know, what you want them to know and how you will know if they have achieved that goal. You must also take into consideration what you will do for those who don’t meet the desired goal.
3. All assessments must be based on a common goal so that the data that is gathered is consistent across the audience being tested. If you are not all using the same standard of measurement then you will not be comparing apples to apples. In order for the data to be pertinent it must be gathered in the same manner across the board.
4. You have to do more than just gather data for the sake of gathering data. You must take that data and determine the best methods to help those students who fell short of the mark and require additional instruction as well as how to provide advanced assignments to those who have achieved success and are ready to move forward.
5. Students who do require extra help need to be able to access that help without losing valuable class time so that they are not missing out on new content. Providing math stations for students who have attained the goal is a great way to allow for pulling small groups who need a reteach without losing out on whole group lessons by being pulled from the classroom to a study hall or sped environment.






Prompt 2: Considering your own professional role in your organization, if you were to organize a PLC around a community of practice, what common structure of focus would provide maximum benefit in line with the organization’s current education goals for the students and the school, district, or community, depending on your role? Please provide an explanation for your thoughts—why that structure and focus would be of benefit and in what way.


I believe that the current system that we use for PLC’s on our campus uses a lot of the methods that were in our research studies. Since we are in an elementary environment, the opportunity for a designated study hall is not an option. We do currently use two designated times (one being PLT – a 45 minute block of personal learning time) where students are pulled by interventionist to work on reading deficits if they are one grade level or more below reading level, dyslexia programming during this time, and LLI groups with ELA teachers. For extended math support we have whole group lesson days and small group lesson days. We use a math intervention program called Kickstart to provide intervention for gaps in learning that exist for content that is below grade level during small groups on whole group days. On each whole group lesson day there is an exit ticket. I review those exit tickets at the end of each whole group day and build small groups for the next day to reteach current content that a student may be struggling with.

We bring this information to our PLC group to see if we need to build designated groups based on specific areas of need. We also look at 3rd grade state testing scores from the prior year and take the TEKS (standards) that had the lowest performance and align them with a 2nd grade TEK and then explicitly teach those TEKS in an effort to better prepare the students for what will be required of them in the next grade level. This is done across the campus from one grade level to the next.

As we plan for each unit, we make sure that as a team that what we are testing is the same. We not only use the same testing documents, we discuss how we will administer the test. If the test is a math test but there are word problems we agree that we will administer the test orally. Since it is not a reading test and many students are below grade level in reading, we would not get the true data of what that could accomplish from a math standpoint. The reverse is true when the test is strictly a reading based assignment. Only those students that receive oral administration would get that via headphones.