Philadelphia Learning Collaborative

The Philadelphia Learning Collaborative has three programs: 1) workport@plc 2) plc teacher institute, and 3) purpose-driven community of practice (cop). The workport@plc is dedicated to increasing the capacity of school partnership coordinators and employers to place high school students in high-quality, real-world Learning experiences. We convene partnership coordinators from eight schools to build the materials and structures needed to accomplish this goal. This year we hired a real-world Learning project manager to anchor the workport, drafted an employer handbook, developed satisfaction surveys for employers and students, an employer interest form, began generating real-world Learning opportunities for students, and negotiated with big picture Learning to begin using imblaze, an online platform, to inventory and share real-world Learning opportunities with and between schools. Plc teacher institute is an educator-led professional development series for teachers at our member schools. This year, we hosted six sessions on various student-centered, deeper Learning practices. We paid participating teachers stipends and awarded them continuing education credits. An average of 15 teachers attended each session. This year, we launched the purpose-driven community of practice (cop) with 26 teachers from seven schools. The goal of the cop was to professionally develop teachers to implement an identity development curriculum in advisory. Teachers attended saturday trainings and scheduled in-school cops with their peers who were also participating in the community. Over the course of the year teachers facilitated professional development sessions, adapted the prescribed curriculum and created lesson plans for their individual contexts, had 30 or more of their students craft purpose statements, and maintained an online cop.