Mobilise Project
The Professional Learning Community Model for Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants
Introduction (5 minutes)
Agendas for the meeting are circulated and the learning intentions for the meeting are presented (use this format for your agenda).
Starter activity (5 minutes)
Participants engage in an activity to help them focus on their own school’s learning. For example – share a time either when you could not answer a question posed or someone else’s response to your question surprised you. (This may not be school-based.)
Feedback (25-30 minutes)
Each teacher gives a brief report on what they committed to try out during the ‘personal action planning’ section at the previous meeting, while the rest of the group listen appreciatively and then offer support to the individual in taking their plan forward. This can initially be done as a paired activity then pairs feed back to the group.
New learning about how to best use Teaching Assistants (20-30 minutes)
In order to provide an element of novelty into each meeting of the PLC, and to provide a steady stream of new ideas, each meeting includes an activity that introduces some new ideas about effectively using TAs.For your fifth PLC this will be a discussion from ‘Educational Leadership – Questioning for Learning’ article by CrisTovani (September 2015. Consider the role of questioning in the classroom. Use the ‘New Learning’ questions to engage with the reading.
Personal action planning (15-20 minutes)
The penultimate activity of each session involves each of the participants planning in detail what they hope to accomplish before the next meeting. This may include trying out new ideas or it may simply be to consolidate techniques with which they have already experimented. This is also a good time for participants to plan any peer observations that they plan to undertake. If the participants leave the meeting without a definite date and time to observe one another, the peer observation is much less likely to take place (Maher & Wiliam, 2007).Actions should be created from the feedback and/or new learning sessions.
Summary of learning (5 minutes)
In the last five minutes of the meeting, the group discusses whether they have achieved the learning intentions they set themselves. If they have not, there is time for the group to decide what to do about it.