Just because you have a PLC doesn'y mean you are effective

Many school districts have adopted professional learning communities, and with good reason.  If we are going to transform our schools, the people most responsible for accomplishing that task need time to work together to make sense of your vision.

Professional learning communities offer an opportunity for teams of teachers to do just that.  However, just because you pull a team together, doesn't mean that it is going to be effective.  Vivian Troen and Katherine C Boles outline Five Conditions of Good Teams in this Harvard Education Letter.

Accentuate the positive

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
(Lyrics from a song made popular by Bing Crosby in the 1940s)

Positive? In today's competitive, supercharge environment, where there is no room for mistakes; no
time for do overs?

Well, it turns out that people are more productive when they focus on their strengths.  
Twenty-two percent of respondents indicated that they were likely to be disengaged when their 
manager primarily focused on their weaknesses. When their manager focused on their 
strengths, just one percent were like to be disengaged. (From Strengths Finders 2.0 by Tom
Rath).

If we expect our stakeholders to engage with us to solve the complex challenges we face, we need
to find ways to support, rather than criticize their efforts.

The Marlboro Man is so last century

And not just because we learned so much about the dangers of smoking.

Turns out that to be successful in today's world, you need to know how to collaborate.  Seth Goden talks about this in this blog post, Autarky is dead