Explore the powerful synergy between your credibility with students and your collective efficacy as a member of a team. When you increase your credibility with students, student motivation rises. And when you partner with other teachers to achieve this, students learn more. This one-stop resource illuminates the connection between teacher credibility and collective efficacy and offers specific actions educators can take to improve both. It includes: Tips for becoming more trustworthy, competent, and responsive in the eyes of students Tools for teams to use to polish their collective effectiveness through better communication and problem-solving Coaching videos that challenge teachers to improve teacher practice and grow professionally

What makes a powerful and results-driven Professional Learning Community (PLC)? The answer is collaborative work that expands the emphasis on student learning and leverages individual teacher efficacy into collective teacher efficacy. PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design calls for strong and effective PLCs plus—and that plus is YOU. Until now, the PLC movement has been focused almost exclusively on students and what they were or were not learning. But keeping student learning at the forefront requires that we also recognize the vital role that you play in the equation of teaching and learning. This means that PLCs must take on two additional challenges: maximizing your individual expertise, while harnessing the power of the collaborative expertise you can develop with your peers. PLC+ is grounded in four cross-cutting themes—a focus on equity of access and opportunity, high expectations for all students, a commitment to building individual self-efficacy and the collective efficacy of the professional learning community and effective team activation and facilitation to move from discussion to action. The PLC+ framework supports educators in considering five essential questions as they work together to improve student learning: Where are we going? Where are we now? How do we move learning forward? What did we learn today? Who benefited and who did not benefit? The PLC+ framework leads educators to question practices as well as outcomes. It broadens the focus on student learning to encompass educational equity and teaching efficacy, and, in doing so, it leads educators to plan and implement learning communities that maximize individual expertise while harnessing the power of collaborative efficacy.

Help your PLC+ group to work wiser, not harder. This practical guide to planning and implementing PLC+ groups equips professional learning communities with the tools, templates, and step-by-step instructions needed to bring the PLC+ framework to life in a collaborative setting. Twenty-three modules support PLC+ groups as they work through one entire cycle of learning, addressing the five questions and four cross-cutting themes—equity, high expectations, individual and collective efficacy, , and effective activation and facilitation. Engage in deeper learning around the ideas and concepts central to PLC+ and make greater equity and efficacy a reality in your school or district.

“When students know how to learn, they are able to become their own teachers.” —Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Hattie Imagine students who describe their learning in these terms: “I know where I’m going, I have the tools I need for the journey, and I monitor my own progress.” Now imagine the extraordinary difference this type of ownership makes in their progress over the course of a school year. This illuminating book shows how to make this scenario an everyday reality. With its foundation in principles introduced in the authors’ bestselling Visible Learning for Literacy, this resource delves more deeply into the critical component of self-assessment, revealing the most effective types of assessment and how each can motivate students to higher levels of achievement.

The system won’t do it for us. But we have each other. In The Imperfect and Unfinished Math Teacher: A Journey to Reclaim Our Professional Growth, master storyteller Chase Orton offers a vulnerable and courageous grassroots guide that leads K-12 math teachers through a journey to cultivate a more equitable, inclusive, and cohesive culture of professionalism for themselves...what he calls professional flourishment. The book builds from two bold premises. First, that as educators, we are all naturally imperfect and unfinished, and growth should be our constant goal. Second, that the last 40 years of top-down PD efforts in mathematics have rarely supplied teachers with what they need to equitably grow their practice and foster classrooms that are likewise empowered, inclusive, and cohesive. With gentle humanity, this book inspires teachers to break down silos, observe each others’ classrooms, interrogate their own biases, and put students at the center of everything they do in the math classroom. This book: Weaves raw and authentic stories—both personal and those from other educators—into a relatable and validating narrative Offers interactive opportunities to self-reflect, build relationships, seek new vantage on our teaching by observing others’ classrooms and students, and share and listen to other’s stories and experiences Asks teachers to give and accept grace as they work collaboratively to better themselves and the system from within, so that they can truly serve each of their students authentically and equitably Implementing the beliefs and actions in this book will position teachers to become more active partners in each other’s professional growth so that they can navigate the obstacles in their professional landscape with renewed focus and a greater sense of individual and collective efficacy. It equips teachers—and by extension, their students—to chart their own course and author their own equitable and joyful mathematical and professional stories.

It's one of the great mysteries of teaching: Why do some students "get it" and some students don't? In this book, Betty K. Garner focuses on why students struggle and what teachers can do to help them become self-directed learners. Difficulty reading, remembering, paying attention, or following directions are not the reasons students fail but symptoms of the true problem: underdeveloped cognitive structures—the mental processes necessary to connect new information with prior knowledge; organize information into patterns and relationships; formulate rules that make information processing automatic, fast, and predictable; and abstract generalizable principles that allow them to transfer and apply learning. Each chapter focuses on a key cognitive structure and uses real-life accounts to illustrate how learners construct meaning by using recognition, memorization, conservation of constancy, classification, spatial orientation, temporal orientation, and metaphorical thinking. The author's simple techniques stress reflective awareness and visualization. It's by helping students to be conscious of what their senses are telling them, encouraging them to visualize the information for processing, and then prompting them to ask questions and figure out solutions on their own that teachers can best help students develop the tools they need to * Gather, organize, and make sense of information, * Become cognitively engaged and internally motivated to achieve, and * Experience learning as a dynamic process of creating and changing. Suggestions for using these techniques in daily classroom practice, advice on lesson planning for cognitive engagement, and guidelines for conducting reflective research expand this book's practical applications. Use it not only to help struggling students break through hidden barriers but to empower all students with tools that will last a lifetime.

This research-based handbook guides school leaders in successfully implementing a literacy coaching program to drive schoolwide literacy achievement.