The Hidden Skillset of PLC Facilitation: Why Strong Teachers Need More Than Content Expertise

I used to believe the same thing many school leaders believe: that the strongest teachers would naturally make the strongest PLC facilitators. It made perfect sense to me at the time. If someone had strong instructional results, solid classroom management, and the respect of their peers, surely they could guide a professional learning community. In my early years as an instructional coach, I didn’t question this assumption.

It didn’t take long for that belief to fall apart.

What I began to notice, slowly at first, and then all at once, was that the moment the work shifted from teaching children to leading adults, even the strongest teachers struggled. A teacher who could seamlessly manage a classroom of thirty students could suddenly go silent when a colleague pushed back. Another who delivered beautiful instruction day after day couldn’t keep a PLC conversation from drifting off course. One of the most respected teachers in the building unintentionally shut down her quieter teammates simply because she didn’t yet know how to guide collaborative decision-making instead of directing the group.

These early experiences were humbling. They forced me to confront something I hadn’t been prepared for: strong teaching does not automatically translate into strong facilitation. Facilitation requires a different skillset, one that teachers are rarely trained in, and one that I had not been trained in either. I was expecting teachers to do something I was still learning how to do myself.

This realization became one of the most important leadership lessons of my career. It shaped how I selected facilitators, how I supported them, and ultimately how I approached PLC implementation in every school that followed.

My Early PLC Experiences: Three Attempts, Three Lessons

My journey with PLCs began long before I ever coached them. My earliest exposure came as a 3rd-grade grade-level chair on a team with enough personality conflict to fill a case study. Nearly fifteen years into my teaching careerI had never heard of PLCs at that point. So when our new administrative team asked us to begin “meeting as a PLC,” I had no framework or skillset for navigating the adult dynamics that predictably surfaced. The experience was rough, and while I didn’t know it then, it would later become one of the clearest examples of why facilitators need explicit training.

Later, I participated in a district-wide math PLC initiative in Clark County School District. This was my first time implementing PLC structures schoolwide, and I poured myself into it. Each month, I learned more about unwrapping standards and the mechanics of the PLC process, then returned to my school to teach teachers what I had learned. I created beautiful agendas, offered trainings, and tried hard to model enthusiasm and consistency. Teachers followed the steps. They completed the templates.

But instruction didn’t change.
Student outcomes didn’t move.
The work remained polite, predictable, and shallow.

And while I had learned a tremendous amount about standards and PLC structures, I couldn’t effectively support a schoolwide system from the classroom while teaching full-time. That experience taught me two important truths: implementing and supporting PLCs must be someone’s actual job, not something added on top of teaching. and teachers need structured time built into the day to collaborate meaningfully.

My second attempt came when I became an instructional coach. The principal wanted us to “do PLCs,” but what she truly wanted was a schoolwide book study on The Reading Strategies Book. I tried my best to make it work. But book studies, while valuable, are not PLCs. Very quickly, the work devolved into lesson planning sessions rather than data-driven discussions. And because teachers needed help, I stepped in to support.

Except my support turned into doing the facilitation for them.

I wrote every agenda.
I led every discussion.
I redirected every tangent.
I carried nearly all the cognitive load.

It felt helpful at the time. But it removed the wrong barriers. Teachers were participating, but they weren’t growing in their capacity to lead the work. The PLCs became dependent on me, which made the system fragile. If I wasn’t there, the PLC simply didn’t function at the same level.

By the time I moved to my third school, I had a sense of what wasn’t working, but I still needed to figure out what would.

The Breakthrough: Facilitators Need a System Behind Them

When I started implementing PLCs at my third school, the first thing I realized was that I couldn’t build a schoolwide system alone. So I pulled together a team of instructional coaches and created a leadership PLC, a PLC about the school’s PLCs. We met regularly to look at what was working, what wasn’t, and what support teachers needed. This leadership PLC was the anchor that had been missing all along.

But the bigger realization came from reflecting on the patterns I had seen in my earlier experiences: the dysfunctional grade-level team from my teaching years, the well-intentioned but ineffective math PLC rollout, and the book-study-turned-PLC at my second school. The common denominator was clear:

Teachers were expected to facilitate work they had never been taught how to facilitate.

The breakthrough moment came during a 5th-grade PLC where the strongest instructional voice in the room was a brilliant, charismatic teacher who pushed hard for her approach. She was confident and articulate, and the rest of the team deferred to her. But what went unnoticed was that the quietest teacher at the table consistently had stronger student outcomes in the very area they were discussing. She never volunteered her perspective, and the facilitator didn’t know how to draw it out or balance the team dynamic. The conversation collapsed under the weight of one dominant voice.

In another PLC, I found myself stepping in repeatedly to keep the meeting from derailing. I was asking the questions, redirecting the discussion, and providing clarifications, not the facilitator. And it hit me: facilitators weren’t stepping up because they didn’t know how.

Not because they weren’t strong teachers.
Not because they didn’t care.
But because we had never taught them the hidden skillset of facilitation.

