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Collaborate to ensure all students succeed

Our On-Site Professional Learning for PLC at Work®

When a school or district functions as a PLC, educators within the organization embrace high levels of learning for all students. They work collaboratively for continuous improvement, using data to guide their efforts. The educators within a PLC know that their work is an ongoing process involving collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.

With the help of a certified associate, your staff will learn practical strategies for implementing and sustaining the PLC at Work® process in your school. There’s never been a better time to do this work.

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Luis F. Cruz discusses the benefits of Solution Tree’s rich diversity of professional development associates.

Where are you on your professional learning journey?

Your Goal

Building Your Skills

One‑Day Services

Keynote

An expert keynote speaker will engage your entire staff with inspirational stories, thought-provoking questions, and no-nonsense strategies to help your school’s PLC and collaborative climate thrive.

AllThingsPLC Magazine

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PLC at Work Overview

Gain an understanding of the PLC at Work process, including the three big ideas of a PLC—focus on student learning, focus on collaboration, and focus on results. You and your team will:

  • Understand the benefits of PLCs and how to implement them in a school or district
  • Develop and maintain a healthy collaborative culture
  • Answer and utilize the four critical questions every PLC must address

Included resource: the PLC Toolkit

PLC Toolkit

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Community Connections and Your PLC at Work®

In this full-day session, participants will learn step-by-step actions on how to specifically enhance family and community involvement and engagement through the frameworks and culture of professional learning communities directly resulting in enhanced student achievement.

  • Gain clarity on the current state of community involvement and engagement.
  • Understand how to align collaboration, learning, and results to support community involvement and engagement.
  • Create tangible action items to move theory into action.

Community Connections and Your PLC at Work®

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Using the PLC at Work Process to Build Confident Learners

Learn how the key practices in the PLC at Work process can be used to build student ownership, motivation, and efficacy. Leaving every student convinced that they are capable, confident learners can significantly impact their future success in both school and the workplace.

  • Emphasize the skills and behaviors of motivated, self-efficacious learners.
  • Gain clarity on how the four critical questions of learning in a PLC at Work can be used by students to advance their own learning.
  • Understand how schools can empower students as true partners in the learning process.

You Can Learn!

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Making Teamwork Meaningful

Learn how to explicitly structure the work of collaborative teams to increase efficiency, efficacy, and student achievement.

  • Gain clarity on what “the right work” of collaborative teams in a professional learning community looks like in action.
  • Examine tools and templates designed to keep collaborative teams focused on “the right work.”
  • Identify appropriate next steps for collaborative teams to move their work forward.

The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams in a PLC at Work® and Making Teamwork Meaningful

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Career & Technical Education (CTE) and PLC at Work

Gain an understanding of PLC at Work for Career & Technical Education teams, focusing on:

  • Understanding the purpose and benefits of collaborative teams with CTE representation.
  • Identifying commonalities among teams with CTE representation.
  • Developing high performing collaborative teams with CTE.
  • Using the four critical questions to advance student learning in CTE.

Collaboration for Career and Technical Education

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Establishing a Collaborative Team Culture: Shifting From Me to We

Move your staff from working in isolation to committing to a collective urgency to ensure learning for all. In this one-day service, you will work with an expert to build the foundation for an effective, interdependent professional learning community. You will see results in higher levels of learning for your students and a more positive, productive work environment for your staff.

  • Establish a meaningful foundation for building a culture of learning for students and staff alike.
  • Ensure your mission and vision statements become a guarantee for all stakeholders.
  • Meet the professional learning needs of educators so they can support high levels of achievement for the students they serve.

Shifting from Me to We

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Districtwide Framework for PLC at Work Teams

Understand the operational stages of building a districtwide culture of learning based on the PLC at Work process. With this districtwide framework, leaders will inspire professional learning communities to achieve continuous improvement and a guaranteed and viable curriculum for every student.

Leading PLCs at Work® Districtwide

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What’s Next? Monthly Extensions to Challenge Proficient Students in a PLC

Becoming a high-level PLC at Work® ensures high levels of learning for all students. One group of students who are often omitted from deliberate and intentional planning are the students who already know the material. In this workshop, participants will dive deep into Question 4 of the PLC process and leave with strategies, protocols, and tools that can be incorporated into future units of study.

  • Explore the critical components of Question 4.
  • Understand why personalizing the learning experience is important for all learners, in particular those who already know it.
  • Learn the basic tenets of personalized learning.
  • Gain common pre-assessment strategies and activities for Question 4 Qualifiers.
  • Develop a Question 4 plan for an upcoming unit of study.

What’s Next?

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Your Goal

Deepening Your Skills

Two‑to‑Four‑Day Services

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.

Help Your Team

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Identifying Essential Learnings

Answer “What is it we want our students to learn?”, the first of the four critical questions of the PLC at Work process. How can teacher teams properly identify these priorities?

  • Work in collaborative teams to come to consensus and understand the need-to-know learning targets that will best prepare students.
  • Ensure high levels of learning for all students.
  • Create a districtwide plan for achieving your learning outcomes.

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.

PLC at Work and Your Small School, How to Develop PLCs for Singletons and Small Schools, and Singletons in a PLC at Work

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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.

Leading With Intention

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Using Student Data to Inform Instructional Practice

Examine the ways your school and district can better use student achievement data and nonacademic student data to identify areas for improvement.

