1. Building the Collaborative Culture of a PLC
Collaboration: Session 1
PLC Professional Development for Teams
Learning Council, Elementary Leadership Teams, and Secondary Leadership Teams

2. CRCSD
Strategic
Plan
Guiding Document
LEARNING
COLLABORATION
RESULTS

3. What am I doing here?
What did we accomplish?

4. Meeting Experiences Activity
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Work in small groups.
Think about the meeting experiences that you’ve had. Write down the reasons why they were satisfying using one idea per post-it note.
Go around the table, each person sharing one idea.
Look for commonalities. In the middle of table, on paper, create “clusters” of ideas that are similar.
Repeat for frustrating experiences.

5. Activity: Trust Busters & Builders
“Trust is …cultivated through speech, conversation, communication and action.”
Busters
Talk, talk, talk
Disengaged
Pessimistic
But….
Builders
Follow through
Consistent
Agree to disagree
Listens to others

6. Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Lencioni, Patrick. Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

7. Team Norm Activity In your small group develop team norms by:
Brainstorming norms
Group like ideas - affinity diagram
Create short list of group norms - not a laundry list
Review the six areas to consider
If your team has already written group norms:
Do your norms cover some of the common challenges that occur in teams?
Do you need to add anything after looking at the six areas to consider?
-norms = ground rules
-schools and teams at different places
-if your team has already created norms, we suggest reviewing them using the norms to consider template : time, listening, confidentiality, decision making, participation, and expectations. These are common areas that challenges often appear.
DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree, 2006. (p )

8. Additional Tips for Creating Norms
Each team creates its own norms
Stated as commitments to act or behave in certain ways rather than as beliefs
Reviewed at the beginning and end of each meeting for at least 6 months
Teams formally evaluate effectiveness at least twice a year
Teams focus on a few essential norms rather than extensive laundry list.
Violations of team norms must be addressed
DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree, 2006. (p.106)

9. Are you looking in the mirror or out the window?
Seven Norms of Collaboration
Paying attention to self and others
Presuming positive intentions
Pursuing a balance between advocacy and inquiry
Pausing
Paraphrasing
Probing for specificity
Putting ideas on the table
Handout of page 105 to give to partipcants
Are you looking in the mirror or out the window?
DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree, 2006. (p. 104)

10. Seven Factors to Influencing Reluctant Staff
Connecting to the person’s intuition so that the proposal “feels right”
Appealing to rational thinking and decision making
Changing the way the information is presented (e.g. using analogies)
Presenting real world examples where the idea has been applied successfully
Providing people
with incentives to
embrace an idea
Building shared knowledge of the research base supporting a position
“resistance must be identified and dealt with rather than ignored”
Reason
Research
Resonance
Representational Re-descriptions
Resources and Reward
Real-World Events
The greatest opportunity for change comes from the first six factors.
7. Confrontation
Gardner, Howard. Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. Boston: Harvard Business School, DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree, 2006. (p. 173)

11. Why am I here? Work together to accomplish goals
Benefit students when return to classroom with “expanded repertoire of skills, strategies, materials, and ideas in order impact student achievement in a positive way.”
-capable and talented teachers
-when we look at the skills and challenges our students face, it is a job that requires more than individual work, need team
DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree, 2006.

12. What did we Accomplish? Leaders…
Promote focused and productive meetings
Apply effective communication skills
Encourage interdependence to achieve goals
Keep 4 crucial questions at the forefront

13. Building the Collaborative Culture of a PLC
Collaboration: Session 2
PLC Professional Development for Teams
Learning Council, Elementary Leadership Teams, and Secondary Leadership Teams

14. Small Group Discussion
Isolation Collaboration
Brainstorm: What are the rewards / benefits of
working in isolation? Collaboration? Write one
idea per sticky note. 20
Share Points-
Share sticky notes, add to whole group chart

15. Defining PLC Collaboration
Isolation
Collaboration
PLC Collaboration
“The traditional school often functions as a collection of independent contractors united by a common parking lot.” Eaker, Results Now, p 23
“Congeniality, focus on building groups camaraderie”
“Consensus on operational procedures”
“Committees to oversee different facets of school operation”
“…a systematic process in which teachers work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice.”
“Teachers work in teams, engaging in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep team learning.”
“…leads to higher levels of student achievement.”
What is a “Professional Learning Community”? Educational Leadership, May 2004

16. Partner Discussion Jigsaw Activity:
5 Keys To a Successful Meeting – highlight the big ideas for one of the following:
Behaviors and Relationships
Focus
Roles and Responsibilities
Structure
Process
Have participants read one section, do as a jigsaw, number off, each group reads, highlights and reports out to the large group: Pages of Collaborative Teacher
Share Points-
Share the key’s big ideas with the whole group
Erkens, Cassandra, et. al. The Collaborative Teacher. Bloomington: Solution Tree,  (p )

17. Comparison
With those sitting around you, discuss how your line compares with that of organizational change

18. First and Second order change
First order change:
Small changes with “existing knowledge and skills of the staff”
Small steps within existing paradigm
Second order change:
BIG changes…a “dramatic departure from the expected and familiar”…
“Perceived as a break from the past… may require new knowledge, new skills”
Large group open share of examples
DuFour, Richard, et. al. Learning by Doing. Bloomington: Solution Tree,  (p. 186, 215, & 218)

19. Don’t Judge too Quickly

20. PLC: Professional Learning Communities 4 Crucial Questions
What do we want each student to learn, know, or be able to do?
Student Learning Expectations
What evidence do we have of the learning?
Formative Assessment
How will we respond when some students don’t learn?
Pyramid Of Intervention
How will we respond to those who have already learned?

21. Bathroom remodel – feel out of place, uncomfortable
Don’t judge
Bad PLC
Fed Ex
Bathroom remodel – feel out of place, uncomfortable
Ship – front fell off