ALTON - During the regular Alton Community Unit School District Board of Education meeting on Sept. 17, 2024, attendees learned about the district’s School Improvement Plan.
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The plan has three main objectives, which focus on creating a culture of belonging, standardizing instruction, and building professional learning communities. At the board meeting, Superintendent Elaine Kane and Director of Curriculum Rene Hart spoke about the professional learning communities (PLCs).
“Professional learning communities are groups of people who come together with the same goal to partner and collaborate to get better results,” Kane explained. “That’s how we do our best work.”
Kane said that the district has contractual time for meetings, so teachers can come together and plan their teaching in a PLC setting. She added that through funding received during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alton has purchased “very high-quality curriculum resources” for teachers and students to utilize. Both of these elements contribute to Alton’s ability to have effective PLCs.
Hart noted that there are four standard PLC protocols for all of the grade levels. New this year, these four protocols are unit internalization, lesson plan preparation, data analysis, and looking at student work.
Unit internalization “backwards maps the curriculum,” Hart said. Teachers and administration look at end-of-unit assessments and consider what students need to know for these assessments, then match their instruction to this schedule.
Lesson plan preparation focuses on the details of each lesson. Teachers tailor their lessons to individual students.
“This is really, really preparing yourself to intentionally deliver a lesson plan,” Hart explained. “[Teachers] are really taking a student-centered focus when looking at a lesson plan within our curriculum.”
Data analysis considers where students are struggling and where they are performing well. Looking at student work involves studying what students are producing. Teachers and administrators analyze this information to adjust instruction.
Hart added that the principals in each building are doing “a fantastic job” of modeling these protocols and supporting their teachers. She said 61 teachers have come together already this year to talk about these resources and how to create effective PLCs.
“We’re committed to keeping our work alive and being really transparent and clear about the intentionality that we place on our time and the work our teachers are doing in the classroom,” Kane added.
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