Why Instructional Expertise Doesn’t Automatically Translate to Facilitation Expertise

I once believed strong teachers would naturally become strong facilitators. But facilitation requires skills that are rarely part of teacher preparation or classroom experience. Teaching students and leading adults involve fundamentally different competencies. Teachers are trained to deliver instruction, manage a classroom, and guide individual learners. PLC facilitation requires navigating adult personalities, prompting reflective discourse, balancing conflicting ideas, and maintaining neutrality while guiding a team toward shared decisions.

Once I understood this, I no longer assumed that the strongest teacher should automatically become the facilitator. Instead, I started thinking differently about who should lead. I began paying attention to the teachers who had strong colleague relationship skills. The teachers who listened deeply, stayed curious, asked thoughtful questions, and demonstrated a genuine growth mindset. These were the teachers who could navigate difficult conversations without escalating them, who could stay neutral in moments of disagreement, and who were willing to learn how to guide adults rather than direct them. That shift in thinking fundamentally changed the way I approached facilitator selection and support.

The Human Complexity of Leading Peers

What makes facilitation challenging has very little to do with content and everything to do with context. Teachers are accustomed to leading students, not peers. When a teacher becomes a facilitator, the dynamics change instantly. They’re still a colleague, but now they’re also responsible for guiding the work. They must be neutral, yet influential; supportive, yet able to hold boundaries; collaborative, yet clear about expectations.

This tension of leading without positional authority creates a delicate balance that even seasoned educators struggle to navigate. Facilitators often fear damaging relationships, offending colleagues, or stepping into conflict. They worry about appearing bossy. They hesitate to challenge veteran teachers or redirect conversations.

Without training, facilitators often default to avoiding the very moves that make PLCs effective: redirecting, asking probing questions, challenging assumptions, guiding the team back to student evidence. It’s no wonder PLCs fall into familiar patterns of venting, planning, tangents, and surface-level conversations. The facilitator’s silence becomes the PLC’s stagnation.

When Facilitators Aren’t Supported, the System Suffers

I’ve seen the same symptoms across multiple schools: meetings drift, dominant voices take over, quiet teachers disengage, and data discussions become personal or, worse, are avoided entirely. Facilitators become frustrated, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to move the group forward. And because no one wants to harm relationships, the PLC becomes “nice” rather than effective.

This isn’t a sign of weak facilitators.
It’s a sign of weak support systems.

Facilitators need professional learning, practice, and coaching, not assumptions that they’ll figure it out. And they need leaders who reinforce their role, protect their time, and model the kind of adult collaboration they expect from teachers.

When Leaders Undermine Facilitators Without Meaning To

Two leadership behaviors show up repeatedly in schools where facilitators struggle.

The first is when administrators jump into PLCs and immediately take over the conversation. Even when done with good intentions, it sends an unmistakable message: the facilitator’s role isn't real or trusted.

The second is using PLC time for announcements or compliance tasks. This communicates that collaboration is flexible, interruptible, and secondary to other needs. When PLC time becomes fragmented, facilitators lose momentum and teams lose purpose.

These behaviors are rarely intentional, but they undermine facilitators nonetheless. And they reinforce my core belief: if leaders want PLCs to thrive, they must actively support, protect, and calibrate with the people leading them.

The Hidden Skillset That Makes PLCs Work

Over time, I learned that effective facilitation hinges on a few foundational elements. Facilitators need clarity of purpose so they understand what the team is working toward and why it matters. They need roles and structures that promote consistency, predictability, and safety. They need the ability to stay neutral, even when they have strong opinions. They need relational trust, which comes from reliability and fairness.

Most importantly, they need partnership with leadership. Facilitators cannot do the work alone. They need coaching, calibration, and reinforcement, not occasional check-ins. When facilitators feel supported, they take risks, guide deeper conversations, and lead with confidence. When they do not, they shrink back, and the work stays shallow.

Where Schools Must Go Next

If I could offer one lesson to leaders from my decade-long journey with PLCs, it would be this: teacher leadership isn’t instinctive. It must be intentionally developed. Facilitators need professional learning, modeling, and ongoing partnership. When schools invest in teaching facilitators how to lead adults rather than assuming they can the change is immediate and noticeable. Conversations deepen, teams collaborate more meaningfully, and instructional practice begins to shift in ways that truly impact students.

PLCs only improve student learning when the adults guiding them are equipped to lead. And when facilitators are trained and supported, the PLC stops being a meeting and instead becomes the engine of schoolwide improvement.

If you’re a school leader or instructional coach reading this, here is the same reflection that changed everything for me:

Have you taught your facilitators how to facilitate, or have you simply asked them to?

If the answer is the latter, you’re not alone. But now is the moment to shift. PLCs will only be as strong as the people leading them. Investing in facilitator training isn’t optional; it’s foundational.

How Leaders Can Train and Support Facilitators

In my upcoming article, I’ll dig into what meaningful facilitator training actually looks like including how to build a yearlong facilitator support plan, how leadership PLCs keep collaborative systems healthy, and how to create structures that grow teacher leadership without burning people out. I’ll also highlight the most common mistakes leaders make when rolling out facilitator roles and what to do instead.

If your facilitators are leading without training, support, or partnership, you won’t want to miss what comes next.