Professional Learning Communities are meant to help teachers improve what matters most for students: learning, how learning happens, and the conditions that make learning possible. This guide introduces Adaptive PLC, a lightweight improvement approach designed for the conditions schools actually have: constrained time, complexity, compliance, and constant surprises.

These Adaptive PLC principles describe how we think, work, and improve the practice of teaching and learning together. When our work gets better, students and educators feel the difference.

Adaptive PLC teams form around a shared purpose. Team formation and membership should match that purpose, not a one-size-fits-all structure.

Team formation should be intentional but lightweight, guided by professional judgment and flexible enough to evolve as learning unfolds. The goal is not perfect alignment on day one, but to bring the right people together to start improving and learn through action. PLCs exist because meaningful improvement is too complex to do alone.

When forming Adaptive PLC teams, focus on three essentials that shape how the work begins and how it unfolds: purpose, people, and permission.

Permission is supported by a few practical conditions:

Autonomy does not remove responsibility. PLCs remain responsible for improving results, with flexibility in how they achieve them.

An Adaptive PLC includes roles for doing the improvement work and roles that support the conditions for that work. Roles are lightweight responsibilities, not fixed titles. They can rotate by cycle and scale based on what the work requires.

The Core Team is a small group of educators with the right mix of perspectives and expertise for the improvement work itself.

Supporting Members help make improvement possible without taking ownership of the work itself. They provide expertise, resources, coordination, or support while leaving decisions and learning with the Core Team. They may include coaches, specialists, partners outside the school, and even students when appropriate. They are pulled in to support the team as needed.

They keep priorities clear and remove friction, without managing the team's day-to-day learning and decisions. This separation protects team autonomy and keeps learning honest.

Real improvement unfolds in complex, changing conditions, requiring both clear direction and adaptability. Students respond unexpectedly, school conditions shift, and plans often need adjustment in practice.

Adaptive PLCs address this by pairing an Improvement Vision with short Improvement Sprints. The Vision sets direction, while Sprints deliver incremental progress and learning that compound toward that Vision through real classroom practice.

Teams establish an Improvement Vision, a shared destination guiding improvement over time without detailing every step. It leaves room to learn and adjust through multiple cycles.

The Improvement Vision is shaped by three questions:

An Improvement Vision typically spans at least a semester and often up to a year, focusing on outcomes rather than specific tasks or solutions.

Use this statement format to draft your Improvement Vision. It’s a helpful starting point, not a requirement.

An Improvement Sprint is a short cycle (six weeks or less) that turns an Improvement Vision into small tests in real practice, creating a steady rhythm of action and learning. Like chunking a big learning goal into manageable steps, an Improvement Sprint breaks an Improvement Vision into smaller, workable chunks. Each Sprint focuses on one Improvement Goal: the next meaningful step toward the Vision.

Each Improvement Sprint is composed of four Improvement Routines:

When one Improvement Sprint ends, the next begins, creating a steady rhythm of learning and improvement.

The Adaptive Improvement Sprint comes to life through four distinct, yet interconnected, routines. These short, repeatable processes provide a framework for action, learning, and continuous progress within each Sprint, ensuring your team stays agile and effective.

The Plan is the first Improvement Routine for each Sprint. Its primary aim is to establish sufficient clarity for immediate action, rather than creating a rigid, overly detailed blueprint or getting bogged down in endless discussions. The Plan is structured around four key components:

The Plan begins by clearly defining the Improvement Goal for the current Sprint.

This Goal uses the same outcome-focused language as the overarching Improvement Vision, but it is specifically tailored to be achievable within a single Improvement Sprint. It articulates what the team anticipates seeing next if they are moving in the right direction. An effective Improvement Goal is:

Indicators are crucial for assessing progress towards the Improvement Goal. These are practical, everyday markers that inform decisions on what to continue, change, or stop as the Sprint unfolds. They help the team identify what's working and what isn't.

