Are you the only art teacher in your district? Or do you teach with a few fellow art colleagues? As you well know, art teachers often feel isolated or alone on our own little island when it comes to public education. PLC has been my solution to putting an end to this feeling! No longer do I feel as if I’m the only one who is dealing with unclean paint brushes left in the sink, or looking for ideas on how to organize & display students’ artwork.
What is a PLC?
Professional Learning Communities, also known as PLC, is something our school district switched to two years ago. Our students get out on Wednesday’s at 2:09pm and my colleagues and I have a chance to meet with each other as professionals. It has been an amazing experience as the elementary art teachers and I have a time to meet. We are actually getting what happens in each other’s art room and as an added bonus we are getting to know each other!
This year we added another .2 time art teacher. Yes, all of our 1st & 2nd graders are screaming for joy to have more art time. I was previously meeting with just the elementary art teacher before, and we found many benefits of this, but now we have one more person to brainstorm ideas about art with. As a united art department force we are starting to dig into re-aligning our benchmarks to the national art standards.
We PLC every other week and the opposite weeks we are learning about Project Based Learning, PBL. So we PLC & PBL alternate each other, never too many acronyms in education, right? Look for future articles as I talk about the wonderful PBL project we are working on!
So does your school PLC? Tell us about it in the comments below.
How do you spend your PLC time?
Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.
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