Welcome to Collaborative Teaching and Student Learning

If you’re on this website, it’s probably because you’re a scholastic journalism professional who’s been asked by your administration to participate in a Professional Learning Community (PLC). And, if you’re like most journalism teachers, you’re quite possibly the only person in your building who does what you do, which makes collaborative teaching and data-based student learning—a hallmark of the PLC model created by Richard DuFour—almost impossible.

So what can you do? Plenty. And we can help.

With the backing of the Journalism Education Association (JEA), we created a National Journalism PLC (NJPLC) model to combat the very problems that plague journalism teachers like you. Over the years, we have developed and fine-tuned a digital PLC model to overcome the issues of space and time that stymie teachers in your situation.

Please note that we did not develop the DuFour PLC model; those important PLC questions—What do we want students to learn? How do we know when they learn it? What do we do when they don’t learn?—are integral to the entire process. All we’ve done is develop a way for you, as a journalism education professional, to fully participate in PLCs the way your colleagues in other departments have been participating for years.

Take some time to click around the site. We hope to answer many of your questions here and even provide you with examples of NJPLC work from some of our PLC groups around the country. If this intrigues you, then click on the link about how to get involved. We offer training and support in a number of different venues.

Thanks for visiting. We hope to hear from you soon.