IBEC: PLC (Module 2)

• How do you define a professional learning community?

I see a PLC as a group of people who are committed to honing craft and development/sharpening skills to enhance the institution as well as oneself. The community aspect of this lies in the goal being ascertained. The community should be working towards the completion of a specific goal (SMART) through their learning journey together.

• How does the IB support a professional learning community?

Through the required completion and training that teachers should/must ascertain while or beginning there journey at an IB world school, the IBO is ensuring/consolidating its expectations and rigor. Through the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning that takes place through PYP to IBDP, the IBO is essentially creating a stipulation that requires professional communication to occur and the nature of that communication inherently calls upon professional learning to occur.

• How do you know that your school/context is genuinely supporting professional learning communities?

Our school has been calling upon teachers through the years I have been working here (more and more), to present their own learning as subsidized by the school. The school has built professional learning budgets in each department at the school and requires each department to present at least 1 school-wide professional learning workshop as well as mandatory attendance to it on a department-to-department basis.