DVD or VHS -
Through New Eyes: Examining the Culture of Your School
Richard DuFour -
This 4-hour training program for use with elementary, middle, and high school staff, helps educators see the differences between a traditional school and a Professional Learning Communities school through the eyes of Johnny, a high school freshman. The resource contains a facilitator’s guide and a discussion DVD. The facilitator’s guide includes an introduction to the program, step-by-step instructions for leading the workshop, guiding questions, small-group and full-group activities, and pages that can be made into transparencies or duplicated as handouts for use during the workshop. In his video introduction, the author explains the structure and culture of PLCs. He discusses how educators can change the cultures of their schools, which is then demonstrated in Parts I and II of the video.
VHS / DVD Set -
The Power of Professional Learning Communities at Work: Bringing the Big Ideas to Life
DuFour, Eaker, and DuFour -
How can your school radically improve student learning? Teachers and administrators from eight diverse schools share successful strategies and inspiring experiences in candid, unscripted conversations and collaborative team meetings in this lively new PLC resource. Created as an introduction to PLC concepts, this four-program series provides your staff with a powerful learning experience that is informative and entertaining. Four programs approximately 20 minutes each on 4 VHS cassettes and 1 DVD plus a 70-page Facilitator’s Guide. The programs can be presented in four half-day workshops.
Audience: K–12
VHS -
Let's Talk About PLC: Getting Started - Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals
DuFour, Eaker, DuFour, and Sparks -
In this first tape, "Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals," viewers will learn:
The importance of focusing on student learning
How to make mission, vision, values documents meaningful
The importance of passion and persistence
How to foster collective commitment
VHS -
Let's Talk About PLC: Getting Started - Collaboration
DuFour, Eaker, DuFour, and Sparks -
In this second tape, "Collaboration," viewers will learn:
The importance of embedding collaboration into the school culture & the first steps in creating a collaborative culture
How to use collaborative time effectively
The meaning of collective inquiry and how it is used in a PLC
The importance of building trust
VHS -
Let's Talk About PLC: Getting Started - Leadership
DuFour, Eaker, DuFour, and Sparks -
In this third tape, "Leadership," viewers will learn:
How leaders operate in a PLC and how to get started
How to help teachers develop a deeper understanding of the PLC model
The perceived barriers to creating a learning community and how to overcome them
How to build consensus and avoid the pitfalls associated with consensus decision-making
DVD -
Passion and Persistence: How to Develop a Professional Learning Community
Richard DuFour -
Inspire your professional learning community team with this 7-minute motivational DVD. How to Develop a Professional Learning Community provides an overview of important PLC components. Powerful music, memorable quotes, and lighthearted humor combine to create a motivating experience that simply and beautifully connects your staff to the heart of PLCs. This DVD has been used with great success in Rick DuFour’s presentations at PLC summer institutes designed for administrators, teachers, and other school staff members.
Books and Other Materials in Print -
Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement
DuFour and Eaker -
This resource guides you through recommendations drawn from the best practices found in schools nationwide for continuously improving school performance. The book provides specific, practical “how-to” information about transforming schools into results-oriented professional learning communities. Richard DuFour is the former Superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School District and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on applying the principles of PLC. Robert Eaker is the former Dean of the College of Education at Middle Tennessee State University and a nationally known authority on instructional leadership.
Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: New Insights for Improving Schools
DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker -
This 10th-anniversary sequel to Professional Learning Communities at Work™: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement provides much clearer insights regarding the transition from traditional schools to professional learning communities (PLCs). The authors set the record straight by responding to the work of educators who have unsuccessfully tried to implement or have misunderstood PLC at Work™ concepts. The authors examine organizational development, change processes, leadership, and successful practices outside of education to offer fresh perspectives.
A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams
Anne Jolly -
This book provides a way of engaging school faculties in sustained, onsite professional development that builds capacity and collegiality. improves teaching quality, and focuses on student achievement. This practical "how-to" guide will provide facilitators with field-tested tools and procedures for establishing and maintaining professional learning teams in schools.
