Most regular Radical readers know that I am passionate about professional learning communities.
That’s because the time I have spent collaborating with my peers over the last fifteen years has made me a better teacher. My colleagues have challenged my practice time and again — asking difficult questions, offering helpful suggestions, and working with me to make revisions that have helped more students to learn at higher levels.
Stated more simply: I’m not an accomplished individual. I’m an accomplished individual because I’ve been lucky enough to work together with a bunch of really bright people.
But here’s the hitch: Working together with other people isn’t always easy for classroom teachers.
Working together depends on developing high levels of trust with one another. I have to believe that you have my best interests in mind before I am going to be willing to let you challenge my practice. I have to also understand how your strengths — both as a person and as a practitioner — can make me a better teacher.
And “working together” really isn’t enough. We need to make sure that we are “doing the right work together.”
Our goal isn’t just to share practices with each other. Our goal is to study effective instruction together. We need to be committed to collecting evidence to document the impact that our pedagogical choices are having on students — and to making constant revisions to our work that lead to higher levels of learning for all kids.
So how does a team move from “working together” to “doing the right work together?
That’s a topic that I tackle during a breakout session titled “We’re Meeting. Now What?” at Solution Tree PLC Institutes. The entire session is designed to help participants identify essential behaviors of high-performing collaborative teams and then to provide specific tools and templates that can help teams strengthen the work that they do with one another.
The session is always REALLY well received. Teams love learning more about what “the right work” looks like in action. But more importantly, they love accessing the tools and templates that I have developed over time to help teams structure their collaborative work with one another.
Recently, Solution Tree decided to record the session and post it in Global PD — their online content collection designed to give folks just-in-time access to advice from experts.
You can access the session there if you already have a Global PD subscription — OR you can sign up for a free Global PD trial today and check it out that way.
You can also explore the slides for — and get editable copies of all of the tools shared in — the session here:
To get your own editable copies of the tools shared in the session, simply click on the links in the slides! They are “force copy” links that will give you your own copy of the document in your Google Drive.
And if all of this content resonates with you, be on the lookout for The Big Book of Collaborative Tools for Teams in a PLC at Work — my newest book, which will be published by Solution Tree in May of 2020.
#hopethishelps
