While PLCs are found in schools across the country, not all PLCs deliver the level of instructional improvement educators hope for. Even highly committed teams can slip into routines that feel busy rather than meaningful, or collaborative but not instructional. 

Done right, PLCs can have an immense impact—not only on student achievement, but on building a culture of continuous improvement and learning for educators. To uncover the key to a strong PLC, we turned to two essential handbooks, Amplify Your Impact and Learning by Doing, along with the lived experience from educators doing the work every day.

Together, these expert perspectives reveal three practical strategies to move PLC time beyond routine meetings and lead to real instructional improvement.

‍

What Makes an Effective PLC?

A PLC, or professional learning community, is a team of educators who meet regularly to collaborate and share expertise with the goal of improving student learning. PLC meetings are a protected time for examining evidence of learning, planning instruction in response to that evidence, and collectively building teacher knowledge.

In an effective PLC, teachers walk away knowing exactly what they learned, what decisions were made, and what next steps they’ll take in the classroom. The qualities of an outcomes-based PLC include:

• Shared Goals and Vision: Taking the time to craft a team charter and mission will help educators keep meetings focused and goal-driven. As a good starting point, Amplify Your Impact recommends developing a Strategy Implementation Guide to increase clarity around the PLC’s purpose and goals.
• Structured Format and Agenda: When teams operate from a pre-established agenda following the same general flow, meetings stay on track and focused on student outcomes. Plus, members can gather relevant data and materials in advance, saving time during meetings.
• Data-Informed: Instead of relying on anecdotes and guesswork, PLCs must be driven by high-quality data from formative and summative assessments and intervention plans. In a strong PLC, educators review the previous week’s data and establish a plan for gathering next week’s data, creating assessments as needed.
• Action-Oriented: Looking at data is not enough—teams must act on it. After reviewing data to determine who is or is not learning, educators must then ask, “How will we respond?” Action plans may include corrective teaching in small groups, modeling an example, or alternate assignments.‍
• Collaborative: In Learning by Doing, Richard DuFour says, “When you remove educators from doing the work, you remove them from the learning.” PLC time is just as much about building teacher knowledge as it is student learning. Collaborating not only leads to better student outcomes, it also collectively increases educator learning.
  ‍

3 Ways to Strengthen Your PLC Outcomes This Year

We looked to the experts for the best ways to improve PLC processes and student achievement. Three actionable changes rose to the top to help teams sharpen their focus, make better use of time, and translate data into instruction more consistently.

‍

1. Separate Your Data Time from Your Planning Time

As instructional designer at Falling Creek Middle School in Chesterfield County, Virginia, Ursula Rockefeller led the charge on reconfiguring her school’s PLC process. One of the most valuable changes she made was to separate the data review meeting from the planning meeting in PLCs.

PLCs in Falling Creek meet twice a week for 45 minutes each. The first meeting is dedicated to data, and the second to planning based on those insights. The plus side of this structure is that teachers have a chance to digest and act on what they’ve learned. For example, if the team decides that a new formative assessment is needed, teachers can create one in advance of the next meeting before too much time has passed.

While some educators may be hesitant to devote two weekly meetings to their PLC, Rockefeller insists that this divide leads to more productive and impactful time. That’s largely thanks to Rockefeller’s meeting templates and guiding questions which ensure that every minute of the short meetings is valuable. 

Teams that adopt this approach don’t just meet—they’re able to focus their time on making data-based decisions to best support their students.

‍

2. Make a “Keep, Drop, Create” List

Before teams can improve instruction, they need absolute clarity on what students should actually learn. In Learning by Doing, Richard Dufour cites Tom Many’s “Keep, Drop, Create” process as a way to identify nonessential curriculum. When teams regularly evaluate what stays, what goes, and what needs to be built, they protect instructional time and ensure that every minute pushes students toward the outcomes that matter most.

How It Works

1. Once a quarter, devote a grade-level or departmental meeting to analyze whether the curriculum actually being implemented matches the intended curriculum or standards.
2. Every educator brings their lesson plans and a copy of the essential curriculum or standards.
3. A team member hangs three large pieces of paper on the wall of the meeting room and labels each with one of the three categories: Keep, Drop, or Create. (This can also be done virtually with a platform like Miro.)
4. Each team member is given sticky notes in three different colors, one for each of the three categories. Educators then reflect honestly on their teaching to sort their topics accordingly:
   ‍
   1. Keep: Topics that are included in both the essential curriculum documents and the teacher’s lesson plans.
   2. Drop: Topics included in a teacher’s lesson plans but not reflected in the essential curriculum documents.
   3. Create: Topics identified as essential but not addressed in a teacher’s lesson plans.

“This process not only assists in discovering curriculum gaps and topics that must be addressed in upcoming units,” says DuFour, “but it also helps teams create a stop-doing list of topics that are not essential.” With this list in hand, PLC teams can reclaim instructional time, reduce teacher overload, and ensure students spend more time on the concepts that drive mastery.
‍

3. Create Common Formative Assessments

PLCs need to be speaking a common language informed by regular data. Reviewing data becomes a challenge when assessments are inconsistent across teams. That’s why common formative assessments are integral to the PLC process.

Team-developed common formative assessments serve both purposes of a PLC:

1. Meeting individual student’s needs through timely and targeted intervention or extension
2. Helping teachers improve their individual and collective teaching practice

But teams must be strategic about the formative assessments they create. Assessments must be reliable enough so that teachers are confident in the results and not tempted to change assessments regularly. 

When building an assessment, Solution Tree’s influential book, Amplify Your Impact recommends considering:

• The number of questions to include for each target
• The number of points to assign to each item and each target to ensure a fair balance for grading
• The amount of emphasis and time spent on the target
• The target’s level of importance
• The item’s wrong answers, or distractors, since these provide information about student misconceptions

While these questions may lead to ample discussion, getting on the same page will enable educators to build consistent assessments to best understand—and ultimately improve—student performance.

Streamline Your PLC Process with Wayground

With Wayground, PLCs get the consistency and visibility needed to translate discussion into action. Instead of spending valuable time gathering materials or stitching together data from different tools, teachers walk into PLCs already grounded in clear, shared evidence of student performance.

Wayground directly supports the PLC process with:

• Common Assessments: Build, share, and reuse common assessments so every teacher is measuring the same targets.
• Automatic Accommodations: Apply required supports consistently across classrooms without creating extra versions or extra work.
• Instructional Insights: Access question-level and standards-based reporting that reveals misconceptions and next steps instantly.
• Job-Embedded PD: Receive on-demand support through embedded tips, model items, and AI-powered guidance that help strengthen assessment design and instructional decisions.

Wayground strengthens every part of the PLC cycle by giving teams a single platform to plan, assess, and analyze learning. With Wayground, PLCs stop being another meeting on the calendar and become what they were designed to be—a powerful engine for accelerating student growth.