Amplify Your Impact : Coaching Collaborative Teams in PLCs (Instructional Leadership Development and Coaching Methods for Collaborative Learning)

With Foreword by Rebecca DuFour

Amplify Your Impact presents K-12 educators and school leadership with a collaborative approach to coaching teachers in their PLCs. The authors share best practices and processes teams can rely on to ensure they are doing the right work in a cycle of continuous improvement. Discover concrete action steps your school can take to adopt proven collaborative coaching methods, fortify teacher teams, support leadership development, and ultimately improve student learning in classrooms.

Adopt a collaborative team-teaching approach to coaching and leadership development:

• Gain insights from teachers and empirical evidence from schools that confirm the benefits of how coaching and refining collaborative teams can strengthen PLCs.
• Use the Pathways Tool for Coaching Collaborative Teams to guide your team's conversations and team-based learning.
• Learn how to develop and use the strategy implementation guide (SIG) to map out your collaborative team success.
• Analyze coaching scenarios that illustrate how to turn ineffective team meetings into positive collaborative learning experiences.
• Increase instructional leadership development that promotes reflective coaching and a collaborative approach.

Contents:
Introduction

Part I: The Why, How, and What of Coaching Collaborative Teams
Chapter 1: Combining Coaching and Collaboration
Chapter 2: Coaching Collaborative Teams in a PLC

Part II: The Framework for Coaching Collaborative Teams
Chapter 3: Amplifying Your Impact With Clarity
Chapter 4: Amplifying Your Impact With Feedback
Chapter 5: Amplifying Your Impact With Support

Part III: Putting It All Together to Amplify Your Impact
Chapter 6: Making it Real: Coaching Scenarios

Afterword
References and Resources
Index

Thomas W. Many is an educational consultant in Denver, Colorado. Tom retired as the superintendent of schools in Kildeer Countryside CCSD 96 in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Tom's career included twenty years of experience as superintendent, in addition to serving as a classroom teacher, learning center director, curriculum supervisor, principal, and assistant superintendent. District 96 earned the reputation as a place where the faculty and administration worked together to become one of the premier elementary school districts in the United States during his tenure as superintendent.

In addition to nearly 40 articles, Tom is the coauthor of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work, Third Edition with Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Mike Mattos; a contributing author in The Collaborative Teacher: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community; and coauthor of Aligning School Districts as PLCs with Mark Van Clay and Perry Soldwedel.

To learn more about Tom's work, follow @tmany96 on Twitter.

Michael J. Maffoni, an educator since 1987, has a diverse background that includes experience as a teacher, principal, and district administrator in a variety of districts and school settings in Colorado. He also teaches courses in educational leadership as an affiliate faculty member at Regis University.

Michael is the director of professional learning communities for Jefferson County Public Schools, Golden, Colorado. In this current role, Michael leads PLC implementation in over one hundred schools throughout the district. His collaborative leadership has been instrumental in developing an integrated PLC support system, monitoring structure, and associated professional learning for district leaders, principals, instructional coaches, and teachers.

To learn more about Michael's work, follow @mjmaffoni64 on Twitter.

Susan K. Sparks is an educational consultant in Denver, Colorado. Susan retired in 2008 as the executive director of the Front Range BOCES (boards of cooperative educational services) for Teacher Leadership, a partnership with the University of Colorado at Denver. Susan spent her career in St. Vrain Valley School District as a teacher and with four different BOCES as staff developer, assistant director, and executive director. She consults internationally in collaborative cultures, conflict resolution, contract negotiations, and community engagement.

Susan contributed to The Collaborative Teacher: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community and coauthored How to Cultivate Collaboration in a PLC and Leverage: Using PLCs to Promote Lasting Improvement in Schools.

To learn more about Susan's work, follow @sparks12_susan on Twitter.

Tesha Ferriby Thomas, EdD, believes passionately in the power of PLCs, which she has worked to develop in multiple schools as an assistant superintendent, assistant principal, department chairperson, and classroom teacher.

She is coauthor of Amplify Your Impact: Coaching Collaborative Teams in PLCs at Work® and How Schools Thrive: Building a Coaching Culture for Collaborative Teams in PLCs at Work®. She has been a member of the Michigan Learning Forward board and the Michigan Department of Education Surveys of Enacted Curriculum Steering Committee and is a National Writing Project fellow. Her successful doctoral research was focused on the impact of coaching on PLCs.

In addition to presenting and writing, Tesha is a school improvement facilitator and language arts consultant at the Macomb Intermediate School District in Macomb County, Michigan.