Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) focus on fostering changes within educators to inspire, motivate, and achieve student engagement to drive successful results within each student. The aim is for every student to reach their optimum potential through the instruction of educators to facilitate equitable opportunities for learning for all students within their class. While PLCs may be a ‘path to change in the classroom’ (Levine, 2019, np.), there are five challenges faced by teachers which include ‘incoherence, insularity, unequal participation, congeniality, and privacy’ (Levine, 2019, np.).

Challenges in professional learning for educators can hinder the productive learning of topics and instructional methodologies while sometimes fostering a notion of shared, group thinking with the same professional colleagues. Unequal participation refers to the lack of active voices from educators within Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and this means that their knowledge and expertise is not shared among the professionals.

It’s like having a smooth-sailing relationship without any bumps such as debates and arguments; while we’re not suggesting that argumentativeness is a key to professional learning among colleagues, providing constructive feedback and candor between educators is necessary for effective learning practices from each other. On the topic of privacy, Teacher isolation where they tend to engage with instructional strategies, skills, and tactics in their individualized way without professional development through sharing with others means they remain in a private and autonomous realm without gaining insight from other educators on effective instructional practices.

Working through and overcoming these obstacles below:

1. Working together and following up

2. Speak up and document outcomes

3. Making sure everyone has a voice

4. Going beyond nice and pushing past the problem towards a solution

5. Trying the solution together in the classroom and fixing it together

How Do We Overcome The 5 PLC Challenges?

Now that we have covered the five challenges and their essence within professional learning, let us consider how to overcome these challenges. How do PLCs promote coherence? Given that much of the professional development for educators can be sporadic, events over different time periods that focus on a topic but are not followed up on and revisited for the purpose of sharing what educators have learned, then PLCs can promote coherence through engaging educators in learning on a particular topic or protocol and then revisit this with a gathering which permits the exchange of what has been attained by each professional within the realm of the topic.

For example, behavioral management techniques might be a topic to visit among educators as a PLC event and it could be a wise idea to gather all attendees for a revisit of the topic six months later where educators can report on how they found the different behavioral management techniques, what worked and what didn’t work. If educators meet with the same colleagues consistently, they can ‘produce group-think’ (Levine, 2019, np.) while adding new professionals to the mix or re-structuring small groups within the learning forum can add value to the learning.

New professionals are Welcome too!

New professionals and different group structures mean fresh input into learning. To promote equal participation, it is effective for Facilitators of PLCs to obtain opinions and knowledge from every attendee and to foster learning as collaborative where every educator has the platform to voice their ideas. This fosters more growth and professional development than relying only on a select few or group to actively participate. Moving past congeniality might seem like a difficult task; in fact, it is in a way a real challenge to not be cordial and maintain the peace between teaching staff.

 Developing trusting relationships is important but so is the ability or the safety to offer constructive feedback and input into instructional methodologies. For some Teachers, they might enjoy learning new attributes from colleagues while others may prefer to “stick with what they know” which is not necessarily an effective way to develop within your profession. It doesn’t have to mean arguments; in fact, it can be quite the opposite: firm but gentle suggestions on how to manage a class, whether behaviorally or with cognitive engagement, can actually provide great benefits.

Plan, Practice, Repeat

The practice of teaching is one that, as mentioned, means moving away from educators remaining in the comfort of what they know, the tried and true methodologies of pedagogy. Opening up a forum in which all educators can contribute ideas and suggestions for one another’s classroom or particular student behavioral management techniques can be advantageous for all educators as it helps them foster more effective instructional practices and can actually inspire them to be more innovative. 

 Source:

 Levine, T. H. (2019). ‘Overcome 5 PLC challenges’. The Learning Professional: The Learning Forward Journal. Vol. 40. No. 3. Learning Forward.

https://learningforward.org/journal/learning-better-by-learning-together/overcome-5-plc-challenges/?fbclid=IwAR1NpzX6IjmRUeRwAyaAGPsBEcFqMZYq1-vC-IwWc07C-oUuDaBnv0V1Vpc. Accessed 05/02/2020.