Indicators are often drawn from daily practice, such as:

Once the Improvement Goal is clear, the team decides what to try next. In Adaptive PLCs, learning happens through small experiments. An experiment is a focused, real-world change made to learn how current conditions respond. Experiments are not plans or commitments; they are small, testable changes used to learn what actually helps. For each experiment, two essential parts are captured:

Tasks are the concrete actions the team will undertake to execute experiments and derive learning from them. They serve to support experiments and learning, not as a separate plan. These may include preparation, determining when and where an experiment will take place, communication and coordination, and establishing how the team will capture observations.

Check-In is a brief, focused coordination point designed to help the team support one another and make necessary course corrections during the Sprint. Typically lasting 5–10 minutes , it occurs at least once a Sprint and often more. Teams can use these four questions to guide their Check-In:

Review occurs at the culmination of each Improvement Sprint. Its purpose is to understand what transpired and determine subsequent actions. Review translates results into validated insights, ensuring these insights shape future decisions.

Review fosters transparency by addressing four questions, in a specific order:

Retrospective follows Review, completing the Improvement Sprint. Its objective is to refine how the team collaborates, making improvement processes more efficient and effective over time. By default, Retrospective is exclusive to the Core Team, fostering honest reflection and psychological safety. External perspectives may be invited when genuinely needed, but this is an intentional and optional decision.

During Retrospective, the team critically examines the methods of working that contributed to the Sprint's outcomes. This includes team dynamics, processes, tools, and the overall environment. Retrospective culminates in the selection of one small change to the team's working approach, to be implemented in the subsequent Improvement Sprint. This focus on a single change prevents overload, respects time constraints, and increases the likelihood of successful adoption. It aims to reduce friction or enhance a practice, ensuring the next Sprint runs more smoothly. The chosen change should be specific, actionable, and small enough for immediate trial.

Adaptive PLCs work best when improvement work is transparent, shared, and easy to access. The goal is not more documentation. It is a shared picture of what the team is trying, what is happening, and what to do next.

These artifacts stay visible throughout the Sprint so work stays aligned and does not disappear between meetings. Visibility reduces rehashing, surfaces obstacles sooner, and supports faster decisions about what to continue, adjust, or stop.

These artifacts are lightweight documentation: just enough to keep the team aligned, transparent, and ready to adapt. They should be easy to update as the work changes.

Teams may add additional elements to any artifact if it helps them get improvement work done.

Adaptive PLC stands on the shoulders of people who have spent decades making improvement more practical, learnable, and real. We're grateful for the communities and practitioners who shaped the ideas that influenced this work. We have adapted these ideas for schools and for the daily realities educators face.

Adaptive PLC is designed to be used, not just read. Understanding comes fastest when a real team applies it to a real problem and learns from what actually happens in daily practice. Choose one team and one meaningful focus. You can run the full model or start with a single routine, but ground it in real conditions. Take one step, look at what you’re seeing, and let that learning shape the next step. This keeps the work practical and prevents “rollout mode” before you have proof.

If you’re ready to start, don’t build everything from scratch.

The Adaptive PLC Starter Toolkit gives you the practical pieces teams usually need to get moving quickly: templates, facilitation guides, and ready-to-use resources for running a Sprint with clarity and consistency. It reduces setup time, keeps meetings focused, and helps teams stay anchored in evidence instead of discussion.

Find the course, toolkit, and resources at AdaptivePLC.org

If you've made it this far, thank you. The fact that you're here tells us something important: you care deeply about improving learning for students and making schools better places to work for educators.

That intent has always been there. Educators have never lacked commitment or care. What we've tried to do with Adaptive PLC is offer a practical way to turn that intent into everyday progress, without adding more weight or complexity to your work.

You don't need to be someone new or do something heroic to begin. You can start right where you are, with the team you have, and the challenges you're already facing. Small, thoughtful steps add up when they're guided by learning and evidence.

We hope this guide gives you a method that makes your effort feel more focused, more hopeful, and more likely to lead to real change for students and teachers alike.

Thank you for the work you're doing. It matters, and it's worth supporting.