Learning Together / Leading Together: Changing Schools Through Professional Learning Communities
Shirley M. Hord -
This volume offers practical advice from 22 schools (elementary, middle, and high schools) that have successfully modeled or are creating professional learning communities.
Leading Every Day: 124 Actions for Effective Leadership
A one-of-a-kind guidebook for administrators and teachers, Leading Every Day offers inspiration and opportunities for reflection in a unique and accible new way. Separate chapters cover four major aspects of leadership:
Everyday Leadership
Everyday Change
Leading Learning
Leading Effective Change
Each chapter is divided into 31 days (one for each day of the month) in a powerful fourfold "daybook" format. On each page, educators will find cogent questions, inspiring stories, and invitations for large discourse that can literally change lives.
Leading Learning Communities: Standards for What Principals Should Know and Be Able To Do
National Association of Elementary School Principals -
This resource identifies six standards that the NAESP believes together characterize instructional leadership in schools.
36 Tools for Building Spirit in Learning Communities
Many of today's schools suffer from stress fractures as they struggle with challenges of achievement gaps, class sizes, differentiating instruction for diverse students, and responding to ever greater demands for accountability. Longtime facilitator R. Bruce Williams gets to the heart of the matter, emphasizing that change is not just external but also comes from within through revitalized individuals and strong culture.
Getting Started: Reculturing Schools to Become Professional Learning Communities
Eaker, DuFour, and DuFour -
This book answers the question that many schools ask when seeking to transform themselves into Professional Learning Communities: “Where do we begin?” The authors offer suggestions for finding the time for transformation, lessons learned from one school’s transition, a conversation with the authors that answers many of your questions, and a section with tools and samples.
On Common Ground: The Power of Professional Learning Communities
DuFour, Eaker, and DuFour -
On Common Ground brings the ideas and recommendations of many of North America’s educational leaders into one resource for educators working to help their students achieve at ever-higher levels. Each chapter contributes to a sound conceptual framework and specific, practical strategies for developing professional learning communities.
122 Ways to Build Teams
Jolly -
Find out how to move your team members from "brainstorming" to "performing" by implementing team processes that can create lasting change in your school.
The Collaborative Teacher: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community
Erkens, Jakici, Jessie, King, Kramer, Many, Ranells, Rose, Sparks, and Twadell -
The time of exclusive top-down leadership is over! Only teachers can transform education from inside the classroom, and this book defines best practices of collaborative teacher leadership. Specific techniques, supporting research, expert insight, and real classroom stories combine to illustrate how to work together for student learning, create a guaranteed and viable curriculum, and use data to reach all students.
The Collaborative Administrator: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community
Buffum, Erkens, Hinman, Huff, Jessie, Martin, Mattos, Muhammad, Noonan, Parscale, Twadell, Westover, Williams -
In a culture of shared leadership, the administrator's role is more important than ever. How do you maintain the right balance of "loose-tight" leadership? How do you establish profound, lasting trust? What principles strengthen principal leadership? This book answers these questions and more in compelling chapters that deliver the strategies and heartfelt inspiration essential to being the best administrator you can be.
The Power of SMART Goals: Using Goals to Improve Student Learning
O'Neill and Conzemius -
This comprehensive yet easy-to-read book by the authors of The Handbook for SMART School Teams shows readers how to transform their schools into places where each and every student is meeting and exceeding standards by shifting thinking to a focus on results. Four real stories from elementary, middle, and high schools that are implementing SMART goals give you a firsthand look at their “problems and opportunities” -how they are turning challenges into opportunities for learning and improvement. The authors also provide templates and forms for implementing the SMART goals process in your own schools and classrooms.
