PLC Series | 2 of 5
In the first post of this series, I shared why I’m changing our PLC structures again as I begin my seventh year as a principal. Now, before I start showing you what we’re doing differently, I think I need to go backward a little more.
Because I could very easily show you the PLC I’m building now. I could give you the process, the expectations, the forms, the rehearsal structure and the work my instructional leadership team will do around it.
But that wouldn’t really tell you how we got here.
Our PLCs have evolved over six years because our school has evolved over six years. And when I look back at those first PLCs, I don’t think, Wow, we were doing this all wrong.
I think, That’s where we had to start.
Before I could build the kind of PLC I wanted, I had to help create the conditions that would make that kind of PLC possible.
And that took years.
In the Beginning, We Were Just Trying to Plan
When I arrived at my campus, teachers weren’t consistently lesson planning.
So that’s where our PLC started. We planned lessons.
And when I say lesson planning, I really mean lesson planning.
Forget instructional rehearsal. Forget deeply analyzing student thinking. Honestly, forget even having these beautiful conversations about unpacking standards, determining the exact level of rigor, anticipating misconceptions and planning how we would respond.
We weren’t there yet.
We were trying to establish something much more basic: What are you teaching next week, and have you actually planned for it?
When I say that now, six years later, it almost sounds unbelievable. But this is something I think we sometimes miss when we talk about turnaround schools. You have to start with the school you actually have, not the school you wish you had.
And the school I actually had needed some very basic systems.
I was also essentially by myself. When I arrived, there was no assistant principal, no counselor and no instructional coaches. They had all left—an unfortunate and recurring story for this campus at the time. So, at least in the beginning, it was just me: a brand-new principal at an F-rated campus that was already reporting to the state, trying to build the instructional systems the school desperately needed while simultaneously figuring out how to actually be a principal.
And then, six weeks into my principalship, COVID happened. 😳
I mean…I think only an emoji can adequately express my feelings about that timing.
I had barely learned everyone’s names, and suddenly we were trying to figure out how to run a school virtually. I had taken on this campus thinking, Okay, we’re going to turn this school around, and six weeks later the entire concept of “school” changed.
So that first year wasn’t some beautifully executed turnaround plan.
It was survival.
Then I Started Really Learning What I Had Inherited
Once we began returning from COVID and I had more opportunity to actually know my staff and understand the culture, that’s when I started seeing just how complicated the work was going to be.
There was a lot of resistance.
One of the things I heard repeatedly was some version of, We’re professionals. We know how to teach. We’ve been doing this for years.
And listen, teachers are professionals. Experience absolutely matters. I don’t believe strong leadership means micromanaging capable educators simply for the sake of control.
But professionalism also requires us to confront evidence.
And our evidence was saying something very clearly: what we were doing wasn’t producing the outcomes our students needed.
There was also this belief that the campus had previously been a very strong school and had somehow suddenly fallen into this situation. But when I started looking backward at the historical performance, that wasn’t really true either. The school had fluctuated over the years, and eventually performance had plummeted.
So I was trying to figure out how to say, We have to be honest about this. We cannot improve something we aren’t willing to acknowledge.
And even that became complicated.
This Part Was Wild
I’ve thought a lot about how much of this part of the story I want to share.
But if I’m going to write honestly about why our PLCs developed the way they did, I can’t leave it out.
Employee organizations had an enormous amount of influence at the time. There were moments when I wanted to establish what I considered fairly normal instructional expectations—things like asking teachers to be intentional about lesson planning—and those expectations would essentially need to be discussed with the employee organization first so that we could gain their support and hopefully avoid significant backlash.
Can you believe that?
Because even living it, there were moments when I couldn’t.
Here I was answering to the state about why students weren’t performing, while at the same time we were essentially running instructional expectations by an external employee organization before asking teachers to do them.
It was wild.
I remember thinking, How did this become normal? How did we get here?
At times, it felt as though we had surrendered part of our instructional decision-making to an external entity whose primary responsibility was understandably to advocate for employees—not to carry responsibility for the instructional outcomes of my school.
Those are two very different responsibilities.
And I didn’t yet know how to navigate the tension between them.
I was being told, in no uncertain terms, to fix the school, move the data and get the results. But when I started saying, Okay, then we need to look honestly at instruction, that could generate a complaint.
If I said, We cannot keep explaining the data entirely through student behavior or student circumstances. At some point, we have to examine what we’re doing instructionally, that could be interpreted as me being negative, critical or even hostile.
“Hostile work environment” became a phrase I heard more than once.
And I was just like…what?
I was being asked to do incredibly difficult turnaround work, and then I was having to defend myself for doing the critical work.
As a brand-new principal, I was constantly trying to make sense of expectations that didn’t seem to fit together: improve everything, but don’t upset anyone. Hold people accountable, but be careful about what you ask them to do. Answer to the state for the results, but don’t be too direct about what might be contributing to those results.
It was a wild time.
Sometimes I Wonder What I Would Have Done Differently
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been more transparent with the state about just how much employee-organization influence was affecting our ability to make campus-level decisions.
