Alphabet Soup

Anyone in education knows we live in a world of buzzwords and acronyms.  Walk into any meeting in an elementary school, and it's like witnessing an episode of Sesame Street highlighting alphabet soup.  Unless you live and breathe in our world, it often sounds like we're speaking a foreign language.

Some of those acronyms are short-lived... and some stick around for awhile and reshape our world as we know it.

Like PLCs and CFAs.

Professional  Learning Communities (PLCs) were the "new thing" back when I was still in the classroom.  Our reaction?  "Sure, okay, we'll try it, but this will probably just be a trend and disappear eventually."

And then I started graduate school, with a whole class focused on PLCs.  I learned so much... mostly that PLCs just MAKE SENSE.  And if you think about it - and learn about it - they're COMMON SENSE.  And I jumped right on the bandwagon.  A bandwagon that quickly parked to let us all know it was here to stay.

We no longer live in a world of "MY classroom" or "MY students."  It's about "OUR students."  It's about taking ownership of not only all of the students in your grade level... but all of the students in the entire school.  In order for that to work, we must collaborate, discuss, share, and believe in each other and what we can do for our kids.  And that happens in a PLC.  I've seen it happen, and have the opportunity to witness it each week in our building.

As our PLCs have grown, we've finally gotten comfortable with Common Formative Assessments (CFAs) which also just MAKE SENSE.  How can we improve our teaching, our methodology, without knowing how are students are progressing?  Marrying the arts of assessing and collaborating is key in creating a school environment in which we care about every kid in the hallway.  A school environment in which teachers make themselves vulnerable to each other in order to grow.  A school environment in which we, the adults, are continuous learners.  A school environment in which it becomes less about the buzzword, and more about making magic happen with our instruction.

I am SO proud of our teachers and their willingness to jump on this bandwagon with me, to learn the art of CFAs, to find the beauty in an effective PLC.

Because at the end of the day, all acronyms aside, these kids depend on us.  And if we're asking them to learn and grow, we should do the same.