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Strand Two
Developing Professional Communities
This strand contains two vital arenas. In the first arena, Teacher-to-Teacher: Developing Learning-Focused Relationships, you will find tools and strategies for enhancing the one-to-one skills necessary for practitioners who support the growth and learning of their colleagues. The second arena, Developing Communities of Practice, offers resources and skills for developing, presenting to and facilitating collaborative groups.
Teacher-to- Teacher: Developing Learning-Focused Relationships
In this arena we explore the essential concepts, templates and mediational tools for developing effective, learning-focused relationships between growth-oriented educators. Our model and materials are in wide use across North America providing foundational principles and practical tools for mentors, coaches and instructional supervisors.
Target Audiences: Teacher mentors, instructional and content coaches, curriculum specialists and instructional supervisors
Workshops and seminars include:
Learning-Focused Mentoring: Consulting, Collaborating and Coaching for Professional Excellence
Based on our best selling book, Mentoring Matters: A Practical Guide to Learning-Focused Relationships, this seminar explores the important relationship between mentor teachers and the novices they support. The sessions move mentors from simply handholding and advice dispensing to becoming skillful growth agents. The materials and learning experiences offer practical tools, specific templates, and technical tips for educators who help beginning teachers to increase the effectiveness of their practice.
Topics Include:
Establishing learning-focused relationships
Examine three critical functions of learning-focused relationships; offering support, creating challenge and facilitating professional vision. Learn how to balance the three functions by addressing a novice’s immediate needs with a longer-term view of growth.
Navigating a continuum of interaction
Explore three stances of learning-focused interaction: consulting to offer expertise and provide technical resources, collaborating for shared planning and problem-solving and coaching, a nonjudgmental interaction that develops decision-making skills and supports reflection. Learn specific strategies related to each stance and skills for flexibly moving between stances.
Inviting Thinking
Refine a toolkit for increasing willingness, confidence and skill in the thinking that drives instructional decision-making and reflection on practice. Learn to apply verbal and nonverbal skills to learning-focused conversations with novice teachers.
Applying templates for learning-focused conversations
Employ templates to guide mentor/novice conversations about instructional planning, reflecting and problem solving. Learn to use time-effective structures in one-to-one and small group interactions that focus conversations, maintain momentum and develop targeted thinking skills.
Providing feedback
Develop methods for standards-driven conversations that provide feedback to improve instructional decision-making. Learn how to foster a novice teacher’s capacity for analyzing gaps between learning standards and present levels of performanc.
Teacher-to-Teacher: Developing Instructional Expertise
This seminar explores the what, why and how of learning-focused relationships between professional colleagues. These sessions offer practical tools, specific templates, and technical tips for educators who wish to develop and expand instructional and content expertise in others.
Topics Include:
Being growth agents not change agents
Define and enhance the colleague-to-colleague support relationship by developing skills to respectfully promote adult learning and work through resistance to changes in practice. Learn how to balance three functions of learning-focused relationships; offering support, creating challenge, and facilitating professional vision to promote teacher growth and development.
Navigating a Continuum of Interaction
Develop the verbal and non-verbal tools for skillfully navigating a continuum of interaction from consulting (sharing expertise and providing technical assistance), to collaboration (shared planning and problem solving), to coaching (a non-judgmental interaction which promotes reflection and develops professional capacity). Learn how to transfer expertise, encourage experimentation and develop habits of reflection within the teachers you support.
Applying templates for learning-focused conversations
Employ templates to guide conversations that engage teachers of all experience levels with instructional planning, reflecting and problem solving. Learn to use time-effective structures in one-to-one and small group interactions that focus conversations, maintain momentum and develop targeted thinking skills.
Providing feedback
Develop methods for standards-driven conversations that provide feedback to improve instructional decision-making. Learn how to foster teachers’ capacities for self-assessment and increase your skills and confidence in structuring and facilitating difficult conversations about tough to talk about issues.
