Teacher Groups Work for Immediate Student Improvement

and its professional learning communities (PLCs) are working toward changing the way progress is measured in each class, which will help students to do better in each class.

According to high school principal Karl Mundi, each PLC is based on what he called common formative assessment.

“In every class, teachers want to make sure they know how each student is doing while the course is still in progress,” Mundi said. “Mid-terms are almost like a post-mortem. It doesn’t do any good to find out after the fact that the students don’t understand something. It’s better to know while the course is going on, so teachers can make adjustments within their instruction. We want to be able to catch where the misconceptions are earlier and correct them.”

The PLC groups at the high school are structured by academic discipline, Mundi said.

“That structure benefits the teachers as they can work together on not only students, but complete classes,” he said. “It’s great for sharing ideas, which provides a great benefit to the kids.

The PLC groups are set up to meet every other week in the mornings. On those days, sophomores, juniors and seniors are allowed to come to school at 8 a.m., while teachers take the first period of the day to work in their PLCs.

“Some parents have voiced concerns about why students are going to school late, and wondering if they should be in the classroom during that time,” Mundi said. “But these groups are helping our teachers to help our students. This is the way all professions advance, by sharing ideas and learning ways to do things better.”

Mundi discussed some of the PLC groups within the school, including English, advisory and advanced placement (AP) classes.

The English department is currently investigating summer reading, working on a proposal where the entire school would read the same book over the summer and discuss it over the course of the whole year.

The advisory PLC group is looking into ways to make the school feel more personal, and to make sure that at least one teacher knows every single student in the school.

“In a school with more than 1000 kids, it’s easy for someone to just hide in the corner and never be known by anyone,” Mundi said. “We’re want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Currently, every teacher in the school is an advisor to a group of 12 students, as is Mundi. The groups meet once a month and work on a range of topics and activities including respect, school rules and study and organizational skills.

Finally, the AP group is working on a way to be sure that each AP student gets to meet with his or her teacher for conferencing time to review material for the AP test.

“We want to give the AP students detailed customized guidance so that we can see an improvement in AP scores,” he said.

Each week, Jefferson Patch is looking at the PLC groups in schools throughout the district. Last week we looked at the groups at .