Leading in a Professional Learning Community Culture

Type: Article
Topics: School Administrator Magazine, Staffing, HR & Talent Development

October 01, 2025

Building a district’s collective leadership and action through collaboration and a guiding coalition

As a high school principal, I found myself dabbling in professional learning communities. I knew PLCs were important because there was a box to check on the state’s principal summative evaluation that indicated you were in a PLC.

It wasn’t until I became an assistant superintendent for leadership and learning in a large school district that I began to fully understand the dynamics of creating a culture that embodied the characteristics of a professional learning community — what Richard DuFour and colleagues define in their book Learning by Doing as an “ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”

My newfound clarity revealed that I was leading in what DuFour and Douglas Reeves called a PLC Lite environment, which they described in their 2016 Kappan article as one in which “educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings, engage in book studies that result in no action or devote collaborative time to topics that have no effect on student achievement all in the name of the PLC process.”

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Phillip D. Page

Retired superintendent, co-author

Celebrating in a PLC at Work

Keeping a Tight Commitment to PLCs

In a professional learning community culture, five foundational commitments are tight within a school district, meaning they are clearly defined, nonnegotiable and require consistent adherence. These commitments guide the work of the adults to ensure success for all students.

In Learning by Doing, Richard DuFour and colleagues define what is tight in a PLC culture:

We will work in collaborative teams with collective responsibility for student learning.

We will implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit, for all students (instructional equity).

We will use common formative assessments to monitor student learning.

We will use common assessment data to improve teaching and learning practices.

We will provide systematic interventions and extensions.

Within these requirements, school and district leaders must acknowledge that each school and each school district has its own best practices that contribute to success. For this reason, effective leadership in a PLC continuously asks:

Are we building collective leader and/or teacher efficacy in our decision-making process?

Is there clarity in why a change is needed for our school or district?

Is there clarity in how we are going to move forward to get better results for all students?

As the guiding coalition examines the data to assess the effectiveness of the tight commitments, they must determine whether changes are necessary to increase student achievement. If the data show a need for change, the guiding coalition assesses effectiveness through the lens of structure, mentality or clarity, and execution.

Too often, districts or schools react to data with an urgency to change the structure when the lack of success is due to a mentality or execution issue. When considering an ineffective collaborative culture where the team does not take collective responsibility for all students, it is most likely due to a mentality or lack of clarity regarding why all teachers must have responsibility for students with IEPs or those who are English language learners.

Many schools use common formative assessments to monitor student learning during core instruction. Teachers who become frustrated when the students’ results on the common end-of-unit assessment do not correlate with the results on the common formative assessment may need professional development in how to execute a well-developed assessment structure for student success.

To promote success, guiding coalitions must accurately assess whether a structure needs improvement, teachers require an explanation of why a change is necessary or professional learning must clarify how to execute it more effectively for improved results.

— Phillip Page

The Coherence and Clarity of Teacher Teams
Angela Lyon Hinton

By Angela Lyon Hinton

Spartanburg County School District Two is one of the fastest-growing districts in South Carolina. Over the past three years, the district has added nearly 1,500 students and now serves approximately 12,000 students, 67 percent of whom come from low-income households.

As our enrollment has grown, it has become increasingly diverse, with children from a variety of backgrounds, including Russian, Ukrainian and Hispanic. Between 2023 and 2024, the district added 550 English language learners and more than 100 students with special education needs.

To address these rapid changes, the district committed to prioritizing clear instruction and teacher collaboration, resulting in improved student learning and performance on end-of-year assessments. Today, all levels of learning across our system rank in the top 10 in the state.

The cornerstone of our approach is coherence. Rather than implementing disconnected initiatives, the district created a unifying instructional vision and approach that focuses on providing purposeful learning experiences and scaffolded support through teaching and learning teams, multitiered systems of support and research-based instruction.

Much of our work is guided by the research of John Hattie, whose studies, as outlined in his Visible Learning series, suggest that “collective teacher efficacy” and “teacher clarity” have the greatest impact on learning.

Power of Teams

To promote collective teacher efficacy, we established school-based teaching and learning teams, or TLTs, our version of professional learning communities. These teams, the backbone of our instructional improvements, create a shared language and understanding around instruction across grades and content areas.

The TLTs meet weekly and focus on key actions such as unpacking essential standards, creating assessment plans, planning adaptive and responsive standards-based instruction and analyzing formative assessment results to guide interventions or extensions.

These actions provide answers to three key questions: What do we want all students to learn? How will we know they have learned it? How will we respond when some students have learned and some have not?

Also central to our success is the focus on teacher clarity. Clarity isn’t just about setting clear objectives. It’s about creating a thread that connects standards, instruction and assessment in ways that make sense to teachers and students.

Through our work with Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, co-authors of the 2020 book PLC+: A Playbook for Instructional Leaders and their 2024 follow-up The Teacher Clarity Playbook (2nd ed.), we better understand that when teachers have a clear understanding of what students need to learn and how to assess that learning, student achievement improves dramatically.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen significant improvement in student learning as we’ve focused on the deliberate alignment of the three questions of a TLT with the nine “plays” of teacher clarity. The nine plays, such as determining the relevance of the learning and establishing mastery of standards, provide teachers with guidance as they develop key actions to answer the three TLT questions.

The district schedules monthly professional development sessions for principals, assistant principals and school-based instructional coaches related to the instructional vision. These school leadership teams, in turn, customize professional learning for their respective schools, providing all educators in our system with professional learning that is operationalized through the TLT process.

Depth Over Breadth

There’s a difference between delving deeper into learning and getting lost in the educational weeds. Our shared commitment to aligning efforts districtwide has created a clear, cohesive vision that empowers rather than overwhelms teachers.

We believe if we provide students with the necessary support, the data will demonstrate they’re making progress. This approach has yielded impressive results, particularly in our high schools, where our on-time graduation rate is 90 percent, our Algebra I results rank first in the state and our U.S. History results rank second in the state. Last year, 77 percent of our students were college- or career-ready, the highest percentage to date.

Angela Lyon Hinton is the assistant superintendent for instructional services in Spartanburg School District Two, Chesnee, S.C. 

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