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Learn to Work Together?
How Can Teams That Have a Hard Time Collaborating Learn to Work Together?
That a culture of collaboration and collective efficacy is one of just three big ideas of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016) highlights their importance to the PLC process. (Chapter 2, page 33, lists the other big ideas and additional foundational concepts.) This does not imply that establishing such a culture is easy. Teams, especially those new to the PLC process, often struggle with collaborating around curriculum content standards, assessment methods, and how to respond to data. If your school is just beginning its PLC journey or is struggling to advance on that journey, you know this is true. However, if you’ve been a part of or witness to a truly effective collaborative team, you know and understand the power collaboration has to transform teaching and learning. If you assess that your teams need additional support with the collaborative process, we suggest tapping one or more of the following resources.
Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at
Work (DuFour et al., 2016) Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: Proven Insights for Sustained, Substantive School Improvement (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker,
Mattos, & Muhammad, 2021) Collaborative Teams That Work: The Definitive Guide to Cycles of Learning in a PLC (Sloper & Grift, 2021) Energize Your Teams: Powerful Tools for Coaching Collaborative Teams in
PLCs at Work (Many, Maffoni, Sparks, & Thomas, 2022) Transformative Collaboration: Five Commitments for Leading a
Professional Learning Community (Flanagan, Grift, Lipscombe, Sloper, & Wills, 2021)
In addition, each subject-based book in this series is set up to help teams get better at the collaborative process for the purposes of supporting literacy growth, offering teams guidance on how to examine the value of each literacy strategy in ways related to the skills each subject is meant to develop. In other words, we focus on the subject standards and how literacy strategies support those standards. When teams come together to collaborate, consider using these books to help focus team members on how to learn together to make innovative, impactful, and positive changes to how they approach literacy instruction.
