SERVE Topic Educator Quality

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Professional Learning Communities

Steps for Supporting Professional Learning Teams

What Are the Benefits? Use this activity to help teachers reflect on the benefits of working together in Professional Learning Teams.
What Do the Experts Say? Use this activity to provide teachers with additional evidence that teacher collaboration is a researched and effective process for building teacher expertise.
Why Work Together? Use this overhead to emphasize the importance of collaborative learning.

Step 2: Review the Process

What's Involved—In a Nutshell Use this handout to provide teachers with a brief, preliminary glance at what learning team participation involves.

Step 3: Organize the Teams

Decisions, Decisions! Use this handout as a checklist to help teachers think through team logistics and the initial resources they will need. If you are facilitating this process, a good way to kick off this initiative is to prepare the notebooks and collect materials for the teams in advance.
Notebook Checklist Give teams a copy of this handout to assist them in thinking through what they need to include in their team notebooks. Stress that all of this information does not need to be included, they may choose to include different information, and this information need not appear in any particular order. The key is to keep up with information, keep it organized, and keep it in a place that is readily available to other teams and the administration.

Step 4: Define Team Expectations

Traits of Successful Team Members This handout describes some attitudes and interpersonal skills that characterize successful team members. This tool can be used for individual reflection before being discussed as a group.

Step 5: Analyze the Data

Reflecting on the Data Use this overhead to lead a faculty discussion of six of the major considerations in Tool 5.3 in the Facilitator's Guide.

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