Learn What a Healthy Math PLC Looks Like in One School First
When a state math team asked its regional leads how professional learning reaches classrooms, it found that everyone pictured a professional learning community differently, and that discovery turned out to be the win.
The Win Behind the Wins
Every month, I meet with a state level math team, and like every school, district, and system partner we support, we start with wins. This month there was a lot to celebrate. The team had finished training for six of its regions on the new math standards, and the feedback from participants had been overwhelmingly positive. One team member had just come back from a national meeting where she shared how the rollout was going, and leaders from other states were surprised. They wanted to know what this state had done differently, because that kind of support from the field isn't typical.
Other wins followed. One region had invited its principals from elementary all the way through high school to the math training, so middle and high school leaders could see what was coming before it reached them. Nearly every region had joined the state's math coaching academy. And the team had found funding to go further with its work on fluency this year.
But the win I want to write about here came later in the hour, and at first it didn't sound like a win at all.
Key Takeaways
A healthy professional learning community is a team of educators who meet regularly to study a standard, look at student work together, and decide what to do next. Before scaling PLCs across a district or state, align everyone's picture of a PLC, match expectations to the time that exists, and learn what works in one school first.
- Get everyone's picture of a PLC pointed in the same direction.
- Match PLC expectations to the time teachers actually have.
- Start with the smallest system you can study: one grade-level PLC in one school.
- Experience a PLC together before you ask anyone else to lead one.
Move 1: When Everyone Pictures a Professional Learning Community Differently
The team had recently attended a professional learning community for its regional math leads. To kick it off, they asked the math leads a few honest questions:
- How do you know professional development is improving student success in your region?
- What structures do you use to monitor it?
- What do you wish were working, but isn't?
The answers revealed something the team hadn't fully expected. Everyone had a different picture of what a PLC is. Some regions held regular PLCs with their math leads, but the work stopped there and never reached teachers. Others weren't sure PLCs were happening in their schools at all. And as the team talked it through, they realized that even among themselves, their experiences with PLCs were very different.
That could easily have felt like a setback.
Instead, the director of the branch called it the biggest win of the day. "It's clear as day to me that all the arrows are pointing in different directions right now," the director said. "Step one is we've got to get the arrows pointed in the same direction."
By hosting that conversation, the team had collected honest data about the current reality, and that data gave the director something concrete to bring to executive leadership. The roles of the state, the regions, and the schools in supporting this kind of work had never been clearly defined, and now there was evidence of why that mattered.
Leading in a Culture of Change: Everyone Designs Learning Experiences
This weekend I was re-listening to Michael Fullan's (2020) Leading in a Culture of Change. Fullan is candid that there's no step-by-step recipe for change, because the problem is too complex to treat in a linear way. One idea I took from it is that whatever level of the system you work in, you are a designer of learning experiences. A teacher designs them for students. A coach designs them for teachers. A regional lead designs them for coaches and principals, and a state team designs them for regional leads.
So the real question becomes where those learning experiences live in a system, and whether they happen often enough to change anything.
Move 2: Match PLC Expectations to the Time Teachers Actually Have
That question took us somewhere uncomfortable. If we want teachers to deeply understand new math standards through the lens of fluency, when do they actually get to do that thinking?
In many systems, the honest answer is almost never. One elementary coordinator we support in another state gets nine hours of PLC time for the entire year, split into three cycles. Another system we work with has no PLC time at all. In places like that, the work can't look the same, and expectations have to shrink to match the time that exists.
As Jon Orr, co-founder of Make Math Moments put it recently, when we deliver PD without a plan for how it will live in a school's ongoing routines, it's like a teacher lecturing to the class and then sitting down and saying, "Well, I did my job." The information was shared, but no one knows whether anyone learned it. (We've written more about what not to do when planning math professional development.)
Why PLCs in Education Need Both Content and System Design
So the team is really working on two problems at once, like two strands of a double helix.
- Content. Building a shared understanding of what fluency means and what evidence of it looks like in student work, so the people leading this work at every level are calibrated.
- System design. Making sure there is an engine at the school level that gives teachers the same opportunity to think deeply about standards that the state team gets.
Without that engine, the learning stops at the regional level, no matter how strong the training is. (For one picture of what that school-level engine can look like week to week, see our guide to designing PLCs around a repeatable student-work cycle.)
Not every barrier is the state math team's to remove. What they can do is notice those barriers and send that information back up, so leadership sees what is and isn't possible. Learning flows down, information flows up, and the system gets a little stronger each time.
Is your professional learning reaching classrooms? If you're not sure where the work is stalling between the training room and the classroom, the free Math Improvement Plan Assessment takes about 12 minutes and gives you a custom report on your system's area of greatest need.
Move 3: Start Your Professional Learning Community Work in One School
Near the end of the call, one team member said something I loved. All of this was new to him. "Everything is theory for me," he said. He didn't want to design a statewide PLC system before he had ever really been part of one.
That led to my recommendation. Start with the smallest system you can study, which is a single grade-level PLC in a single school. Put on the hat of a fourth grade teacher in that school, with that curriculum and that data, and learn what it takes to make deep collaborative learning work there before trying to scale it.
