Professional learning communities: A model for dropout prevention?

Professional learning communities — working groups organized to attack problems and improve performance — are becoming a popular mechanism for school reform from the inside out.

From increasing reading and math scores, to finding ways to implement better art instruction, to improving student behavior, PLCs have shown great success in making schools better.

But D’Ette Cowan, project director with the Improving School Performance program at the education advocacy group SEDL, says PLCs are underused for addressing the dropout crisis.

During the National Dropout Prevention Center’s bi-monthly “Solutions to the Dropout Crisis” Webcast, today, Cowan said that learning communities, working toward a shared vision and using data to guide their decisions, have the ability to significantly lower dropout rates. 

“It’s really hard to believe that in a country with so many resources and opportunities that almost one-third of public high school students fail to graduate each year,” Cowan said. “  “Data and research are at the core of good decisions.”

Cowan said that it’s not enough for PLCs to simply envision a reduced dropout rate. She believes that it’s important to focus on improving a wide range of metrics — from attendance to grade point averages — that research shows is related to student success.   

“We can’t just wait until the end of the year and just tally up the dropout rate,” she said. “Then it’s just too late to be able to do anything about it.”

Ann Neeley, a program associate at SEDL, acknowledged that implementation of PLCs can be difficult, particularly given time constraints, the tendency to simply try old approaches to solving old problems, and the challenges of building trust among those who are wary of change.

But, she said, “a PLC cannot really proceed until the openness, the relationships, the truth telling really occurs.”

And it can be done, she said, noting the dramatic turnaround at Marked Tree High School, where even though 75 percent of students have been listed as “economically disadvantaged” the school’s performance was in the top 15 percent in the state of Arkansas.

While data and vision are important to achieve such results with PLCs, Cowan noted another benefit: “What we’ve learned is the students do notice what the professional staff is doing and how they interact with one another,” she said.

When teachers and administrators are working, vigorously and professionally toward a shared vision, she said, students often follow suit.

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To listen to the full interview with Cowan and Neeley, visit http://www.dropoutprevention.org/webcast/ep.php

To learn more about SEDL, visit www.sedl.org

To learn more about the National Dropout Prevention Centers visit http://www.dropoutprevention.org.