What is PLC?

PLC is a professional learning community which acts as an extended learning opportunity to foster collaborative learning among colleagues within a particular work environment or field. This year it became part of the ongoing foreign teacher training program during the spring semester for 2016. It was used as a way to organize teachers from school districts into smaller groups. Foreign teacher in their groups then had to decide on a specific issue within the EFL environment at the public schools in Hsinchu city, which they wanted to better understand, improve or change by means of a PLC approach.

Our group, which included Corli Steyn from Dongyuan Elementary School, Janda Aucamp, from Yang Guang Elementary School, Nikki MacArthur from Chu-lian Elementary School and Simone Scheepers from Dongyuan Elementary School had decided to focus on our emerging students and how to raise their levels of motivation and participation in the EFL classroom.

Within the framework, of our somewhat limited knowledge regarding PLC, we had decided to use the guidelines from the handouts given to us during training in a way that suits our needs and focus. One of the goals of PLC is to generate an environment of trust and co-working in a professional community. We as a group did succeed in that.

According to our guidelines we had to find a focus/problem for our group. We then had to define why it is a potential problem and what goals we will implement to gain control and improve this problem. Within our goals we had to decide on certain strategies and assessment and then to do a self-reflection with follow up remediation to improve our students learning outcomes in a continuous and enjoyable way.

FOCUS/PROBLEM

How to motivate and improve participation under emerging students in an all-inclusive environment:

The schools in Hsinchu city have an all-inclusive policy where students of different levels of English ability will be placed together in one class. We can therefore assume that the primary focus of the EFL classroom should be on uplifting emerging students at an attainable level. A secondary concern is to find ways to engage the more advanced students. However, with the dynamics of classroom interaction it is all too easy to let the emerging students fall behind. This made “a focus on our emerging students and their motivation” in our opinion a rather pressing and urgent issue. Being introduced to PLC gave us the perfect opportunity to brainstorm our respective classroom environments and experiences and to learn from each other.

1. Reasons for low achieving students?

Within our PLC group we concluded that the following reasons might explain some of the issues responsible for our lower achieving students struggles in the EFL classroom:

• Not enough exposure to English;
  
• Students give up if they cannot master success in the EFL classroom;
• Loss of confidence levels;
• Lack of understanding classroom;
• Often cognitive or physical constraints will have a direct impact on students’ English language skills     and development;

2. Our goals within PLC?

We had decided to investigate, implement and develop ways to build on our students’ confidence levels, and their willingness to learn. This led to the development of practical and workable strategies in an all-inclusive classroom environment. We then had comprehensive discussions on these strategies and shared our experiences from our perspective schools. A time constraint for our PLC group limited us from individually implementing all these strategies. However collectively all strategies were implemented and tested. Therefore, we concluded in follow up discussions that these strategies were attainable and believe that our ideas are therefore worth sharing.

3. Strategies based on PLC interaction

We by now had a focus and a goal on how to motivate our emerging students. Therefore, the next step was to implement these strategies in the FT directed EFL classroom.

Strategies:

• Classroom routines.
  • A classroom routine is simply a well-rehearsed response to a teacher's directive. The alternative is usually noise, milling around, and time wasting on the part of students, as well as frustration on the part of the teacher.
  • Our collective experiences indicated that meaningful classroom routines will start with setting up a classroom environment prior to the arrival of students, after which they can start to engage with meaningful activities. These activities will be most successful if a predictable pattern over the course of time is followed.
• Engage all students with role specific responsibilities, while at the same time using the facilitative power of the more affluent EFL students to give support to the emerging students. This was conducted in a respectful and discreet manner.
  • Engaged students will be involved in meaningful activities and tasks. They will also have a sense of competence regarding the EFL levels and assigned responsibilities. Furthermore, it generates opportunities for collaborative learning in an all-inclusive classroom.
• Differentiate the expectations of work produced to allow emerging students to develop a sense of achievement and self-motivation
  • These expectations included (but was not limited to) the role of relationships in the classroom, challenges set out to students, time management, making work relevant, having enough practice time and eventually project assessments and individual progress reports.
• A final strategy was to use real-life, open-ended activities to motivate students.
  • These strategies could potentially build on ideas from our British Council Workshops where we focused on Task Based Language Learning with a specific focus on pre, main and post task activities within any specific unit of instruction.

ROLE OF ASSESSMENT (3 parts)

• At some point assessment becomes an important tool to measure your students’ language learning progress. This in turn will assist in providing indicators for when a young language learner is ready to move on to the next level.
• Using assessment in this manner is a useful tool in the FT directed EFL classroom and should not be used as part of standardized test results.
• When assessing a student’s progress do it in comparison with previous baseline testing and having a clear understanding of reasons for underachieving in the EFL classroom.
• Assessment should also be self-directed towards the teacher as a tool for professional growth and mediation in the classroom

Reasons for underachieving in the EFL classroom

1. Proposed checklist for STUDENT assessment under the PLC regime included:

• Assessment without increased student anxiety;
• Traditional paper and pencil tests are just not sufficient to build a student profile for support and remediation;
• Assessment should be used as a diagnostic tool;
• Emphasis should be on success and not on failure;
• There should be a specific focus on:
  • Personal response,
  • Performance based,
  • Communicative competence indicators in a classroom environment
• Be diligent in capturing all assessment requirements in order to be able to build a complete profile on the EFL learner in the classroom

2. Classroom observation with a focus on observing STUDENT interaction can be a powerful tool in finding ways to help and accommodate all learners.

Ideally a teacher can observe a class in progress with a focus on the learners. However, a peer or parent can also observe students during your instruction time for a workable PLC program. Pay attention to the following objectives during observation:

• Classroom interaction
• Concentration spans
• Distractors in the classroom
• Whole class observation
• Observing students individually

3. Self-Reflection

John Dewey said, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. Therefore, in our PLC group we discussed on how to use a self-reflecting questionnaire to find out if we understood:

• Student priorities;
• Different characteristics and learning styles;
• Students’ rights in an EFL environment and the teacher's responsibilities.

REMEDIATE/RESPONSE

n general, we focused on which strategies worked and didn’t work. These strategies were adjusted after further group discussions.

As an extra measure we looked at how to adjust the level of outcomes for our emerging students with

• A focus on individual attention and support to learners in and out of class;
• Individual reward systems which might increase student motivation;
• Finally, we concluded that being able to provide extra time to those learners might help them in achieving the desired goals and outcomes, but will need time.

Our young learners need our constant support and encouragement. Therefore, it is also important to build good relationships outside of the English class. Furthermore, it is important for our young learners to find ways to use their attained knowledge before moving on to the next level. Ways need to be utilized to reduce pressure on the young learners while at the same time achieving the outcomes and keeping them motivated to engage in and outside the EFL classroom when using their acquired English abilities.

PLC presentation in Donyuan	Group Discussion

PLC presentation in DongMen

A Big Success of Hsinchu City’s Training