How to Create a Vertical Professional Learning Community

A vertical professional learning community, or PLC, happens when a team of educators come together to see how standards, curriculum, assessment, and instruction align within the school. It’s most effective for a vertical PLC to be made up of all teachers within the same department or content area and span across grade levels (for example, in a high school, all of the math teachers—regardless of whether they taught Algebra 1 or AP Calculus—would be part of the math PLC).

This is a shift from traditional PLCs, in which all teachers either within the same grade level or teaching the same content area meet (for example, all of the fifth-grade teachers meeting together, or all of the seventh-grade ELA teachers).

The “why” behind vertical PLCs is that they can be the key to unlock shared instructional strategies and collaboration at your school site. But how can your faculty and staff begin—and how can you support them as a school leader? These are the three key things to keep in mind: building buy-in, creating an agenda that works, and assessing the success of the vertical PLC.

Building Buy-In

The number one piece of crafting successful vertical PLCs in your school is buy-in from your faculty and staff. However, it can be challenging for faculty and staff to see the worth of even the best PLCs—with so many things on everyone’s plate, the last thing you want is for people to think that the vertical PLC process is a waste of time. Here are some suggestions for your faculty and staff to get started:

I recently worked with a math PLC, and every single teacher—from 6th grade to 12th—identified fact fluency as a major area of concern for their students. They also identified students’ positive attitude toward math games as a major celebration. With these two pieces of information, we found a fact fluency game resource for them to use in their daily instruction.

Creating an Agenda That Works

Once a PLC is formed, I recommend that teams craft an agenda for each meeting. An agenda keeps pertinent topics at the forefront of the conversation and also gives space for key updates and collaboration. When I help craft vertical PLCs for my faculty and staff, I always include the following:

I help my teams to identify the “PLC lead” (essentially, who runs the meetings), the “timekeeper” (who keeps track of time during the meeting), and the “note taker” (who adds notes to the agenda). I also help my teams send out the agendas one week in advance so that PLC team members can review the agenda, ask questions, or put in additional items that they feel would be beneficial to discuss. At the end of each meeting, PLC leads have the option to turn their agendas in to me and my administrative team or have a meeting to discuss the meeting and the anticipated progress.

Assessing the Success of the Vertical PLC

The key to monitoring PLC success is identifying what I refer to as the “follow-throughs.” A successful PLC means that the participants are not only identifying key indicators of success in their content area but working to be solution oriented to keep improving on these indicators. Here are some ways that leaders can identify—and celebrate—success in PLC teams: