1. Teacher Leadership in Action:
Part 2
Desmarie Hodge
CI5393- Teacher Leadership
American College of Education

2. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
According to Dufour (2004) Theory
“When a school begins to function as a professional learning community, teachers
become aware of the incongruity between their commitment to ensure learning for all students
and their lack of a coordinated strategy to respond when some students do not learn.”
● Dufour mentions in his article is that “The staff addresses discrepancy by designing strategies to ensure that struggling
students receive additional time and support, no matter who their teacher is.”
● What do we want each student to learn? • How will we know when each student has learned it? • How will we respond
when a student experiences difficulty in learning?
● Big Ideas, focus on designing strategies that will resolve problems that may arise during the blueprint of our initiative
framework.
● The powerful collaboration that characterizes professional learning communities is a systematic process in which
teachers work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice.

3. Communities of Practice
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1998) argued
“Communities of practice are everywhere and that we are generally involved in a number of them - whether that is at work,
school, home, or in our civic and leisure interests.”
● A community of practice involves much more than the technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking some
task.
● Guidelines to incorporate are Joint enterprise, Mutual Engagement, setting routines, styles, and communal resources.
● Deepen thinking and identify what is practice? How are we using practice to better teach our students abilities? Connect
them to real knowledge and also practice to resolve problems in everyday interactions, and life.
● Supports the idea that student engagement derives from array of practices, such as social involvement, productivity,
theoretical , and practical reasoning.
● Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important in part because of their potential to
overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities
also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of
the traditional structural boundaries.

4. Critical Friends Group Video BIE (2014)
5 Key Factors in Critical Friends Group
1. Constructive Feedback
2. Reflect on projects in the beginning and end
to determine the progress of results for
learners.
3. Establish delegating roles for providing
successful feedback by organizing who will
Facilitate, Present, and also a Feedback
division.
4. Utilizes protocols to identify, establish, and
reflect on a source of improvement for
learners.
5. Gather important and useful tips, ideas, and/or
revise current ideas to broaden, deepen and
even engage learners.

5. Alignment for each Framework to Facilitate the work of the Team.
What does PLCs mean for our team?
● Strategies to reinforce the way we need to
interact with our parents to motivate
Collaborative learning as a whole.
● Collaborative conversations stem from great
ideas, great suggestions, however a main focus.
● Let's put this focus on our students and help
them achieve to the best of their abilities. This
requires much more than a lesson here, or
lesson there for individualized plans. It
requires attention to detail and a affirmative
action for effective results. In order to gain
these results it's takes “timely, systematic, and
direct interventions” Dufour (2004)
What does Community of Practice mean for our team?
● Creating an informal team organization on how do we
involve our expertise on what we do as learners,
educators, and crafting those ideas to improvement
student learning.
● Establishes values by pursuing ongoing bonding
● Enabling networking through different forms of
engagement.
What does Critical Friends Group mean for our team?
● Builds foundation for improvement through use
of consistent feedback
● Collaborative problem solving creates a
nurturing environment for educators to rely and
become reassured without becoming defensive
about ideas and work.
● What do we know now about what we see? How
can we instill the same strategic methods of
tightly knitting problem solving and utilizing the
community for resources.

6. Team’s Framework Choice
Notes from Team Meeting
● Professional Learning Community is the best fit for what we would like to accomplish. In Module 2 we discussed the initiative
to develop stimulating decisions to gain more of an effective outcome on the behalf of our school’s low budgets and Health and
Safety.precautions.
One important factor of Professional Learning Community in our school is effective representation. (Results!)
● It important for us to utilize the art of representation to gain extensive support from all of our colleagues. We have a vasts
amount of ideas being suggested by our inner circle. However in order to have a reliable balance of effectiveness there must be a
drawing point of the main focus goal ideas. What do we want to accomplish? And How are we setting the center stage to
develop what needs to be accomplish? According to Dufour 2016 Collaborative teacher conversations must quickly move
beyond “What are we expected to teach?” to “How will we know when each student has learned?”
● Therefore our critical area of focus relies on how can we congregate around the idea of fundraising and practicing safe and
healthy practices. Practices that will promote a better platform for all of our students to have a better level of productively
learning in our school environment.

7. Team Choices and Rationale
The team found Professional Learning Communities as well as Critical Friends Group to be very inspiring in the connection to raising money to provide deeper
explorations for our student in a safe and healthy manner.
Recap: What does PLCs mean for our team?
● Strategies to reinforce the way we need to interact with our parents to motivate Collaborative learning as a whole.
● Collaborative conversations stem from great ideas, great suggestions, however a main focus.
● Let's put this focus on our students and help them achieve to the best of their abilities. This requires much more than a lesson here, or lesson
there for individualized plans. It requires attention to detail and a affirmative action for effective results. In order to gain these results it's takes
“timely, systematic, and direct interventions” Dufour (2004)
They also found Critical Friends Group to be a great way to utilize all that we are doing which is building foundation with our forthcoming ideas. This
model truly demonstrates the potential to really involve the initiatives for our team leadership. It also can be a choice for the future of endeavors once
our ideas are completely constructed and concrete.
Recap: What does Critical Friends Group mean for our team?
● Builds foundation for improvement through use of consistent feedback .
● Collaborative problem solving creates a nurturing environment for educators to rely and become reassured without becoming defensive about
ideas and work.
● What do we know now about what we see? How can we instill the same strategic methods of tightly knitting problem solving and utilizing the
community for resources.

8. References
Buck Institute for Education (2014) Critical Friends Proctol Overview Retrieved by
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Nqw3Q7SV8 March 12, 2016
DuFour, R. (2004). What is a" professional learning community"?.Educational leadership, 61(8), 6-11.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Retrieved June, 9, 2008.
Wenger, E. (1998) 'Communities of Practice. Learning as a social system', Systems Thinker,
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml. Accessed March 12, 2016