Establishing Professional Learning Communities to support better teaching practices
Bahrain Middle/High School: Education_bh Innovation and Excellence
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Please share a brief background of your innovation.
At Bahrain School, we focus on our action plans to identify specific student needs to create learning opportunities based on concrete data for our students, to find what we can work on together. We have established Professional Learning Communities (PLC) to directly address student achievement data. The PLC members meet weekly to monitor and adjust curriculum planning and assessment to ensure that all students experience success in their academic endeavors. We maintain a diverse school community that proudly represents over 29 nationalities. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the heart of all of our educational endeavors at Bahrain School. Additionally, we encourage our students to be heavily involved with community outreach as they are members of establishments such as Club Interact with the local Rotary Club and frequently involve themselves in community service and volunteering.
How was it planned?
We have developed a School Action Plan based on student formative and summative data and have established goals and milestones for student achievement. The school action plan is guided and supported by the Region and District Action Plans established by the Department of Defense Education Activity, Europe and the Europe South District. This has been a region, district and school-wide effort since 2019.
Did you face any challenges in implementation?
Challenges included having the complete buy-in of the plan(s) and providing time for teachers to fully unpack standards of learning and new curriculum material for lesson planning and assessment. Another challenge was fully implementing PLCs to include data review and specific teacher strategies to address student learning.
A brief assessment of your results
We witnessed a 5% growth in student performance for Grades 6 through 12, Mathematics. Our numbers in literacy are still below our milestone goals across different grade levels. However, this calls for improving assessment calibration and teaching strategies to implement writing across the curriculum. The process is on-going as we begin a new cycle of data review and strategic planning for deeper, meaningful collaboration to guide instruction.
In hindsight, what were the most valuable lessons learned? Could things have been done differently?
To provide more time for data review, analysis, and collaboration to fully address the gaps school-wide, especially through an in-depth review of subgroup performance levels was a crucial lesson learned. Understanding teacher needs earlier will assist in providing professional learning to directly improve instruction and student learning.
