Yesterday, we instituted our new Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) for the coming school year.  With much drum rolling, we were led to the gymnasium where we were instructed to stand under the sign announcing our group preference.  The groups (reading, writing, math, social skills, personal development - classroom management, goal setting, self-assessment, etc. - and technology infusion) were based on our work from the previous week (see my previous Schoolwide Blog)

Three other teachers and I chose personal development.  I was happy with the size of my PLC and the fact that we are all early childhood educators.  After our first meeting I felt confident that we would be able to work together well this year.
    
As a first step we established norms for our meetings.  Then, as we talked about our first goal I began to get energized that maybe this year, for the first time in a long while, I would be working with teachers, all of who would be respectful of each other’s professional experience and expertise.  

The PLC cycle requires us to identify a concern, determine a goal, design lessons/activities to address that concern, collect student work to discuss as a group, and analyze of how well our lessons worked by determining whether or not we met our goal.  Then, the cycle starts again with a new concern and goal, or with follow-up concerns/goals.  The biggest question for our group will be how we will “measure” personal development.  However, we will also need to grapple with the relationship between and among classroom management, self-assessment, goal setting, work habits, and personal development.  Should classroom management be the kingpin of our PLC focus?  What part does engagement play in the development of personal development, as previously defined?  How are student engagement and classroom community related?  Where should we direct our focus?  These questions and our expressed concerns about helping children become self-managing, independent learners reminded me of a New York Times article my daughter sent me recently, Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

    The article talks about the importance of developing and enhancing children’s executive functions and of a program called Tools of the Mind that hopes to refocus early childhood programs on what counts for helping children live a life that matters.  According to Wikipedia, the term executive function is described as “a loosely defined collection of brain processes which are responsible for planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, rule acquisition, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information.”  Most, if not all, of Arthur L. Costa’s, and Bena Kallick’s Habits of Mind could be considered executive functions or as being affected by various executive functions.  The Habits of Mind are:  persistence, thinking and communicating with clarity and precision, managing impulsivity, gathering data through all senses, listening with understanding and empathy, creating, imagining, innovating, thinking flexibly, responding with wonderment and awe, thinking about thinking (metacognition), taking responsible risks, striving for accuracy, finding humor, questioning and posing problems, thinking interdependently, applying past knowledge to new situations, and remaining open to continuous learning. (Retrieved on 10/10/09 from http://www.habits-of-mind.net/whatare.htm)

    Our first assignment as a PLC is to read this article and determine if this approach could help us “get at” the heart of this very important but potentially illusive topic.  Now that I’ve connected this further to Habits of Mind, I can see a potential plan forming in my mind.  If we are interested in helping children become independent problem solvers, for example, we could conduct a survey to determine which children are able to articulate a procedure for solving problems; this would be our pre assessment tool.  If many of the children could not identify steps to solving a conflict this could become a teaching focus in our classrooms.  After a predetermined amount of time we would survey them again, observe their interactions, interview them etc. to determine if this situation has changed.  While we would need to determine a reasonable ending date for our research, we could phrase our goal in the following way:  More than ½ of the class is able to articulate a problem solving procedure.  Or, we could study the Habits of Mind and identify those that are concerns right now in our classrooms.  And, now my mind is reeling.  

    Stay tuned as this promise to develop into something bigger than I imagined before I started to make these connections.  I welcome your comments about this nascent idea for our PLC work this year.