Click on the Inquiry Question links below to see the full survey response and learn what each PLC group is exploring.
2015-2016
2014-2015
- What best practice resources are available to implement and improve social thinking?
- For beginning 2014/2015 school year it was “how do we engage students in self-assessment of their writing?” Now our new question is “how do we tie the self-assessment practices we have been building into our reporting?”
- How do we further engage students in their own learning/writing using a writing continuum?
2013-2014
The Leader in Me
Our journey in PLCs is routed in our journey as a “Leader in Me” or 7 Habits school. Aspen staff have worked together; learning, planning, implementing and evaluating in cycles as part of that process. PLC work is familiar territory. We had a large delegation of teachers at the PLC institute days in August and the feeling was that “this is just what we do” with time attached. Through the cycle of learning, planning, implementing, and evaluating, we knew collectively what our next step needed to be for our school and that provided the initial focus for our PLC time. We knew that we needed to explore student engagement through self-evaluation and accountability. The “Leader in Me” refers to this as data notebooks or Leadership notebooks, which are a type of portfolio.
Staff decided that we would work together as a large group and then re-evaluate that by
Christmas. We are still working as one large PLC team in April. Each week one teacher
volunteer is released by one of the admin team for half an hour to meet with the CST and the other administrator to plan the next week’s session. This shared leadership has meant that the sessions are teacher driven.
Out of one of our initial discussions came the desire to gather more data from students and
parents and we sent out a survey around the questions of student engagement and
accountability. The plan is to repeat this survey in the next month. This survey provided more information for our discussions. Our focus has shifted and changed throughout the year. We began by collectively implementing a few self-reflection strategies one at a time and then reviewing how that had worked at the following PLC meeting. These times also provided discussion for how to adapt the strategies to be age appropriate and how to adapt for students with individual needs. Each strategy reflected the 7 Habits work we are doing, but were applicable to any content area.
