We are proud to kick off the first part of a 3 year commitment to fund professional learning communities (PLC’s) and create ongoing development opportunities for our Lakeshore staff.
One of the three new major projects that are being funded by the Lakeshore Excellence Foundation got off the ground as a group of 45 educators and administrators from our district attended an in-person professional development session in Grand Rapids to learn more about Professional Learning Communities or PLC’s. They attended the training created by Solution Tree, a company that is committed to transforming education by helping educators to raise student achievement.
The conference had approximately 1,400 attendees from over 20 states and Canada.
PLC’s empower educators to work collaboratively in cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Many consider PLC’s to be the most powerful strategy for sustained and substantial school improvement. PLC’s create opportunities for continuous improvement within our school district.
Presenter Luis Cruz stated that “A school or school district becomes a PLC when the professional educators engage in an ongoing process of collaboration. This collaboration happens in recurring cycles of inquiry, where teams are looking at their common formative assessment data to determine which students ‘got it’, and which students didn’t ‘get it’. And then determining what we are going to do about it. Because HOPE is not a strategy.”
Continuous learning among our educators is essential. LEF has committed $225,000 over three years to fund the training of our staff on PLC’s. The outcome of this investment will be continuous, job-embedded training for our educators and improved learning for all students, every day.
Welcome to the Board!