Anonymous on Professional Learning Communities in Utah

Anonymous left this comment:

Several schools in our school district (Washington County Utah) have started doing this kind of assessment and intervention with individual students. They've had such amazing results that the school district is passing a resolution today requiring all schools and teachers to participate. They call them Professional Learning Communities or PLC's.

From today's newspaper:

"The resolution in support of PLCs would require each educator in the district to participate in the PLC activities, part of a collaborative effort to achieve better results from students by continuously analyzing performance and intervening where necessary with individual students."
School board ponders new background checks
David DeMille • ddemille@thespectrum.com • Published: March 07. 2011 10:29AM

I am a huge fan of "Professional Learning Communities," which I think should probably be seen as an indigenous, American form of Japanese lesson study.

Richard DuFour invented "professional learning communities" at Adlai Stevenson High School in the 1980s, and the school has seen continuous improvement in student achievement since that time. Here's his website: allthingsplc.

The great charter schools use a variant of Richard DuFour's approach, too. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo cites DuFour in his book Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction which is essentially the companion volume to Doug Lemov's Teaching Like a Champion.