Answer Key for Activity Four

Now that you have sorted through the handouts designed to support learning teams at different stages of development, see if your choices lined up with session presenter Bill Ferriter's thinking:

Filling the Time:  When teams are in the Filling the Time stage of development, their work often feels unfocused and unproductive.  Team meeting agendas can reduce frustration by providing much needed structure for regular meetings.

Planning, Planning, Planning:  When teams are in the Planning, Planning, Planning stage of team development, they often fall into comfortable patterns of talking about teaching INSTEAD of talking about learning.  Surveys like this one that introduce teams to a wider range of collaborative tasks and consensus building tools like this one that make it safe for teachers to express disagreement with team decisions can move these teams in new directions.

Developing Common Assessments:  As teams begin to develop common assessment together, they will benefit from handouts like this one detailing the characteristics of different types of assessment practices and this one designed to help teams work through the inevitable conflict that comes with powerful conversations about just what students should know and be able to do.

Analyzing Student Learning:  One of the most challenging steps that collaborative teams take is learning to analyze student learning data collected from common assessments.  The simple truth is that working with data isn't something that most teachers have any experience with.  Supporting teams that are ready to analyze student learning might mean givingthis data literacy survey or introducing this template for structuring data conversations.

Differentiating Follow Up:  Teams that are truly acting on student learning data will begin to create intervention opportunities for struggling students.  Like everything in a PLC, however, intervention practices must be monitored and evaluated for effectiveness.  This intervention tracking document and this intervention reflection template can help ensure that teams embrace intervention practices with a proven pattern of helping students.

Reflecting on Instruction: Motivated by each other and the tangible benefits of collaboration, the most advanced learning teams in your building are going to need the most help at choosing which collective efforts to ABANDON.  These teams should use this evidence of practice in action document or this practice monitoring tool to protect themselves from becoming professionally overwhelmed.  Advanced teams interested in and/or comfortable with peer observation might also benefit from this practice-centered observation protocol.