How to Use Professional Learning Communities to Strengthen Instructional Decisions

A lot can happen during a productive PLC meeting. Teachers review the data. They talk about students who are struggling, compare what they're seeing across classrooms, and share strategies that have worked.

The conversation may be thoughtful and engaging. But then everyone returns to their classroom.

One teacher decides to reteach the skill. Another adds more practice. Someone else tries a strategy that came up during the meeting. By the time the team meets again, they've all responded to the same problem in different ways—and the conversation has already moved on to something else.

That's where I think we need to look more closely at how we're using professional learning communities.

The question isn't whether PLCs give teachers opportunities to collaborate. It's whether that collaboration is helping them make better instructional decisions together.

What Should a PLC Actually Produce?

For years, we've worked to create time and structures for teachers to collaborate, and that work matters.

Teachers need opportunities to learn from one another, examine student learning, and solve instructional challenges together.

But collaboration is the structure, not the outcome.

When we evaluate the effectiveness of a PLC, we often focus on what happened during the meeting: 

• Did teachers review the data?

• Did everyone participate?

• Did they share strategies?

• Did the team make it through the agenda?

I'd argue there's a more important question: What did the team leave with?  

An effective PLC should create greater clarity than the team had when they walked into the room. By the end of the conversation, the team should have a stronger understanding of:

• what students are learning and where they're struggling

• which instructional needs should be prioritized

• what teachers will do in response

• how they'll determine whether that response worked

Those are the outcomes that move collaboration beyond conversation and into instructional improvement.

This also gives leaders a different way to think about PLC effectiveness. A team can have a lively conversation, share plenty of good ideas, and review pages of data without ever deciding what should happen differently in classrooms.

→ Still working to strengthen the foundation of your PLCs? You might like Establishing Effective PLCs: The First Three Steps. 

How Effective PLCs Move From Conversation to Action

Begin With the Evidence

Instructional decisions should begin with evidence of student learning. 

That evidence might come from student work, formative or common assessments, classroom observations, student discussions, or other sources that help teachers understand what's happening during instruction.

But evidence doesn't tell us what to do next. That's the work of the PLC.

Imagine a team reviews a common formative assessment and finds that only 42% of students successfully justified their thinking on constructed-response questions.

The easiest response might be to conclude that students need more practice with constructed responses. Teachers agree to give them more practice, and the meeting moves on.

But what if practice isn't actually the problem?

Perhaps students understand the content but don't know what a strong explanation includes. Maybe they can arrive at the correct answer but struggle to communicate their reasoning. Perhaps they rarely have to explain their thinking during daily instruction, or expectations for written reasoning look different from one classroom to the next.

Each possibility points toward a different instructional response. That's why looking at the evidence is only the beginning.

Look for Patterns and Possible Causes

Before deciding what to do, teams need to slow down long enough to understand what the evidence is telling them.

What patterns are showing up across student responses? Is the same misconception appearing repeatedly? Are students consistently successful with one part of the task but struggling with another? Is the challenge widespread, or concentrated among particular students?

Looking for patterns helps the team pinpoint the learning need more precisely.

From there, the conversation can turn to what may be contributing to that pattern. 

In our example, if students consistently arrive at the correct answer but struggle to justify it, the team has learned something important. The issue may not be understanding the content at all. The instructional gap may be in how often students are asked to articulate their reasoning, how that thinking is modeled, or how consistently expectations for a strong response are reinforced across classrooms.

This distinction matters. If teams misidentify the problem, even a well-intentioned instructional response may do very little to solve it.

→ Want to go deeper on this step? Check out Using Data to Inform Instruction: Solve the Right Problem for more on using evidence to identify the instructional need before choosing a solution. 

Determine the Instructional Response

Once the team has a clearer understanding of the problem, the conversation needs to move toward a decision.

"Students need more opportunities to explain their reasoning" identifies a need, but it still leaves a lot open to interpretation. What will teachers actually do differently?

The team might agree to use a common reasoning routine across classrooms and explicitly model what a high-quality explanation includes. Now there's a shared instructional response teachers can put into practice.

That doesn't mean every classroom has to look the same. Teachers still respond to their own students, content, and what happens during instruction. But there should be enough clarity around the team's decision that everyone understands what they've agreed to implement.

Without that clarity, PLCs can generate plenty of good ideas while leaving implementation largely to individual interpretation. When a team makes a specific instructional decision, they have something they can implement consistently—and something they can come back to and evaluate.

Return to the Evidence

When the team meets again, there's a natural temptation to pull up the newest assessment results, identify the newest problem, and begin another conversation.  But there's unfinished business…

Did the reasoning routine make a difference? Are students explaining their thinking more clearly? Did the response work for some students but not others? What should teachers continue, adjust, or stop doing?

These aren't extra questions to squeeze onto the end of a PLC agenda. They're part of the instructional decision the team already made.

This is one of the places where professional learning communities can lose momentum. Teams may identify problems and select strategies without consistently returning to determine whether those strategies had the intended impact.

When that happens, PLCs can become a series of disconnected conversations. Teams continually respond to the latest data without building much collective knowledge about what actually improves learning.

When teams return to previous decisions, the conversation changes. They're no longer simply asking, "What should we try?" They're also asking, "What did we learn from what we tried?"

Over time, this creates a much stronger cycle of improvement. Evidence informs instruction, teachers implement a shared response, new evidence helps the team understand its impact, and that learning informs what happens next.

→ One way teams can deepen this work is by looking closely at what students actually produce. Read Improving Student Outcomes Through Analyzing Student Work: A Protocol for School-Based Teams for a structured approach to analyzing student work collaboratively. 

What This Means for School Leaders

For school leaders, this changes what we should be looking for in PLCs. A completed agenda isn't enough. Neither is a room full of engaged teachers having a good conversation.

Listen to what the team is actually doing with its time.

• Are teachers grounding their thinking in evidence of student learning?

• Does the conversation result in a clear instructional response?

• When the team meets again, do they return to previous decisions and examine whether they worked?

The answers can tell you not only how effectively a PLC is functioning, but where the team may need support.

Strengthening professional learning communities means helping teams get better at making, implementing, and refining instructional decisions together. As teachers repeatedly engage in that work, they build collective expertise and a stronger capacity to improve instruction across classrooms.

So instead of simply asking, "Are our PLCs working?" ask something more specific:

Is the way our teams work together making instruction better?

That's ultimately the measure that matters.

Ready to help your teams move from PLC discussion to instructional action?

This month's Behind the Desk PD package: Using PLCs to Strengthen Instructional Decision-Making, gives you a ready-to-use PD slide deck, plus three practical implementation tools designed to help collaborative teams analyze evidence, make stronger instructional decisions, support consistent implementation, and monitor impact over time.

Get it through our Behind the Desk membership, along with continued access to time-saving resources each month, or you can grab it by itself from my TPE store.