Preface

The old adage has it right: necessity really is the mother of invention. After January 2011, when my first book, The Practice of Authentic PLCs: A Guide to Effective Teacher Teams, was published, I found myself being asked to support teacher teams or professional learning communities (PLCs) around the United States and abroad. In that role, I have thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of helping schools at various states of readiness do the important work of authentic PLCs, and I believe that I have helped them all in some permanent, sustaining ways. But the chapter in The Practice of Authentic PLCs that gets the most questions (save for those pertaining to facilitating PLCs) and that has produced the most confusion for PLCs trying to implement the book's ideas is Chapter 5: "Reviewing and Responding to Data." Data are confusing. Data are messy. Data are scary. Data review is time-consuming. "We need a systematic process for looking at and responding to data" was the message I got. "And it had better be teacher-friendly. And efficient. And doable in the precious few meetings we can allocate to this and in the precious few minutes we have to do it. And it has to make a difference for our kids—and in our test scores."

Whew. Tall order, I thought. But these teachers were right: anything less was purely theoretical—good for university courses in education, but relatively useless for teachers in the trenches, doing the work as best they knew how in the scarce and coveted time they had to work with their teacher teams.