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Energize Your Teams
the essential elements of a PLC. While Amplify Your Impact offers strategies that help teams with the implementation of the more explicit tasks of PLCs—things like prioritizing and unwrapping standards, identifying learning targets, developing common assessments, holding productive data conversations, and using protocols to ensure that results drive decisions—How Schools Thrive shifts attention to coaching teams around the essential elements of the PLC process— continuous improvement, collective inquiry, action orientation, and a focus on results—drilling deeper into the more complex aspects of the PLC process. Amplify Your Impact and How Schools Thrive introduce a framework and processes proven through our work in schools as successful with coaching collaborative teams to higher levels of effectiveness in dozens of schools across the United States. We know coaching provides teams with more clarity, ongoing feedback, and continuous support of their efforts to improve, which substantially increases the likelihood of implementing the PLC process successfully. Simply stated, coached teams go further faster than un-coached teams (Joyce & Showers, 2002; Killion & Harrison, 2007; Neufeld & Roper, 2003; Thomas, 2019). In this book, we provide school leaders with concrete methods and materials to help build shared knowledge and strengthen collaborative teams’ PLC practice. We include key coaching points, important vocabulary, protocols that foster a deeper understanding of PLCs, and links to resources leaders can use to extend professional development activities. While this book can be used independently, readers of the trilogy will appreciate that concepts from Amplify and Thrive culminate into applicable professional development here in Energize. The beauty of this book is that schools at any level of PLC implementation can use it, from those just beginning the journey to those who have been practicing PLCs for a number of years and are ready to re-energize their teams!
A Flexible Format We intentionally structured Energize Your Teams so those who are coaching teams (principals, department heads, instructional coaches, teacher leaders, or others) can identify an area of need, locate that topic in the book, and deliver a meaningful professional development experience in an hour or less. This flexible format allows coaches to differentiate professional development by content and format. Coaches can deliver modules to grade-level or departmental teams or to the faculty as a whole. This book is organized into three parts. • Part I presents a practical overview of coaching collaborative teams in a PLC. • Part II includes professional development activities that support the five essential prerequisites of a PLC: (1) educators work in collaborative teams, rather than in isolation, and take collective responsibility for student learning; (2) collaborative teams implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit; (3) collaborative teams monitor student learning through an ongoing assessment process that includes frequent, team-developed common formative assessments; (4) educators use the results of common assessments to improve individual practice, build the team’s capacity to achieve its goals, and intervene and enrich on behalf of students; and (5) the school provides a systematic process for intervention and teaching (DuFour & Reeves, 2016).
