Collaborate to ensure all students succeed

Creating a Collaborative Culture

Learn the key factors and practices to help create a true collaborative culture in your school or district. Establishing a collaborative culture can significantly impact student achievement and professional practice.

• Gain clarity on the work of teams in a PLC at Work and uncover the elements of effective team development.
• Emphasize the skills and behaviors that improve communication for individuals and teams.
• Enhance facilitating data conversations and managing consensus while working together.

Small Schools and Singletons in a PLC at Work®: Unique Challenges, Unlimited Potential

Whether you are the lone teacher in a grade or content area or are part of a small school community filled with singletons like yourself, you have a big role to play in a successful PLC. With the support of an expert practitioner, you will discover how to utilize your strengths, organize your resources, and enact significant lasting change to ensure learning for all. As part of your professional learning, you will explore authentic artifacts from small schools at elementary and secondary levels whose staff are working collaboratively within the PLC framework.

• Align teams to focus on essential skills, even if the content or grade levels are not the same.
• Get SMART about data and goals.
• Transform small school culture to achieve higher levels of learning for ALL students.
• Go vertical to create agenda-driven, mutually accountable content teams.

Developing Leaders to Support PLC at Work: Leading With Intention

Implementing and sustaining the PLC process requires diligent leaders who persist in ensuring that their school is a place in which administrators and teachers collaborate, make evidence-based decisions, understand that the student is the top priority, communicate effectively, and are involved in trusting relationships. Learn the actionable steps necessary to develop and lead a highly effective school culture aligned to these priorities.

• Explore eight interrelated concepts essential to your work in leading schools: achieving focus and staying intentional, establishing and maintaining organization, building shared leadership, using evidence for decision-making and action, prioritizing the student, leading instruction, fostering communication, and developing community and relationships.
• Learn how to enhance student achievement in your school or district with the PLC at Work process.
• Examine actionable school leadership steps that will assist you in becoming a more synergistic leader.

Personalize Student Learning in a PLC at Work

Personalized learning promotes increased achievement and engagement for all learners. Discover how your collaborative team can personalize learning to ignite all learners and address the fourth critical question of a PLC: “How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?”

• Discover how strategies that work for “question four students” can work with all students.
• Learn the five elements of personalized learning: knowing your learners, allowing student voice and choice, implementing flexibility, using data, and integrating technology.

Instructional Coaching in a PLC at Work: Make It Happen

Collaborative teams benefit from ongoing coaching and support that helps them put the big ideas of a PLC into action. Learn how administrators, team leaders, and instructional coaches effectively support teams as they implement actions guided by the four critical questions.

• Understand how to best identify your school’s current reality and use that to plan your team’s next steps as they identify essential standards, write and use common assessments, and develop corrective instruction and intervention.
• Explore practical protocols, templates, and advice that will help teams in your school/district assure that all students are learning at high levels.
• Integrate and promote a culture of shared leadership that supports the work of high-performing teams.

Coaching Collaborative Teams: Amplify Your Impact in a PLC at Work

Participants will increase their capacity to successfully coach collaborative teams using a framework of clarity, feedback, and support to implement PLC at Work best practices.

• Examine why the coaching collaborative teams is so important to successfully implementing the PLC process.
• Explore how to develop a coaching culture that promotes the development of high performing collaborative teams.
• Learn what principals, coaches, and teacher leaders can do to successfully implement a team coaching cycle.

Answering Question 4 for Proficient Students: Going Deeper and Extending the Learning in a PLC at Work

Discover what your school community can do to answer the fourth critical question of the professional learning community process: How will we extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency?

• Identify the students who are already proficient.
• Ensure students don’t do busy work.
• Personalize learning when appropriate.

Leadership Tools for Deepening PLC Implementation

In order to ensure ongoing quality implementation of the PLC model, site and district leadership teams need to ensure continuous improvement on two levels: A wide angle view of schoolwide culture and practices, and a closer examination of the work of collaborative teams. This workshop will provide school leaders with a framework and specific tools they can use to keep both views in focus by gathering and analyzing relevant evidence and responding accordingly to ensure continuous refinement and growth.

• Assess the current reality of your site’s culture, structures, student-focused collaboration, and impact on learning using a variety of tools.
• Analyze the factors that are influencing your site’s schoolwide and team level effectiveness.
• Act on the data to provide targeted support in order to maximize your site’s efficacy by continuously improving practices and results.

How to Assess and Support Literacy in Every Subject, Grades 6-12

Teachers in every content area can improve learning outcomes for students who are struggling to read, to understand what they read, or to overcome other challenges blocking literacy success. Immerse your team in professional coaching sessions that focus on literacy assessment and student learning across all academic disciplines. In these sessions, you will explore how subject-based literacy strategies can work to promote:

• Student engagement
• Vocabulary development
• Comprehension
• Synthesis
• Deeper understanding of content standards

Aligning PLC Teams Districtwide Workshop

Ensure your school district is doing the right work, the right way, for the right reasons, by aligning the work of every PLC team districtwide—from the boardroom to the classroom. Learn about the four types of teams and develop practices and tools for working together to foster a districtwide culture of continuous improvement.

• Learn the leadership role the district office plays in supporting successful PLC at Work implementation and school-improvement efforts.
• Align collaborative teams districtwide at every level to ensure high levels of learning in professional learning communities.
• Embed a districtwide process for establishing a guaranteed and viable curriculum, and discover strategies for analyzing student learning and making data-informed decisions.

The Brilliance in the Building: Effecting Change in Urban Schools With the PLC at Work Process

Learn to successfully employ the PLC at Work process to effect change in urban schools. Take advantage of templates and action steps you can use to create a culture of collaboration in your school by maximizing time, ensuring success of teams, and coaching those teams. Through this powerful service, you can:

• Ensure a focus of learning for your staff and students by using the Learning Block process, which involves creating common formative assessments and End-of-Block data teams templates
• Design high-quality instruction by ensuring access to core curriculum for all students, following a common language of instruction, using a standards wall in the class, focusing on literacy, and creating a plan for more time and support
• Create a system focused on positive interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships to have impactful discussions on race and equity
• Engage in continuous learning in your school using the Learning Blocks, Instructional Rounds, Reflection Tools, and Book Talks

The Way Forward

Learn the history of the PLC at Work® movement, the evolution of the public school promise, and the importance of leaning into the professional learning communities (PLC) process as we look to the future.

• Work together to assess your current reality using specially designed rubrics and surveys.
• Learn the importance of a strong guiding coalition in the implementation of the PLC at Work process.
• Conduct a gap analysis of your current practices and design an action plan for improvement.

The 15-Day Challenge Workshop

Get a 15-day roadmap for success using the PLC at Work™ process through enhanced collaboration, easy-to-use planning guides, and ready-to-use templates.

• Establish a guaranteed and viable curriculum based on state standards
• Explore common assessment practices and easy analysis tools
• Plan next steps for continuous learning

Beyond PLC Lite: Building a Self-Sustaining Culture of Collaboration and Results

Investigate evidence-based policies and practices that can promote a culture of continuous improvement while elevating student and teacher agency.

• Learn 10 evidence-based actions to transition your school from the 'lite' touch of PLCs to a more impactful and enduring approach.
• Learn student-centered approaches to assessment, instruction, and grading.