Making Teamwork Meaningful: Leading Progress Driven Collaboration in a PLC at Work

Focus on developing people--not just improving test scores. The authors examine how staffing decisions can strengthen professional learning communities and explore actions that can help school leaders safeguard their schools against complacency. Collect tips and strategies that every leader can adopt, and apply the professional development techniques that prove most useful.

Benefits:

• Develop hiring and support practices that can change staff turnover into an opportunity to strengthen your PLC.
• Create meaningful learning teams for all staff--even specialists and singletons in small schools.
• Gain skills critical for teachers to work effectively in collaborative groups.
• Get the right people in the right places when staffing and creating teams.
• Align the master schedule with PLC priorities.
• Build an effective intervention system.
• Improve collaborative capacity schoolwide.

Contents:
Chapter 1: Getting the Right People in the Right Places
Chapter 2: Incorporating Singletons and Noninstructional Staff
Chapter 3: Aligning a Master Schedule With PLC Priorities
Chapter 4: Building an Intervention System
Chapter 5: Improving Collaborative Capacity

William M. Ferriter is a sixth-grade teacher in a professional learning community (PLC) near Raleigh, North Carolina. A National Board Certified Teacher, Bill has designed professional development courses for educators nationwide. His trainings include how to incorporate singletons into PLCs, how digital tools can make collaborative tasks easier, and how to best develop tangible structures to support the work of learning teams. He is a founding member and senior fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network and has served as teacher in residence at the Center for Teaching Quality.

An advocate for PLCs, improved teacher working conditions, and teacher leadership, Bill has represented educators on Capitol Hill and presented at state and national conferences. He is among the first one hundred teachers in North Carolina and the first one thousand in the United States to earn certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He has been a Regional Teacher of the Year in North Carolina, and his blog, the Tempered Radical, earned Best Teacher Blog of 2008 from Edublogs. Bill has had articles published in the Journal of 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 Teaching the iGeneration and Building a Professional Learning Community at Work, Learning Forward's (formerly National Staff Development Council) 2010 Professional Development Book of the Year. Bill earned a bachelor of science and master of science in elementary education from the State University of New York at Geneseo. Follow him on Twitter @plugusin.

Parry Graham is the principal of Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, Massachusetts. In his twenty years of experience in public education, he has worked in a variety of roles, including as a high school teacher, educational consultant, and clinical assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His passion, however, is educational leadership, and Parry has worked as a school-based administrator at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. His first book, Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year with co-author Bill Ferriter, was Learning Forward's 2010 Book of the Year, and was recognized as a 2009 Book of the Year Bronze award winner by Foreword Magazine. Parry completed his doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has published articles in the Journal of Staff Development, Research in Middle Level Education Online, Connexions, and TechLearning.

Matt Wight is the principal at Apex High School in Wake County, North Carolina. He has worked as a teacher, coach, assistant principal, middle school principal, and high school principal. A strong proponent of PLCs, Matt created a collaborative school culture when he opened Salem Middle School; Salem has become one of the top performing middle schools in North Carolina. Since 2007, he has worked to transform the culture of a large, comprehensive high school, Apex High. During that time, Apex student achievement has risen every year, culminating in 2009 with Apex being recognized as a School of Excellence for having over ninety percent of its students demonstrate proficiency.

Matt was named as the Wake County and North Carolina Region 3 Principal of the Year in 2008. Trained in PLC development by Solution Tree, he consults with numerous schools and districts on establishing and developing PLCs. Follow Matt on Twitter @mattwight.