The Handbook for SMART School Teams
Conzemius and O'Neill -
This resource puts quality improvement at your fingertips by providing you with information covering all aspects of teaming-from types of teams, member roles, and team ground rules to data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation. You will also get a CD-ROM that includes reproducible tools for your quality-improvement efforts. This book will help you set the stage for collaboration and teamwork by teaching you how to become a SMART school and improve processes and systems. You and your team members will learn:
Structures for teamwork
The basics of effective teamwork
Group processes and planning tools
The benefits of thinking like a system
The role of professional development in learning communities
Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn
DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, and Karhanek -
This book examines the question, “What happens when, despite our best efforts in the classroom, a student does not learn?” In traditional schools, the response to this question has been left to individual classroom teachers to figure out. A Professional Learning Community will not leave this critical question to each teacher to resolve. A PLC will, instead, create a school-wide system of interventions that provides all students with additional time and support when they experience difficulty in their learning. The authors describe in detail the systems of intervention, including Adlai E. Stevenson High School’s “Pyramid of Interventions,” implemented by four different schools: a high school, a middle school, and two elementary schools. In addition to these systems, the authors discuss the logistical barriers these schools faced and their strategies for overcoming those barriers.
Pyramid Response to Intervention: RTI, Professional Learning Communities, and How to Respond When Kids Don't Learn
Buffman, Mattos, and Weber -
Accessible language and compelling K–12 stories illustrate how RTI is most effective when built on the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ model. Written by award-winning educators from successful PLC schools, this book demonstrates how to create three tiers of interventions—from basic to intensive—to address student learning gaps. Over a dozen reproducible activities will guide teams in evaluating their current system, building strong interventions, and creating a successful and compliant pyramid response to intervention.
Focused Assessment: Enriching the Instructional Cycle
Gwen Doty -
The focused assessment model teaches the use of purposeful and relevant assessment, from pre assessment to the completion of a final student product. It involves students in the process of gaining a clear understanding of their skill and knowledge proficiency and takes into account different learning styles, so that students may demonstrate evidence of competence in ways that make sense to them. In addition, focused assessment is a consistent reflection of content standards— the objectives that were actually taught—and student data.
Focused Assessment takes the educator through a systematic process that embraces the concept of “assessment for learning.” It provides customizations that enable all learners to demonstrate proficiency according to their readiness level.
This book explains how assessment can become a natural part of learning. Using the same, step-by-step approach found in Focused Instruction: An Innovative Teaching Model for All Learners, this book provides research-based techniques for creating assessments that make sense to students and that enable teachers to continually refine the way they present lessons.
Find out how to:
Choose the right assessment format
Check for understanding throughout the instructional cycle
Assess at the three levels of learning
Using purposeful, continuous, and focused assessments at every stage of the learning process dramatically improves both student achievement and teacher effectiveness.
"Unwrapping" The Standards: A Simple Process to Make Standards Manageable
Larry Ainsworth -
“Unwrapped” standards clarify what students must know and be able to do.
When educators analyze each standard and identify its essential concepts and skills, the result is more effective instructional planning, assessment, and learning.
In “Unwrapping” the Standards, the author guides educators through each phase of the “unwrapping” process. By sharing the many real-life success stories of K–12 educators across the country, Dr. Ainsworth explains how to identify the Big Ideas—what educators want their students to remember long after instruction ends.
This practical text includes more than 80 examples of “unwrapped” standards, plus checklists and templates to help educators immediately apply this simple, proven technique for making standards manageable.
Power Standards: Identifying the Standards that Matter the Most
Larry Ainsworth -
Power Standards offers a step-by-step, practical approach that explains how educators can distinguish the “Power Standards”—those that are absolutely essential for student success—from those that are “nice to know.”
You will learn how to create a prioritized subset of standards that meet state or district requirements, and be able to identify which standards comprise the “safety net”—the skills and knowledge students must master to be successful at every grade level and in every content area.
Educators who apply the practical strategies to create Power Standards quickly gain clear focus and use them to develop meaningful curriculum and assessment.