Learning-Focused Supervision: The Four C’s of Professional Excellence
This seminar explores the shift from teaching-focused to learning-focused supervisory practices. These sessions offer practical tools, technical tips and standards-driven protocols for promoting professional excellence. Learn how to develop the skills and confidence for engaging in nondirective and directive conversations in which learning and teaching standards are the focal points for expanding instructional repertoire. Develop approaches for addressing student performance issues and ensuring high achievement for all learners.
Topics Include:
Clarifying the supervisor’s role
Consider new definitions of supervision and new identities for supervisors as growth agents by exploring the transition from teaching-focused to learning-focused supervisory practices. Learn ways to examine present instructional practices based on clear and agreed upon student performance standards while building teachers’ capacities for self-monitoring and self-modification.
Navigating the 4 C’s of supervision
Engage with practical strategies for navigating across a supervisory continuum of interaction moving between coaching (a nonjudgmental interaction which supports reflection and develops professional capacity), collaborating (shared planning and problem solving), consulting (sharing expertise and providing technical assistance), and calibrating (framing expectations, clarifying standards and articulating success criteria). Learn to flex between these four stances in learning-focused conversations that maintain productive collegial relationships while clarifying expectations and examining gaps in either student or teacher performance.
Refining the supervisor’s toolkit
Develop verbal and non-verbal skills that increase teachers’ willingness to think and talk about professional practice. Learn to apply patterns of pausing, paraphrasing, and inquiring to establish goals, appraise present performance levels and reflect on learning and teaching practices.
Structuring conversations
Apply templates for planning, problem solving and reflecting in both one-to-one and small group interactions. Learn ways to maintain momentum and extend thinking by guiding conversations that increase teachers’ readiness and abilities to think deeply about the choices they are making and their students’ learning.
Providing learning-focused feedback
Connect student-learning standards and agreed upon teaching standards to the feedback you offer teachers as you jointly examine student and classroom performance and outcomes. Learn to apply structures and tools for framing productive conversations that analyze professional practice and determine areas and directions for growth.
Developing Communities of Practice
This arena addresses the critical skills for developing collaborative school cultures that focus on the learning needs of students and the adults who serve them. As the research base grows on the power of professional community to enhance student learning, our seminars and materials offer the practical “how’s” to the support the “what’s” and “why’s” of this important outcome.
Target Audiences: School and district leaders, site and district teams, facilitators and group developers.
Workshops and seminars include:
Data-Driven Dialogue: Practical Strategies for Collaborative Inquiry
Based on our book, Data-Driven Dialogue: A Facilitator’s Guide to Collaborative Inquiry, this interactive seminar explores and applies a three-phase Collaborative Learning Cycle that guides productive collaborative inquiry. Participants investigate strategies and structures that reduce defensiveness and create shared responsibility for student learning. We will hone practical tools for discovering assumptions, promoting data-focused inquiry and developing shared understandings of both problems and possible solutions. These understandings become the foundation for dynamical planning processes.
Topics include:
Using data to focus a group's attention and energy
Apply a variety of interactive structures to help individuals and groups construct meaning as they interact with data and each other. Develop strategies for interpreting, analyzing and applying data to the work of school improvement. Learn how to design engaging data explorations with both quantitative and qualitative data and structure interactive conversations with classroom teachers and those who support them.
Applying The Collaborative Learning Cycle
Experience and apply a three-phase model for guiding data-driven dialogue and collaborative inquiry. Learn how to frame data-based inquiry that help groups: activate prior knowledge by surfacing predictions and underlying assumptions before examining data sets; explore and discover patterns, trends and surprises in data displays; and organize and integrate learning by developing theories of causation and theories of action as platforms for thoughtful school improvement planning.
Extending a repertoire of facilitative tools
Refine and enhance your personal toolkit for facilitating productive group learning, planning and problem solving. Learn verbal and nonverbal tools for inviting and sustaining the thinking of group members. Increase your confidence when facilitating difficult conversations as you use data to promote professional interactions about tough-to-talk-about topics.
