What was the point of this?

Then your school is doing PLCs wrong. PLCs can be a very organic, teacher driven,valuable PD opportunity. Calling teachers who engage in them 'crappy' denigrates those who are working towards improving their practice and is an unnecessary comment.

 

I agree: kids at the top of the spectrum do also deserve an appropriate education, including the involvement of teachers who understand their issues and have time to work with them. GATE kids can learn incredibly early that every other kid has more right to the teacher's attention than they. Too often, however, either there's nothing at all for the GATE kids or the programming that's on offer is diluted out of all usefulness.

 

I remember being in a GATE program in middle school; half the day, two days a week, we were taken to another school via bus and put into an "extension" program. The only thing I remember? Using mnemonic devices to memorizes the names of all the presidents. Not exactly useful content, there.

 

Ick, dave. My younger daughter finally opted out of TAG (Oregon's version: once weekly pullout for 45 minutes, silly activities that most of the kids blew off, and she still needed to make up the classroom work that she missed).

 

Really?

I see it as just the opposite. Manufacturing unauthentic conversations is very inorganic. Having professional teachers who you trust to sit down and have authentic conversations(and have been having them for years) about teaching without having to always have common formative assessments is organic.

 

There is, however, a certain inorganicity, not to mention inelegance, to assuming that the particulars of one's own experience must necessarily be true even for those who explain that they are not.

 

I completely disagree. It takes time to develop conversation and discussion skills but I feel successful when I can give a group of high students a challenging article to read and let them sit and dissect it and discuss it WITHOUT me hovering over them. Yes, maybe they'd like me sitting there next to them, but in the long run it's better for them that they're able to do this on their own. I pop in here and there and probe them with a few questions then step back again and leave them to their thing. It's not less "involvement" it takes time to teach them those skills, it takes time for me to select the right article or math problem or whatever that is challenging yet accessible, it takes time to come up with appropriate questions that I plan on asking them during their discussion. It's not less involvement, its a different kind of involvement.

 

But again, there is a difference between "high" students- which is what we had been referring to here, and actually gifted students.

 

No it IS less involvement. It takes the same amount and type of planning for ALL lessons at ALL levels. It is less time spent participating with your high students in conversation.

I find the conversations are FAR FAR deeper, when a teacher is there to help guide the discussion. Helping them to make the connections. I think it is a huge misconception to think high achieving students don't need or want teacher participation in their problem solving. I have never found coming in and out of their discussions to be anywhere near as effective as being a guide throughout the process.

Edit: do you think a teacher who is guiding an activity or conversation is hovering? or that they just "sit next to them" is what effective teachers do? I know this is not how my teaching comes off to the students, I may be an active guide, directing, orchestrating, maybe, but hovering and just sitting next to them...nope.

 

Is this a word?

 

In high functioning PLCs, there is trust and confidentiality and authentic conversations among the participating professionals. It can be a truly transformative and positive experience. My words can't change your experience...all I can offer is the positive experiences professional educators in my district have had in PLCs...and mine is a district where professional discourse, both real and informal, is the norm. PLCs can be an extension and enhancement of those kinds of discussions.

 

I am sure you are right. I suspect our district is placing to much emphasis on bimonthly common assessments to create conversations.

 

Why not? I needed an abstract noun referring to the state of being inorganic. Caesar could probably have come up with something that's a bit more authentic to Greek, but "inorganicity" fits the rules of English morphology, it is more statal than "inorganism" (which would more or less have to mean 'not being an organism'), and it sounded better than either inorganicism (which would plausibly refer to a philosophy) or "inorganication" (which is an inelegant blend of Greek and Latin and sounds a bit more causal). Feel free to supply and defend an alternative.

 

Ah. That's a very different matter, Pashtun, and if that's what's been being fed to you as a "professional learning community", little wonder that you're fed up.

I'd rather see teachers having authentic conversations about their own learning, and I think that's what a PLC at its best is supposed to foster - but the case you've made for the GATE kids deserving good mentoring has a parallel here, in my view: some members of the community may need coaching in speaking up, others may require guidance in how to yield the floor or disagree graciously, and topics may need to be assigned to begin with while the community learns how to generate (and negotiate!) its own. As you're doubtless aware with GATE kids' discussions, generating and negotiating are a great deal less simple and, um, organic, than they look.

The fact that some mentors seem slow to release responsibility is sometimes a failing - but it could reflect a dynamic within the group that may not be obvious to all members. In any case, before taking the failure of a particular instantiation of a model as token of the failure of the whole model, it makes sense first to ask to what extent the instantiation actually is faithful to the model.

 

Yes, that is a good chunk of time until you look closer at the reality.

The tutor is often 10-15 minutes late to the first 40 minute session because she is usually dealing with a child in the building with major behavior issues. So, now we have 25-30 minutes for her to try and meet the IEP's of 12 kids with 12 very different IEP's and very different needs. That averages out to about 2 minutes per child as far as individual tutoring. If she takes 3-4 students at a time she can give that small group about 10 minutes of attention before she has to run back and get the next small group. She can't take groups larger than 3-4 because they have diverse needs including major issues with focusing and distracting others.

During the second forty minutes she is required to push in to the classroom to work with the students. Again, she is often late because of things beyond her control. This session she is with us ends when it is time for recess. How focused do you think these kids are when they know recess happens when she leaves?

Plus, she had to try to work with these kids while I am working with other kids and some kids are working with partners. Kids that can't pay attention really struggle to pay attention when there are multiple events going on in the room.

Remember she is also trying to cover math, language arts, and behavior IEP's while trying to help the students succeed at a grade level far above their ability level in most cases. And my favorite issue....some of these kids are pulled for speech, PT, OT, counseling, Social Group, or Adapted P.E. during the time she is with me.

Do you still think 80 minutes sounds pretty good?

 

Guiding and participating in their discussion are two completely different things. I specifically said I prefer to guide their conversation, step back, even step away, and let them have their own conversation. Maybe it turns out a little less deep than if I participated in the conversation, but I think they're learning more by only having me as a guiding member of the conversation rather than a participant.