Our+Professioanl+Learning+Community

=**Our Professioal Learning Community**=
 * You may hear a lot about PLC's. Our PLC is our department. It is a group of teachers working together on common goals. It is the work we do together to improve our teaching, improve student achievement, and improve our school. It is the work that good teachers have always done in their collaborations. We are just making our interactions with each other have very explicite goals.**


 * Definitions of a PLC**

Although there is no universal definition of a PLC (Stoll et al., 2006; Williams, Brien, Sprague, & Sullivan, 2008), the following definitions offer a range of ways to describe a PLC:

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 * An ongoing process through which teachers and administrators work collaboratively to seek and share learning and to act on their learning, their goal being to enhance their effectiveness as professionals for students’ benefit (Hord, 1997)
 * A school culture that recognizes and capitalizes on the collective strengths and talents of the staff (Protheroe, 2008).
 * A strategy to increase student achievement by creating a collaborative school culture focused on learning (Feger & Arruda, 2008).
 * Team members who regularly collaborate toward continued improvement in meeting learner needs through a shared curricular-focused vision (Reichstetter, 2006).
 * A group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive learning-oriented and growth-promoting way (McREL, 2003).
 * Educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2006).
 * An inclusive group of people, motivated by a shared learning vision, who support and work with each other to inquire on their practice and together learn new and better approaches to enhance student learning (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Thomas, Wallace, Greenwood et al., 2005).