Leading Groups: Navigating a Continuum of Interaction
This seminar explores a leadership continuum that flexes between the stances of framing, presenting, collaborating and facilitating when communicating important information and supporting groups in generating and processing information. Knowing when and how to flex across this continuum, allows skilled leaders to productively and confidently influence positive outcomes for groups, manage challenging topics and preserve a place at the table for their own participation.
Topics include:
Navigating a continuum of interaction
Explore four stances of group leadership: framing to name expectations, timelines, product and performance standards and constraints, presentingto share information and structure meaningful group member interactions with important content materials, collaboratingto join the conversation as an equal participant beyond role authority or content expertiseand facilitatingto orchestrate productive planning, problem-solving and decision making sessions. Learn specific strategies for each stance, methods for flexing skillfully between the four stances and ways to signal role change when this occurs.
Designing group work
Develop and apply templates for planning and assessing outcomes for the groups with which you work. Learn ways to clarify outcomes for products, performances and decisions.
Energizing groups and supporting information processing
Expand your repertoire of strategies for monitoring and managing the productive energy of group members. Learn a variety of individual, small and large group strategies that support high levels of engagement for exploring, connecting and applying new ideas to professional practice.
Developing groups
Increase your ability to simultaneously manage task focus, process skills and group member interaction. Learn way to accelerate group development by assessing current capacities and designing interventions to support growth.
Refining the group leader’s toolkit
Enhance your verbal and nonverbal skills for focusing groups and increasing group member willingness to think and talk together about important professional subjects. Learn to apply a pattern of pausing, paraphrasing and inquiring to respond to and influence the thinking of group members. Increase your confidence when dealing with difficult people and difficult topics.
Learning-Focused Presentations
This interactive seminar presents practical strategies and innovative ideas for structuring and conducting powerful learning experiences for adults. Based on the three-phase Pathways Learning Model, these sessions offer tested principles of learning and teaching that engage adult learners in meaningful explorations of concepts, ideas and information. We will explore theory and practice by offering powerful design templates and presentation tools for connecting audiences to you, to each other and to important content.
Topics include:
Designing learning
Increase audience engagement by developing outcome driven not content driven presentations. Learn how to design learning-focused presentations organized by clear goals matched to the needs and preferences of adult learners.
Energizing groups and supporting information processing
Increase your repertoire of strategies for focusing the productive energy of group members. Learn a variety of individual, small and large group strategies that support high levels of engagement and meaning making by participants.
Managing groups
Expand your acuity and flexibility for monitoring audience members’ interaction with ideas and each other. Learn tips and techniques for addressing challenging topics and challenging situtations.
Increasing credibility and confidence
Develop a variety of nonverbal and verbal moves and skills to communicate and simultaneously enhance your credibility and confidence as a presenter. Learn how to identify and break personal patterns that might inhibit you with groups and how to identify and internalize patterns that will support personal presentation excellence.
The Facilitator’s Toolkit: Balancing Task, Process and Relationship
This seminar expands personal facilitation skills for conducting more productive and satisfying meetings and work sessions with adult groups. These sessions demonstrate how to balance task focus, process skill development and enhance relationships among group members to support problem-solving, planning and decision making.
Topics include:
Structuring meeting success
Develop clear structures to shape participant interactions by using a variety of productive room set up designs, clarifying decision-making roles and employing a set of meeting standards to keep groups on task, on process and on time. Learn templates and tools for facilitating a variety of meeting types.
Designing group work
Develop and apply templates for planning and assessing outcomes for the groups that you facilitate. Learn how to help groups clarify outcomes for products, performances and decisions.
Expanding the facilitator’s toolkit
Increase your confidence when dealing with difficult topics and difficult groups. Enhance your verbal and nonverbal skills for focusing groups and increasing group member willingness to engage in productive dialogue and focused discussions. Learn to apply a pattern of pausing, paraphrasing and inquiring to respond to and influence the thinking and behaviors of group members.
Anticipating, monitoring and recovering
Develop skills for simultaneously monitoring content, process and group development. Learn how to increase your acuity for group process and recover personal and group member focus if things go astray.
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