THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
Culture of Collaboration: We believe creating a culture of collaboration is a key practice in school success, and that there are actionable strategies and practices instructional leaders can use to successfully build and maintain a sustainable, collaborative community of educators.
Collaborative Professional Development: We believe that collaborative professional development is most effective when teams of teachers meet regularly with clear and specific agendas to establish transparent, attainable goals around student achievement, and support one another in improving their classroom practice to ensure students meet those goals.
Collaborative Professional Learning Communities: We believe that collaborative professional learning communities must regularly meet, collect, review, and reflect on student-data in order to make informed decisions about how best to support students to achieve academic success.
Flexible Professional Learning: We believe that professional learning needs to evolve to mirror the personalization, flexibility, and choice that we want for student learning. A key aspect of this shift is reimagining the times and spaces we can do professional learning, incorporating more asynchronous and virtual learning opportunities for teachers and leaders.
FLEXIBLE LEARNING MODELS
Meaningful Learning: We believe that teachers need to be equipped with the skills in designing varying learning experiences, using the Universal Design for Learning guidelines, that focus on how all students will access and participate in meaningful and rigorous learning experiences that meet their needs.
Remediation Reimagined: We believe that remediation must be reimagined by supporting teachers to think about how to differentiate instruction for the needs of all students through targeted supports, and by using technology to make the differentiation replicable, sustainable, and personalized.
Accelerated Learning: We believe that addressing learning loss and accelerating student growth requires an instructional approach that prioritizes making grade level content accessible to all students by using differentiated, targeted supports that are embedded into the instruction, and one in which teachers are equipped to design meaningful, personalized learning experiences.
Learning Driven by Data: We believe that teachers must analyze student data, engage with stakeholders, and develop flexible systems all in an effort to personalize instruction and close academic gaps.
TRAUMA INFORMED PRACTICES
Building Trauma Informed Systems: We believe that being trauma-informed is a lens through which educators can reflect, analyze, and design their classroom and school structures.
Creating Safe Spaces: We believe that meeting all students where they are is not just an academic imperative, but it is also essential for the growth and development of the whole child.
Disrupting Deficit Narratives: We believe that redefining classroom management starts with dismantling punitive systems and, instead, implementing restorative practices that focus on wellbeing which is essential to being trauma-informed.
SKILLFUL TEACHING, SKILLFUL LEADERSHIP, SKILLFUL DATA USE
Skilful Teaching: We believe skillful teaching includes anything a teacher does that impacts the probability of student learning. Thus, skillful teaching includes an incredibly wide range of actions from clarity to communicating their belief in students’ capabilities to conducing robust discussions that make student thinking visible to developing their cultural proficiency.
Skillful Leadership: We believe skillful leadership includes developing a common language and concept system about effective instruction; honing skills in implementing teacher evaluation systems with rigor and fidelity; shepherding change; coaching and using data effectively; and developing strong, healthy adult professional cultures of openness and constant learning.
Skillful Data Use: We believe skillful data story-telling includes strengthening data literacy and teacher collaboration to design re-teaching for students who didn’t get it the first time around and planning lessons together that are strong and consistent across the team.
