Co-Teaching & PLCs

Definition: PLCs and Co-Teaching

PLCs stand for Professional Learning Communities. This is a team within the school comprised of teachers, school counselors, administrators, and most importantly, the students. The goal of a PLC is to ensure and improve students' learning. It is an effective way of teachers being able to collaborate with each other. Co-Teaching can often times stem from a PLC. This is when 2 teachers work together in the classroom. They collaborate with each other on the planning, organization, instruction, strategies they will use, etc.

Resource

"True collaborative teams embrace student learning as their primary purpose, and sometimes teams must go through difficult conversations in order to make this a reality (Bayewitz, 2015)."

PLCs and Co-teaching are great ideas in theory. However, it would be naive to believe that PLCs and Co-Teaching are without conflict. To dig deeper into conflict among PLCs and Co-Teaching, I discovered an article titled Dealing With Conflict on Collaborative Teams. The article was written by Michael Bayewitz, and he states that although conflict will be present in PLCs and other collaborative strategies, it is important to embrace the conflict, not ignore it.

Bayewitz lists some strategies for conflict in collaboration with other teachers:

1. Q-TIP (Quit Taking It Personally)
2. Invite healthy conflict.
3. Monitor nonverbal communication.
4. Vary your approach.

Find the article here: http://www.allthingsplc.info/blog/view/315/dealing-with-conflict-on-collaborative-teams

Application in the Classroom

I think this article is a great resource for the classroom. It is important to remember these strategies when I am involved in a PLC in the future or when I co-teach with another educator. Conflict is something that is unavoidable, and I will not agree with everyone that I work with. It's important to remember that all effective teachers have the same outcome in mind: student learning. 

References

Bayewitz, M. (2015, October 28). Dealing With Conflict on Collaborative Teams. Retrieved February 16, 2018, from http://www.allthingsplc.info/blog/view/315/dealing-with-conflict-on-collaborative-teams