Florin High School Wiki                    

Inspiring and educating our diverse community to achieve excellence. 

Welcome to Florin's Professional Learning Network

This site is intended to be a marketplace for our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to:

• communicate about their work
• share research and resources
• connect staff members with expertise to staff needing support
• continue staff professional learning in a personalized and immediate way

The Professional Learning Action team page contains professional learning information including pre-service work, our site professional learning plan, and information about our PLCs. Visit it here: Professional Learning Action Team

Professional Learning Community Defined: A team committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.

Professional Learning Communities function based upon a set of norms - that act as a set of collaboratively defined behaviors to ensure collective knowledge and expertise is accessed and the necessary work gets done.

Key Characteristics of a Professional Learning Community        

• Professional Learning                                                                        
• A focus on student learning                                   
• A collaborative culture
• Collective inquiry into research-based best practice
• Action orientation – professional learning by doing
• All members mutually accountable for targeted results

Our Interest-based PLCs continue to have 95% participation from staff and the work those PLCs are doing continues to progress and develop into some very encouraging initiatives for our students, staff, and community.

o   Merchants of Hope is developing mentorships, Parent advisory committees, and examining grading policies

o   Athledemics is running a mentoring program for athletes and looking at incorporating more collaborative learning strategies in their classrooms.

o   Mindset is examining how to motivate unmotivated students who are so hard to reach.

o   Technology is developing 21^st century, student-centered projects like imovies, podcasts, comic life, student web pages, and teacher web pages.

o   SDAIE/EL sits down to examine student work every month and collaborates on cross-curricular lessons.

o   Numeracy joins cross-curricular individuals to discuss critical thinking and problem-solving

o   SLCs examine how to be an effective small learning community/academy and how to best utilize the SMART board resource to help bring relevant, state-of-the-art lessons to students.

Process Accountabilty - beginning January 5th, the site has embarked on a process designed for all PLCs and other site-based initiatives to report to the Steering Committee as well as self-assess their own work thus far.  Below are the tools and rubrics used for this process:

• Mid-Year Reports.doc
• Mid-Year Reports Relection Tool.docx
• Mid-Year Reports Schedule.docx

2009-2010 Interest-based PLCs:   Where are they meeting? Click here: PLC Meeting.locations. 2009.doc

• 21st Century Technology
• Athledemics
• Merchants of Hope
• Mindset
• Numeracy
• SDAIE
• Small Learning Communities