How to Use your PLC Time More Efficiently

Friday - August 18th, 2017- 10:15-11:30 am

The Leander HS Art PLC will share how they effectively use their PLC time and resources such as Google Classroom to collaborate, ensure best practices, and create unit plans. We recommend attending this session with members from your PLC for collaboration time.

“The most valuable resource that all teachers have is each other. Without collaboration, our growth is limited to our own perspective.” - Robert John Meehan

  1. Ice breaker activity
  2. What makes a good PLC? - Attendees respond on Padlet
  3. Not being afraid to share resources and info.
  4. Ask questions and for help when needed
  5. Put pride to the side - overall goal should be focused on student success and how to get them there
  6. Respect each others ideas/opinions
  7. Don’t have the mindset that it is something to check off your to do list - understand how and why it is meaningful and needed
  8. Participants look forward to meeting with one another & hearing how others are doing
  9. How we use our time together
  10. We meet once a week (allow for flexibility when needed)
  11. Collaborate
  12. Share best practices
  13. Unit plans - create news lessons and post them to classroom
  14. Share resources (websites, powerpoints, handouts, videos...etc.)
  15. Discuss what worked or didn’t work during current/previous lessons
  16. Singleton classes (drawing, painting, AP, sculpture...etc.) bounce ideas off other teachers for advice
  17. How we use Google Classroom (View Google Classroom)
  18. Share resources
  19. Post agenda and meeting minutes
  20. Post documents such as department Grading Policy
  21. Post completed unit plans
  22. Agenda/meeting minutes (View Template)
  23. Assign positions (Facilitator, Recorder, Time-keeper, etc.)
  24. Create and follow a template on Google Docs to use at each meeting with a clear agenda and goals. Example of team template
  25. Clear expectations
  26. Post template before meeting for anyone to add discussion points - everyone can pull up the document for reference during the meeting.
  27. At the end of each meeting we discuss what we will cover during the next meeting
  28. How we create unit plans as a team (View Unit Plan Template)
  29. We create a basic timeline of lesson, goals, and objectives for the year
  30. Using the Unit Plan Template (provided by our school) we break our objectives/goals up into 1-2 units per six weeks
  31. As a team we complete the unit plan based off our subjects TEKS, our goals, objectives, and project ideas
  32. Team members use the basic information from the unit plan to develop different activities that specifically fit their students - unit plans are saved to shared google drive folder, as well as, classroom, so they can be copied and edited by each teacher if needed.
  33. Attendees time to collaborate/work
  34. Attendees will be given the chance to work alone or with their PLC to create a Google Classroom
  35. As groups they will discuss how they can begin to use their PLC time more effectively and purposefully - establish more meaningful norms
  36. Groups share ideas and goals they have set for their own PLC
  37. Q and A