Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
What They Are:
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are educational environments in which teachers work together as a team. They hold each other accountable and focus more on learning and less on teaching (“Are my students doing a good job of learning standards?” vs. “Am I doing a good job of teaching the standards?”).
This team approach fosters collaboration among educators, encouraging them to share best practices and approaches. It also ties to the giving of common assessments.
How eDoctrina Helps:
eDoctrina supports Professional Learning Communities in two ways. First, it fosters common planning among grade-level teams. Its unit and lesson planning interfaces allow for teachers to more easily work together to come up with cooperative learning objectives.
Second, its reporting tools provide all the comparative data needed (by class, grade, student, etc.) to spur important discussions among team members.
The process of a team sitting down, looking at classroom data and sharing those strategies that are working is critical. The educator-led team at eDoctrina Corp. highly recommends these discussions take place regardless of what software product is being using to provide the data.