Fellow principals, I must tell you about something that is working, because it is too good to keep on one campus!
As you build next year’s master schedule, you are making one of the biggest instructional calls of the year. Where the PLC time goes. How much. Whether it survives the first crowded week. Get that right, and you set your teachers up to do some of the best work of their careers.
Here is what I have learned about protecting that time. Picture a PLC as an iceberg. The meeting is the tip, the part everyone sees, the block on the schedule, the agenda, the hour we fought to carve out. But the meeting is maybe 10% of the work. The other 90% sits underwater, and that is the good part. It is the teacher trying the strategy on Tuesday. It is the team checking whether it worked. It is coming back the next week to say, “That moved them. Let’s do more of it.” That underwater work is where students actually gain ground, and it is the first thing to slip when the year gets full.
So, protect the meeting, yes. But protect the follow-through even harder.
Two things make that part hum, and they only work together. The first is structure. Give teams a simple protocol that brings them back, an agenda that asks not just “What does the data say?” but “What did we try last time, and did it work?” The second is trust. Teachers tell the truth about a flopped lesson when the room is safe, and that honesty is where the breakthroughs live. Structure without trust is a checklist. Trust without structure is a nice chat. Put them together and watch your teams come alive.
Let me save you a year. Our most common early mistake was starting cycles we never finished. We would dig in, make a plan, and never circle back. The fix was so simple it almost embarrassed me, and I would hand it to every leader reading this.
I am putting an empty chair in every PLC. It belongs to one real student, named, chosen by the team, a child who is close and climbing. Every agenda comes back to that chair. We talk plainly about what she needs, we pick one specific move, and the chair stays at the table next week so someone reports what changed for her. Not for the group. For her.
That one chair does the quiet work that all our structure and all our trust are meant to do. It keeps the underwater work visible. It makes follow-through impossible to skip. And it keeps the joy in the room, because there is nothing better than a team that believes, together, they can move a child forward, and then watches it happen.
So, as you set that schedule, protect the block, and protect more than the block. Protect the trying, the checking, the coming back. That is where teachers grow and where kids take off.
Pull up an empty chair this year. Put a real child in it. I promise you will never look at a PLC the same way again, and neither will your teachers.
TEPSA member Beth Hines is a principal in Arp ISD and a doctoral candidate in school improvement at The University of Texas at Tyler. Her work focuses on professional learning communities in rural schools.
