Marzano

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2008 : January : 9

Marzano
By lenarmc

We are in our second year of Marzano which is the person that came up with PLC's. He has a book out about it.

PLC's are actually for teachers and not students. Professional Learning Community is just a fancy name
for the planning that you do as a team/grade level. The purpose of the PLC is to talk about what went on in our classrooms for the week, what worked/didn't work, give ideas on new lessons, get help from fellow team members for teaching a certain skill if your students had a difficult time learning an objective, etc. We also plan our lessons for the next week. Sounds like a grade level

planning meeting doesn't it?

We also have what is called Classroom Walk-throughs (CWT) where some administrator comes in and observes your class for 2-4 minutes. In that amount of time, they are supposed to know exactly what's going on in your class. They even ask 4 students what they are doing/learning. The data is compiled and analyzed. Each grade level will get the results. You are also to go over this in your PLC. No one teacher is to be singled out.

It's a lot of work, and my school does a piss poor job of implementing it. We don't have meetings weekly which we are to supposed to. We haven't gotten any feedback on the CWT since October for walkthroughs that occured in September. If it's done correctly, it's a good use of time. However, I take issue with the fact that you know what's going on in a classroom in only 2-4 minutes. The K-2 teachers were told that there was no evidence that homework was done! We also have only had an opportunity to plan about 1-2 times per month.

I think that if it's implemented like it should, it could work. However, my principal is too worried about test scores so that she won't lose her job. Our focus is test results.