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A Way of Thinking in a Professional Learning Community: Four Principles Begin with Building a Guiding Coalition

Harnessing more powerful data tools and greater amounts of data.

Granting teacher, parent and community access to data

Planning and utilizing interoperability standards

Big Idea #1: Ensuring That Students Learn The professional learning community model flows from the assumption that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. This simple shift—from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning—has profound implications for schools.

Big Idea #2: A Culture of Collaboration Educators who are building a professional learning community recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.

Big Idea #3: A Focus on Results Professional learning communities judge their effectiveness on the basis of results. Working together to improve student achievement becomes the routine work of everyone in the school. Every teacher team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress. The focus of team goals shifts. Such goals as "We will adopt the Junior Great Books program" or "We will create three new labs for our science course" give way to "We will increase the percentage of students who meet the state standard in language arts from 83 percent to 90 percent" or "We will reduce the failure rate in our course by 50 percent."

In this post I hope to share the essence of some of the main ideas communicated in the speech. The format is: words from the slide followed by a short narrative on the core message of the slide. Hope you find it useful.

The biggest challenge in our current environment is that it is trivial to implement a tool, it takes five minutes. But tools are limiting and can just give us data. What compounds the challenge is that we all have this deep tendency to make decisions that come from who we are influenced from our life experiences. Based on my humble experience of the last few years here are seven common sense recommendations for creating a data driven company culture……

# 6 Reporting is not Analysis

1. If you're not using data to make decisions, you're flying blind.

2. This is all about a process, not a specific technology.

4. You will be spending more money, not less.