Maybe nothing would have changed. Maybe it would have made things worse. Or maybe the state would have helped us navigate some of what was happening.
I genuinely don’t know.
What I do know is that I wasn’t experienced enough at the time to even recognize that as an avenue I might have explored.
My only administrative experience before becoming a principal had been as an assistant principal. Then I stepped into the principalship of this incredibly complicated school, and six weeks later the entire educational world shut down.
I was trying to learn what it meant to sit in the principal’s chair while also trying to understand all of the forces operating around that chair.
Looking back with six more years of leadership experience, I sometimes wish I had been brave enough—or maybe just experienced enough—to say more clearly:
If I’m going to be held accountable for turning this school around, then you need to understand all of the conditions under which I’m being asked to do it.
But I didn’t know that then.
I was trying to be a good principal. I was trying to follow the expectations of my leadership. I was trying to respond to the state, avoid another complaint, build an entirely new leadership team and figure out what our students needed.
And somewhere in all of that, I was also trying to figure out who I was as a leader.
I think that’s worth sharing because I wonder how many new principals are sitting inside complicated systems right now, assuming everything happening around them is simply the way leadership is supposed to work.
Sometimes it isn’t.
And sometimes you don’t know that until you’ve led long enough to look backward and recognize it.
Eventually, PLC Had to Become More Than Lesson Planning
As we continued working through state intervention, the expectations around instruction became more sophisticated.
We began breaking down standards. We started looking more intentionally at what students were actually expected to know and do. We started reviewing data with teams and learning how to connect student performance back to standards and instruction.
But I want to be clear about the sequence.
We did not start there.
We started with lesson plans. Then we learned how to dissect standards. Then we began learning how to examine data.
And when we got to the data piece, we ran into an obstacle much bigger than learning how to read a report.
We had to learn how to accept what the data was telling us.
When the Data Is Always About the Kids
Sometimes it felt like people simply didn’t believe the data.
And when we did accept that the numbers were real, there was usually an explanation.
The kids don’t focus. They don’t behave. They don’t try. They’re too far behind. Their families don’t support them. They have too many needs.
Our students absolutely do come to us with significant needs. More than 70% of our students are considered at risk. Those circumstances are real, and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t help anyone.
But there is a difference between understanding context and using context to absolve ourselves of responsibility.
For a while, the data was viewed primarily as information about the students.
It wasn’t necessarily viewed as information about our instruction.
And those are very different conversations.
I Was Watching Us Prove the Statistic Right
When I first arrived, our student behavior issues were significant.
The prevailing response was often that students needed stronger consequences. They needed to behave, listen and do what they were told.
Of course students need boundaries and accountability.
But I started listening to what the kids were saying, too.
They would tell us they didn’t like school. They would talk about not liking their teachers. They didn’t always feel connected to the adults teaching them.
And I remember having this realization that genuinely scared me.
We were serving a student population with an at-risk rate above 70%. We already knew statistically that many of our students faced factors associated with disengagement from school.
And I thought, Oh my God. What if instead of disrupting that prediction, we’re helping fulfill it?
That was terrifying to me.
Because then I couldn’t look at behavior as simply a kid problem anymore. I couldn’t look at engagement as simply a kid problem. And I definitely couldn’t look at achievement as simply a kid problem.
I had to start asking: What are students experiencing when they come into this building every day? Do they feel known? Do they believe their teachers care about them? Is the instruction engaging? Is it rigorous? Are we giving them access to learning? And when students aren’t learning, are we examining our own practice before we start listing everything that’s wrong with them?
That was a major cultural shift.
And not everybody was ready to make it.
Data Had to Become a Mirror
This is where the PLC work became much bigger than a data protocol.
I could put a spreadsheet in front of everyone. I could create the perfect agenda. I could give the team all the right questions.
But if we looked at a 30% mastery rate and our conclusion was, These kids just don’t care, what exactly had we accomplished?
We had to learn how to use data as a mirror—not as a weapon against teachers and not as evidence that our students couldn’t learn.
A mirror.
What is this telling us? What did students understand? What didn’t they understand? What did we do instructionally? What might we need to do differently? What part of this belongs to us?
That last question was probably the hardest.
Getting people to accept responsibility for student outcomes without making them feel personally attacked became a huge part of my work as a leader.
And I didn’t always get it right.
I was learning too—how to push without shutting people down, when to challenge, when to coach, when to document, when to wait and when something wasn’t really a coaching issue at all.
Meanwhile, I was developing a brand-new leadership team. So our PLCs became very ILT-directed. We asked the questions, facilitated the protocols, walked teams through the data and helped make connections between standards, results and instruction.
And behind the ILT, if I’m being completely transparent, was usually me.
For a Long Time, I Was the System
Hiring someone into a leadership position doesn’t magically make that person an instructional leader.
That takes development.
So for a long time, our PLC systems still ran through me. I was developing agendas, helping determine the direction, monitoring implementation, troubleshooting problems and coaching the people who were supposed to be coaching other people.
