Professional Learning Communities Collaboration (PLC) - 7 views

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  #1 Jinn Winn Chong on 26 Mar 13

   

  I didn't know until reading the resources that what we were doing has a name called PLC. I was a facilitator for a dialogue program on campus. Each dialogue group had two facilitators and there were typically four to six dialogue groups that ran for seven weeks back-to-back each semester. Each group engaged with a topic related to social identities ranging from gender, religion, race, class, sexual orientation, and culture. We even had a dialogue group for veterans and civilians dealing with perceptions of patriotism and the military culture.
  
  The sensitivity of subject-matter plus the candor encouraged in dialogues meant that sometimes what goes on in a dialogue can get highly emotional and overwhelming for facilitators. The challenge for the facilitators was to get support, exchange experiences, and share lessons learned without compromising the confidentiality of each of our groups. We decided to have post-dialogue weekly meetings to touch base and check in on what transpired at the dialogue. Some of these were face-to-face meetings but the majority of these were conducted online to ease scheduling concerns.
  
  These discussions were always rich and helpful. They were our own safe spaces to reflect, introspect, and learn from each other. The one setback was the challenges with coordinating logistics. While we had a usual time and date set up for each weekly meetings, we didn't really have a central mechanism for updating everyone on scheduling changes for times when many of us couldn't make the assigned time. We also didn't have our contact details all in one secure place that we could easily access online. We've found emails to be ineffective for logistics coordination; Facebook often worked better (surprise surprise!) Looking back, a scheduling tool like Padlet would have been very useful.

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">I didn't know until reading the resources that what we were doing has a name called PLC. I was a facilitator for a dialogue program on campus. Each dialogue group had two facilitators and there were typically four to six dialogue groups that ran for seven weeks back-to-back each semester. Each group engaged with a topic related to social identities ranging from gender, religion, race, class, sexual orientation, and culture. We even had a dialogue group for veterans and civilians dealing with perceptions of patriotism and the military culture. <br /> <br /> The sensitivity of subject-matter plus the candor encouraged in dialogues meant that sometimes what goes on in a dialogue can get highly emotional and overwhelming for facilitators. The challenge for the facilitators was to get support, exchange experiences, and share lessons learned without compromising the confidentiality of each of our groups. We decided to have post-dialogue weekly meetings to touch base and check in on what transpired at the dialogue. Some of these were face-to-face meetings but the majority of these were conducted online to ease scheduling concerns. <br /> <br /> These discussions were always rich and helpful. They were our own safe spaces to reflect, introspect, and learn from each other. The one setback was the challenges with coordinating logistics. While we had a usual time and date set up for each weekly meetings, we didn't really have a central mechanism for updating everyone on scheduling changes for times when many of us couldn't make the assigned time. We also didn't have our contact details all in one secure place that we could easily access online. We've found emails to be ineffective for logistics coordination; Facebook often worked better (surprise surprise!) Looking back, a scheduling tool like Padlet would have been very useful.</div>

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