Building a Professional Learning Community at Work TM: A Guide to the First Year

Winner--2010 National Staff Development Council's Staff Development Book of the Year Award

Bronze Medal Award Winner--Foreword Reviews 2009 Book of the Year Award

Get a play-by-play guide to implementing PLC concepts. Each chapter begins with a story focused on a particular challenge. A follow-up analysis of the story identifies the good decisions or common mistakes made in relation to that particular scenario. The authors examine the research behind best practice and wrap up each chapter with recommendations and tools you can use in your school.

Benefits:

• Get a compelling, accessible narrative to grasp PLC problems and solutions.
• Read the book cover to cover or select chapters for mini-lessons.
• Gain reproducible tools you can use in your own schools.

Contents:
Foreword by Richard and Rebecca DuFour
Prologue: A New Beginning

Part I: Summer: Committing to a Common Purpose
Chapter 1: Starting With a Vision
Chapter 2: Empowering the Core Team

Part II: Fall: Building a Team
Chapter 3: Creating Trust
Chapter 4: Supporting Team Development

Part III: Winter: Weathering the Challenges
Chapter 5: Negotiating Personalities and Conflict
Chapter 6: Experiencing Frustration

Part IV: Spring: Looking Forward
Chapter 7: Connecting Data Analysis and Instructional Improvement
Chapter 8: Building a Collective Intelligence
Epilogue: Equal Parts Looking Back and Looking Forward

Parry Graham, EdD, is principal of Nashoba Regional High School in Massachusetts. During his 20 years in public education, he has held a variety of roles, including high school teacher, consultant, and clinical assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Graham has also been a school-based administrator at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

An experienced leader in professional learning communities, he consults with numerous schools and districts to turn PLC principles into concrete improvement strategies. He has written articles for the Journal of Staff Development, Research in Middle Level Education Online, Connexions, and TechLearning.

Dr. Graham completed a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

William M. Ferriter is a sixth-grade science teacher in a professional learning community near Raleigh, North Carolina. A National Board Certified Teacher, Bill has designed professional development courses for educators nationwide on topics ranging from establishing professional learning communities and using technology to reimagine learning spaces to integrating meaningful student-involved assessment and feedback opportunities into classroom instruction.

What Bill brings to audiences is practical experience gained through extensive and continuing work with his own professional learning team and students in his classroom. Teachers appreciate the practicality of his presentations, knowing that the content shared is content that is currently being used by a full-time classroom teacher. Every session is designed to give participants not just a clear understanding of the "whys" behind the ideas that he is introducing, but tangible examples of how to turn those ideas into classroom and collaborative practices that work.

Bill has had articles published in Kappan magazine, Journal for Staff Development, Educational Leadership, and Threshold Magazine. A contributing author to two assessment anthologies, The Teacher as Assessment Leader and The Principal as Assessment Leader, he is also coauthor of several Solution Tree titles, including Teaching the iGeneration, Building a Professional Learning Community at Work™, Making Teamwork Meaningful, and Creating a Culture of Feedback. Bill also maintains a popular blog, "The Tempered Radical," where he writes regularly about teaching in today's world.

Bill earned a bachelor of science and master of science in elementary education from the State University of New York at Geneseo.