Professional+Learning+Communities

**What is a PLC?**

 * [|What is a "Professional Learning Community"?] " To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold yourself accountable for results." Richard DuFour Includes three BIG IDEAS: Ensuring that students learn, Culture of collaboration, Focus on results.

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 * [|PLC's] Robert Eaker explaining which concepts of a PLC are expected to be "tight" and which can be "loose".

Ongoing Professional Development

 * [|Teacher Librarian Ning]** - a great source of connections for teachers interested in research or libraries. Create an account and check out the "Groups" tab - there is a group for everyone, from Inquiry-based learning to Web 2.0 to reader's advisories.


 * Recommended Blogs to Follow -** Tap into strong guiding voices on the web through your RSS reader by subscribing to the RSS feeds of experts in the field recommended by Joanne de Groot and Jennifer Branch.


 * [|From Now On]** - Jamie McKenzie's "from now on: the educational technology journal" article [|Why we still need libraries and librarians] certainly stresses the need for professional development in a variety of areas but is particular to research methods for school-aged children and how libraries and librarians are central to instilling 21st century research skills.


 * [|Shelfari]** - This virtual reading community provides backbone support for much of what we do, learning about books, sharing and discussing books with colleagues at school, other TLs, students (reviews, book club, etc.), their parents, our own personal contacts, and more. It provides a way to "pass along" book information quickly and broadly--much better that scribbling a cobbled title on a scrap of paper, it develops communities of learning through books that can tap into several groups with whom we interact throughout our life journeys. [|LibraryThing] is a similar site, where librarians (and others) can share entire collections online within a world-wide "book club" learning community.


 * [|**Twitter 101 for Students**]** - Curious about Twitter but have no idea where to start? This short booklet can help. Find lists of organizations/people to follow by following the people on the **Recommended Blogs to Follow** page or by searching for recommended lists of education-related hashtags to follow, such as [|this one].

Recommended Reading
These PLC print resources from the gurus themselves are extremely useful to a teacher new to PLCs:

DuFour, Richard, Eaker, R. //Professional Learning Communities at Work: best practices for enhancing student achievement. //Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service, 1998. Print. Eaker, Robert, DuFour, Robert, DuFour, Rebecca. //Getting Started: reculturing schools to become professional learning communities .// Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service, 2002. Print. Erkens, Cassandra, et al. //The Collaborative Teacher: working together as a professional learning community //. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree, 2008. Print. Servage, Laura. (2008). Critical and transformative practices in professional learning communities. //Teacher Education Quarterly//, v35 n1 p63-77 Win 2008. (EJ810651)