Professional Learning Community Paper

The CCC community felt motivated to respond in Christian charity to the conditions represented by recent events in Syria, and to make plans for entering into a sponsorship of a Syrian refugee family. At the time of our last PC meeting, two Cathedral initiatives were involved with early stages of sponsorship planning, one through the Cathedral Justice Group, and the other, Vancouver Acts. At that time, PC appraised plans for entering into a refugee sponsorship, and created a sub-committee to work alongside these two efforts, to allow communication, and to offer support and assistance. The Refugee Sub-Committee organized to meet its purpose over the last month. Today, PC is invited to review its actions, and assess current recommended strategies for co-sponsoring a Syrian refugee family.

Public schools may shy away from welcoming students who can speak or understand little to no English. The reason for this indifference is, because of the No Child Left Behind Act, after one year of enrollment all students must take the required standardized tests. These students include ELL’s. If the teachers do not prepare the students to perform well on the test, then in turn, the school is put at risk of failing (Rance-Roney, 33). Rance-Roney thinks that schools and teachers should embrace these students and try to dispel the myths

A school based community would need to be form to help improve the school. The school based community will involve everyone in the decision making process. I would seek feedback from parents to see what they expect from the school. A discussion of how teachers and parents can contribute to the vision will also be added. The stakeholders will have to understand their roles in order for process to be successful.

The school communicates its vision on its website and its also on a poster in

Community Outreach Academy has approximately 88% of English Language Learners and the mission of the school is to increase students’ language skills. All of the teachers are certified as ELL teachers. Teachers use many different strategies to increase the skills in students and one of them is SDAIE. In addition to that, a supplemental vocabulary curriculum by Steck-Vaughis being implemented for grades second through sixth. For Kindergarten through second grade, students receive a weekly lesson in bi-lingual instruction based upon their Treasures story vocabulary for the week.

Numerous factors have motivated me to want to become a school leader, such as colleagues who are role models in my life, my desire to make a change and to be an advocate for students who may struggle to support themselves. However, one project that I have been involved with that has ignited my desire to become a school leader was becoming the first English Language Learner (ELL) educator in my building in my first year as a full-time teacher. In previous years, my district had struggled with ELLs entering our middle school because we were such a low-incidence district. Due to a lack of enrollment and being on the cusp of the RETELL initiative, we did not have any teachers who were SEI endorsed or prepared to meet the various needs of the incoming ELL students. However, after some time as a long-term substitute English Language Arts educator, my administration asked if I would be interested in pursuing a master’s degree that would align with the needs of the ELL students.

In this paper I will create a professional learning communities plan for the school that I will be a serving as a principal/assistant principal at in the near future. I hope to design a plan that will be used in meeting and facilitating the mission and vision of the school. Mission: “To provide an opportunity for all to achieve success” Vision: “Committed to excellence for all” Looking at the vision and mission of the school the main variable is “All”. The opportunity and commitment is available for “all” who are willing and that seek their own success.

“Effective communication is crucial to any organization, and schools are no different. With a comprehensive communications plan, you’ll be able to promote your school to parents and the community, connects with current students, attract future ones, and even successfully engage staff members.” says Jay Cooper. Both Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) and the strategic communication plan used in the Nixa Public School System are very useful and innovative. To be able to have a strong communication in our school district, we should analyze these plans carefully and know the strengths and weaknesses of the school district.

Introduction It is important to understand the organization has a shared vision and must work together (although process and programs may be different) to achieve a common goal. For example, in an educational organization the goal may be to produce college and career ready students. The organization will expect stakeholders to foster academic excellence with rigor. Another way to meet this goal is to develop trade skills using programs and processes within the organization. A third focus may be intense professional development for stakeholders to also reach the goal.

PLC at Work focuses more on a student-centered culture, and individual teachers meeting each week and following specific processes to ensure success for each individual student. Throughout the process, teachers list essential skills desired for each unit, how much time will be allotted, and how they plan to assess the knowledge. The team will then look at results and determine what did and did not work, and how to teach the concepts better if many students were unsuccessful. They also focus on how to challenge the high-achieving students. An important aspect of this model is that the teachers themselves will have a voice and choice of “when and how” they decide to teach such material.

IDEA OR PRACTICE BEING USED: The district worked collaboratively with teachers to develop personalized learning for all educators to help with using new technology in their classroom. Educators were given an opportunity to teach learning sessions about something they feel they do well or choose learning sessions relevant to where they were with the ease of using technology using the SAMR model. Teachers could also create a TEPS project that involves exploring an educational project that can improve the classroom, and they earn graduate hours. Domain and Understanding that the ideas addresses: Domain III: Systems for Capacity Building Understanding: 0005 Understand how to use professional development for staff, faculty, and self, to promote lifelong learning and the success of all student

After reading the dialogue related to this forum, it appears my colleagues agree it is important for PLC groups to establish protocols and meet regularly. More specifically, Marta shared an experience of where PLC groups were expected to complete forms, which caused stress and often times a distraction from the conversation. Subsequently the district moved to providing the team with an agenda to keep the collaboration time moving and structured. One new protocol I learned about is called 3-2-1. I learned from Kristine that this protocol is most often correlated with PBIS discussions relating to specific behavioral concerns.

What? This week, we spent a lot of time discussing the next steps of our intervention, after finishing our needs assessment. We watched a video about creating a mission statement and vision statement for our intervention. A mission statement must focus on three areas, the purpose of our intervention, the business of the intervention or how we are planning to accomplish our purpose, and the values important to us when generating our intervention.

I observed the same class, the sixth period class. Unfortunately, the students had to take the WIDA assessment. As a result, this class was a continuation of a previously class. The goal for this lesson was to promote active listening and speaking skills. The class objectives included: to be able to orally preset poems using key vocabulary (adjectives), to attend to speaker, and to assess what is heard.

I will make sure all of my group members get a chance to share their ideas, and we will all work together to make this visual. Goal #2: One concrete goal I have is to get a 90% on our final informative speech outline. Currently, we have not started writing our outline to the group informative speech yet.