Professional Learning Communities & Instructional Coaching

In order to increase student achievement, for students who are consistently not meeting the standards, and for those exceeding the assessed standards, the school utilized the Professional Learning Community (PLC) protocol to develop capacity in teachers to use student data to inform instruction. Additionally, Instructional coaching was implemented to support three teachers in designing differentiated lessons for students in content and standards identified by the PLC. This multiple prong action research was evaluated through use of pre- and post-surveys to identify self-perception of the members of the school’s eight faculty, notes taken by the participant researcher, lesson plans, and an Analysis of Student Work form were used.

As an Instructional leader at CSCE, I designed the intervention to work with PLC teams to develop their capacity to differentiate lesson plans. Over the course of the action research all eight teachers used differentiated lesson plans to support their instruction in the PLC identified content area (math). The results of the intervention also shed light on how profound content knowledge can be to planning lessons and how teachers’ value and gain from pro-longed, job embedded Professional Development. Another finding showed teacher’s years of experience, often times, positively affects their efficacy in developing and executing differentiated lesson plans.

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