Professional Learning Communities

This book provides a clear, practical roadmap for teams to enhance their impact by building a strong foundation for collaboration, gaining clarity on essential student learning, leveraging assessments as learning tools, and ensuring every student receives the time and support needed to achieve high levels.

Build a defensible body of evidence for every student. The IMPACT framework and the seven design principles of competency-based learning, as presented in this book, make this practical and doable for professional learning communities. This framework helps with clarifying learning expectations, planning assessments, and establishing protocols for proficient performance.

Develop a research-based math intervention program with common unit assessments. Increase student learning using the MTSS or response to intervention model to guide mathematics assessment.

This book will help collaborative teams meet the challenges of a new landscape of education—one in which we’re now familiar with formative assessment and we strive to improve our assessment design and allow data to inform instruction to best support student achievement.

Explore a variety of perspectives and examples from educators who have shifted to competency-based education in their classrooms with great results.

Dramatically improve your school by merging the High Reliability Schools (HRS) model and the PLC at Work® process. Ensure continuous quality improvement through strong leadership and culture building.

A companion to Collaborative Common Assessments, this practical handbook presents measures for improving your collaborative common assessment process. Evaluate your common assessments’ ability to provide actionable insights into student learning and success.

Discover how to close the gaps between assessment, curriculum, and instruction by replacing outmoded assessment methods with proficiency-based assessments.

Closing student achievement gaps requires specific actions focused on acceleration and leveling up strategies to achieve grade-level proficiency or beyond. Acceleration is the pathway; we cannot continue to go backward if our goal is to move forward. Discover how to erase inequities in student learning while building hope and confidence in both teachers and students. This is equity in action.

Shelly Wilfong, PhD, is assistant superintendent of Wawasee Community School Corporation in Syracuse, Indiana. She has been an educational professional for 30 years, with 19 years as a classroom teacher.