Effective Elementary Special Education PLC Meetings

As an elementary special education teacher, I find that it can be easy to feel like I’m working in a silo—I’m moving between classrooms, interacting with so many different teachers and students, and I haven’t always had time to connect meaningfully with my special education team during the day.

While we’d tried to connect as a professional learning community (PLC) in the past, we often ran out of time or struggled to even find a time to connect to begin with.

We came to realize that connecting as a PLC was incredibly valuable, and we needed to ensure that we could find the time and make the most of it.

5 WAYS TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR PLC meeting TIME

These five strategies can help special education teams set up a consistent PLC meeting time and use that time effectively, allowing for meaningful discussion and action planning around student progress.

1. Set the meeting and hold the time. The first step in setting up an effective PLC meeting is finding the time to do it. With my team, we wanted to ensure that everyone on the elementary special education team could attend the meeting, even if that meant the meeting would be shorter.

We were able to find a 30-minute block to connect each week, and in our first meeting, we talked about how important it was to hold this time.

2. Establish a meeting routine. Just as we set routines in our classrooms to help students make efficient use of their time, we need to do the same thing. For our meeting, we have the routine of reviewing one goal area per meeting—this could be math foundational skills proficiency, reading level, or a social and emotional goal.

By choosing just one area, everyone in the PLC knows what data to review and can do so before the meeting so that we all come prepared to discuss the students that need support.

This saves time, as we are not reviewing data in the meeting, but instead we are focusing only on the students who are not reaching their goals.

To make this routine work, it is helpful to choose one point person for the meetings who sends out what goal will be reviewed at the next meeting. In our PLC, our point person sends this out as part of the follow-up email from each meeting. This just outlines what we discussed and what we will focus on in the next meeting. It may be your special education department head that takes this role on, or a chosen teacher from the group.

3. Keep discussions productive. During the meeting, it is important to keep discussions focused on the data before us and focused on the specific goal we are trying to help students achieve. It can be easy to get sidetracked by something that happened earlier that day or start to commiserate over an instructional intervention that isn’t working. But that isn’t always the most productive use of time.

To ensure that we stay on task, we have a dedicated member of the PLC who is responsible for keeping the conversation productive and on task.

This team member leads the conversation, asking other teachers for their input on how a given student is doing and how a given intervention is either helping or not helping. Teachers don’t start action planning in this step; instead, they simply state what is and is not working.

4. Set action steps. Once we know which students need support, we move on to action planning. This is an important part of the PLC meeting where everyone is able to share their experience and their expertise with the group.

This is the real meat of the discussion, where we collaborate and take advantage of the varied perspectives in the group. This is also the portion of the meeting that can take the longest, so it is important to get to this step as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As everyone in the group shares their ideas on what could help, a designated recorder in the group writes down the intervention ideas so that teachers have a list of options to choose from when they go back to working with the student.

A teacher does not need to choose which action they will take during the PLC meeting, but instead can review the list on their own afterward and decide what makes the most sense, based on their knowledge of the student.

5. Reflect and refine the process. Lastly, throughout the year, it is important to take time to reflect on the effectiveness of the PLC meeting and make adjustments as needed. In our PLC, we try to set one meeting per quarter to reflect, and during that time, rather than discuss the student data, we just discuss the meeting itself and how it could be improved.

This helps everyone feel more connected and more comfortable with the PLC because they have the opportunity to share their opinion and make changes when needed. The more everyone feels like a valued part of the PLC, the better the team can work together.

When done right, a PLC meeting can be incredibly impactful for teachers of all experience levels. And, maybe more important, these meetings can lead to positive change for our students.

These five strategies offer a framework that teams can use to ground their time together and set the stage for meaningful discussion and action planning.