  • Find and use good data to plan instruction.
  • Determine how effective use of these data can help motivate students.

Two-Day Overview with the Guiding Coalition

This two-day overview will be with key central office and building personnel who will make up the guiding coalition.

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.

When They Know It

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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.

Make it Happen

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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.

Amplify, How Schools Thrive, and Energize Your Team (3 books)

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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.

Enriching the Learning

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Implement it - Collaborative Teams

Creating a collaborative school culture is foundational to the success of every PLC. With expert support, your school leadership team will learn essential next steps for deepening collaboration schoolwide. A variety of learning activities address how to: create collaborative teams, carve out time for teams to do their work, define what teams need to accomplish, identify the critical questions that drive the work, create norms and collective commitments, and assess team effectiveness.

As part of this service, you will receive:

  • A school leadership guide
  • Interactive coaching sessions
  • A whole-staff virtual coaching session
  • Global PD licenses
  • Learning by Doing, Third Edition

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.

Formative Tools for Leaders in a PLC at Work®

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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

Every Teacher is a Literacy Teacher series

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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.

Leading PLCs at Work® Districtwide

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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 Brilliance in the Building

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Your Goal

Sustaining Your Skills

Multi‑Day Services

Building a PLC at Work Foundation

Create a district guiding coalition. With guidance from an expert who understands your school or district needs, your stakeholders will become PLC at Work leaders. We'll walk you through the process of establishing the four pillars in your school: developing a shared mission, vision, collective commitments, and goals. This multi-day engagement is designed to help your school build a sustainable infrastructure and communication process.

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work

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Supporting Your PLC Literacy Teams: From Unit Planning and Execution to Data Analysis

When teams proactively engage in unit planning, lesson and assessment design, and data analysis based on essential standards, they devise a clear pathway for student success. Gain specific strategies and processes your literacy teams can put into practice immediately to significantly increase achievement levels for all learners.

  • Gain clarity on the key components of sound curriculum design geared to literacy instruction and assessment.
  • Develop a learning progression and learn to align common assessments and rubrics.
  • Devise effective lessons using engaging instructional strategies to target literacy essential standards.
  • Generate a team calendar to pinpoint dates for instruction, assessment, and intervention.
  • Participate in a data-inquiry process that includes collaborative scoring to gauge next steps in instruction.

Every Teacher is a Literacy Teacher series

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Leading PLCs at Work® Districtwide

Engage in a powerful professional learning project designed specifically for district leadership teams and their unique challenges. Partner with our experts to put systems and processes in place to ensure equity and high levels of learning for all students.

You and your team will learn to:

  • Implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum
  • Create a timely and balanced assessment system districtwide
  • Remove barriers by implementing additional time, support, and extensions for all students
  • Address equity issues through standards-based reporting and grading practices districtwide
  • Build an inclusive and healthy district and school culture
  • Operationalize the concepts and practices of a Professional Learning Community—from the boardroom to the classroom—as a vehicle to improve leadership and the professional practice of all adults in an effort for all students to learn at higher levels

The work will be highly customized for each district based on size and need. Solution Tree experts, who have implemented these practices both as practitioners and partners with districts just like yours, will lead this work to increase learning for all students. At each stage of the process, you will have access to notable examples of successful projects.

Leading PLCs at Work® Districtwide

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Embedded Coaching

Rely on our embedded coaching services to help you ingrain key PLC practices in the culture of your school or district. With help from our experts, both school leaders and staff will learn how to operate as a high-performing PLC and build their collective capacity for continuous improvement. Your coach will empower educators to act as high-functioning teams.

Virtual Coaching for Principals and District Administrators

Get focused and productive support for whatever challenges you face. This high-touch professional learning service is available exclusively for principals and district administrators looking to address critical issues. By meeting with coaches for ten online sessions throughout the school year, participants gain access to ongoing counsel from experienced coaches. Our coaches are carefully selected based on their expertise and proven success in leading a PLC. We help leaders work through our framework to capitalize on the skills of their staff and identify the right next steps for their school or district.

Customized Services

Our professional learning team will listen to your specific challenges and work with you to create a custom learning plan designed to meet your school or district's needs. By integrating research and evidence-based content along with on-site and virtual training, Solution Tree experts are uniquely positioned to help you design your organizational approach to increase student learning.

Global PD Teams

Build a collaborative culture that is focused on student learning and results and committed to learning for all. Among the many digital resources available in Global PD Teams, you’ll find playlists featuring must-see videos focused on the PLC at Work process, plus a Learning by Doing mini-course that’s sure to benefit your collaborative teams. Choose Global PD Teams when you need:

  • Daily, convenient access to real-time school improvement models and strategies
  • Job-embedded professional development
  • Resources to build collective teacher efficacy
  • Clear learning paths toward student achievement and school improvement
  • Quality content from authors you know and trust

Coaching Academy

A comprehensive series of consulting and professional development engagements designed to prepare school, district, and teacher leaders to build a PLC that provides life-changing learning to students.

Research shows that school transformation efforts are most successful and sustainable when there is strong, consistent leadership championing the work.

Carefully developed to maximize participant learning, the academy includes:

  • Three 2-day sessions (six days total) over the course of a school year, led by PLC Master Coaches
  • A highly interactive, customizable curriculum developed by a board of top PLC experts
  • Guidance on how to train other staff members on PLC at Work concepts and processes
  • Continuous expert support throughout the academy term

PLC Toolkit

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