Improvement Science: Learning Fast to Implement Well
In Learning to Improve, Anthony Bryk and his colleagues (2015) describe this as learning fast to implement well. You study the problem at a small scale, you learn what conditions are needed for a practice to work, and then you spread what you've learned. Starting big and working your way down to the classroom tends to produce plans that look good on paper but don't survive contact with a real school.
The team already had a place in mind. One elementary school had asked for help. Instead of seeing that as too small to matter, they started to see it as the best possible place to learn. The ideal version would include the regional lead too, so the state, region, and school are all learning side by side with a shared learning stance.
Move 4: Experience a PLC Before You Scale It
The last move was the simplest. One team member asked whether our team could lead their team through a PLC, so everyone would have a common experience to build from.
The Professional Learning Community Questions That Drive the Work
That's exactly the right instinct. Most of the team's discussion that day was about the structure of a strong PLC. Richard DuFour and his colleagues (2016) frame it around a few driving questions in Learning by Doing:
- What do we want students to learn?
- How will we know if they've learned it?
- What will we do when they have, or haven't?
But understanding those questions in theory is very different from sitting with colleagues, studying a standard, looking at student work, and deciding together what to do next.
So we'll set a time where everyone puts on their teacher hats. We'll bring in work from schools we're supporting, dig into a standard ahead of an upcoming assessment, talk about what exemplars would look like, and decide what the evidence tells us. (If you want a model for that standards conversation, here's how we unpack math standards with teacher teams.) It won't be perfect, and it doesn't need to be. The goal is to model what it looks like to think deeply about mathematics teaching and learning, so the team can recognize it, and eventually build it, at every level of the system.
What Made the Difference: One Shared Picture of a Professional Learning Community
The rollout wins are real, and the team should be proud of them. But the bigger success this month was the team's willingness to say that they weren't yet on the same page, and to treat that as information rather than failure.
By the end of the call, the team had a clearer path forward:
- They'll keep using their regional PLC to build shared understanding of fluency and the standards.
- They'll study one grade-level PLC in one school before trying to scale anything.
- They'll experience a PLC together, as learners, before asking anyone else to lead one.
As the branch director put it, the tension in the room was understandable and healthy, and it was something to navigate together. Change at scale rarely starts at scale. It starts with one team, one school, and one honest conversation about where things actually stand.
Your Next Step
If your own system is rolling out new standards or initiatives and isn't sure whether they're reaching classrooms, the free Math Improvement Plan Assessment is a quick way to see where the work may be stalling.
Frequently Asked Questions About Building a Professional Learning Community
What is a professional learning community in math education?
A professional learning community, or PLC, is a team of educators who learn together to improve student learning. In practice, that means studying a standard, looking at student work, and deciding together what to do next. As one state math team discovered, the label means little until everyone shares the same picture of the work.
What are the four PLC questions?
The four PLC questions come from Richard DuFour and his colleagues: What do we want students to learn? How will we know if they've learned it? How will we respond when some students don't learn it? How will we extend learning for students who already have? Using them with colleagues around real student work matters more than memorizing them.
What does a healthy PLC look like?
A healthy PLC looks like colleagues sitting together to study a standard, examine student work, discuss what exemplars would look like, and decide what the evidence tells them to do next. It doesn't need to be perfect. The goal is deep, shared thinking about mathematics teaching and learning, happening often enough to change practice.
Why do professional learning communities fail to reach teachers?
PLCs often stall when roles and definitions are unclear. In the state described here, some regions held PLCs with math leads that never reached teachers, and others weren't sure PLCs happened in schools at all. Without a school-level engine for teacher learning, the work stops at the regional level, no matter how strong the training is.
How do you implement PLCs across a district or state?
Start smaller than feels comfortable. Study one grade-level PLC in one school, ideally with state, regional, and school leaders learning side by side. Improvement science, as Bryk and his colleagues describe it, means learning fast to implement well: learn what conditions a practice needs at a small scale, then spread what you've learned.
How much time does a PLC need?
There's no universal number, but expectations have to match the time that exists. One elementary coordinator gets nine hours of PLC time for an entire year, split into three cycles, and some systems have no PLC time at all. When time is that limited, the work can't look the same, and expectations have to shrink to match.
References
Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America's schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press. (Link goes to the Carnegie Foundation's page for the book, since I couldn't find a live Harvard Education Press product page.)
DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., Many, T. W., & Mattos, M. (2016). Learning by doing: A handbook for professional learning communities at work (3rd ed.). Solution Tree Press. (Link goes to Solution Tree's page for the 4th edition, published 2024.)
Fullan, M. (2020). Leading in a culture of change (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
About the Author
Yvette Lehman is Chief Academic Officer at Make Math Moments, where she coaches state, district, and school math teams through their improvement work and co-hosts the Making Math Moments That Matter podcast with Jon Orr. Yvette struggled with math as a student, and visual models changed how she saw it. That experience drives her focus on conceptual understanding and elementary progressions.