At the same time, I was addressing significant personnel issues, which meant we experienced turnover year after year.
And I want to be honest about that turnover because it wasn’t all accidental.
Some people realized this was no longer the school for them. The expectations were changing, and simply showing up, teaching the way you had always taught, or spending your days frustrated with the very children you were there to serve wasn’t going to be enough anymore.
Others retired.
And in some cases, I had to do the much harder work of documenting, coaching, providing opportunities for improvement and, when that improvement didn’t happen, helping people move out of the organization.
That meant we were constantly rebuilding while trying to improve. We’d hire, train and develop, then experience another change and begin again.
It absolutely slowed the instructional work, but looking back, I don’t think we could have skipped that part.
You can’t build a strong, student-centered culture while ignoring the adults whose actions are working against it. And you certainly can’t build a teacher-owned PLC culture if some of the people sitting at the table don’t believe they have anything to change.
There were years when I could see where I wanted our PLCs to go, but organizationally, we simply weren’t ready to go there.
That’s something I understand much better now.
The depth a PLC can reach is profoundly shaped by the people doing the work and the leadership conditions surrounding them.
Sometimes what looks like a PLC problem isn’t actually a PLC problem at all.
And Then the Balance Changed
About two years ago, I started to feel something shift.
It wasn’t that all of our problems were suddenly solved or that every person on the campus was exactly where I wanted them to be. We still had work to do. We still had personnel issues. We were still developing leaders and strengthening instruction.
But for the first time, the balance had changed.
The strong, willing teachers—the ones who believed in our students, wanted to get better and were willing to do the work—started to outnumber those who were resistant to it.
And that changed the feel of the entire school.
For years, so much of my energy had gone toward trying to move people who didn’t necessarily want to move. Now, more and more, I was surrounded by people who were saying, Okay, let’s do this. What’s next?
That is a completely different kind of leadership.
It meant we could finally start moving beyond systems that had been designed largely to create consistency and accountability and begin building systems around growth, ownership and instructional improvement.
My instructional leadership team was developing. Our culture was getting stronger. The staff was becoming more stable. And eventually, the leadership surrounding me changed too.
None of this happened overnight. It had been building for years.
But about two years ago was when I really began to feel the tipping point.
And that’s important to this PLC story because suddenly our problem wasn’t simply getting people to participate in the work.
We had people who wanted to do the work.
Now the question became:
Are we using that willingness well?
And Then Our Problem Changed
We’re still building, and I’m certainly not at the finish line.
I want PLCs that teachers sustain rather than PLCs that exist because the principal is pushing them. I want instructional leaders who can coach, monitor and respond without waiting for me to determine every next step.
But now I believe we have the people and the conditions to actually build toward that.
And once we got there, I started noticing a completely different problem.
We had gotten much better at PLC.
But were we actually getting better at teaching?
A teacher could have an excellent conversation about rigor in PLC and then deliver a lesson that didn’t require enough thinking from students. We could identify a likely misconception and then miss it when it appeared. We could plan a beautiful check for understanding and then collect the information without changing instruction based on what students showed us.
I started realizing that we had become pretty good at talking about instruction.
But talking about instruction and executing it are not the same thing.
That’s when something clicked for me:
Students don’t experience our lesson plans. They experience our teaching.
And that changed my question.
I’m no longer primarily asking, How do I make our PLC better?
I’m asking:
What should teachers be able to do differently in the classroom because they attended PLC?
That’s the question I’m carrying into year seven.
Maybe we don’t need another agenda or another protocol. Maybe instead of adding more to PLC, I need to move some things out of it so we can spend more of our time together doing something we haven’t done nearly enough:
Practicing the teaching.
Not because our old PLC system failed.
It didn’t.
It helped us solve the problems we had at the time.
But we’re not the same school anymore.
And maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this:
When your people change, your systems should be allowed to change with them.
Before You Change Your PLC…
If you’re a principal, coach or instructional leader who’s frustrated because your PLC isn’t where you want it to be, maybe the first question isn’t, What should we add to the agenda?
Maybe it’s:
What is preventing our people from doing the PLC work we already know needs to happen?
Is it skill? Trust? Belief? Accountability? Leadership capacity? Personnel? The system surrounding the principal?
Maybe it’s several of those things at once.
I’d really love to hear about your experience in the comments. Have you ever discovered that what looked like a PLC problem wasn’t actually a PLC problem at all? What was underneath it?
I’m sharing this series while we’re actually doing the work, so I certainly don’t have a finished story to hand you. I’m still figuring out what this next version of our PLC will become too.
And if you’d like to follow along as I share that work in real time—the PLC changes, the leadership lessons and everything else happening along the way—you can find me on Instagram at @thewildflowerwithin_. 🖤 Click the post below to find me.
Because maybe there isn’t one perfect PLC model.
Maybe the better question is whether the one we’re using right now is producing the instruction our students deserve.
And that’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out in year seven.
Next in the series: The Work Before the PLC—Why We’re Moving Internalization Outside the Meeting.
Julie | The Wildflower Within 🖤
Keep Becoming.
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