Professional Learning Communities
at Clackamas High School
Each student engaged today, inspired for the future, and ready for new challenges.
Our Professional Learning Community Mission:
Our moral purpose is to see to it that each student learns at high levels. The future of our students depends upon our
success. We must work collaboratively to achieve that purpose because it is much more difficult to accomplish this goal if
we work in isolation. We must continually assess our effectiveness in achieving our purpose on the basis of results--tangible
evidence that our students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and dispositions we feel are essential to their future success.
Beliefs:
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Professional learning communities provide the right kind of continuous, structured teacher collaboration that
improves the quality of teaching and creates significant and immediate dividends in student learning and
professional morale.
School improvement must be school-by-school and one school at a time.
There are only two kinds of schools--improving schools and declining schools.
Every adult in a school is important.
The capacity to improve a school already resides in the school.
Each student can do rigorous academic work at high standards, even if they are far behind academically and need a
significant amount of time to catch up.
Effective effort is the main determinant of achievement--not innate ability.
School success depends, more than anything, on the quality of teaching we provide.
Guiding Questions:
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What is it we want all students to learn?
How will we know when each student has mastered the essential learning?
How will we respond when a student experiences initial difficulty in learning?
The answer to the third question separates learning communities from traditional schools.
Guiding Principles:
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Creating highly effective Professional Learning Communities is a three to five year process.
Increase the capacity of Clackamas High School by placing issues of teaching and learning at the center of the
dialogue within the entire school community.
Focus (not limiting) our professional learning community work at the freshman and sophomore levels. We must get
our lowerclassmen to grade level, thus opening Advanced Placement and college credit opportunities to our upperclassmen.
Initially, teachers will only participate in one professional learning community.
Professional learning communities will consist of small groups of teachers (4-5) who teach a common course and
will meet at least 50 minutes per week.
Every effort will be made to keep professional learning communities together for multiple years.
Process:
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Build a shared knowledge about the most essential learning for each course (departmentally) by collaboratively
studying state standards, district curriculum guides, and state assessment results (2008-09).
Identify and commit to teach the most essential outcomes or "power standards" for each PLC course (2008-09).
Develop a plan to ensure common pacing of the curriculum (2009-10, consistently revising each year thereafter).
Create frequent formative assessments to monitor each student's learning and adjust instructionally accordingly
(2009-10).
Establish a common standard (75 percent?) to determine proficiency and establish agreed-upon criteria to be used in
assessing the quality of student work (2009-10, consistently revising thereafter).
Analyze the results from each formative assessment and develop a plan to address areas of concern both for students
in general as well as for individual students (begin 2009-10, ongoing).