Maximizing Teacher Collaboration to Realize Collective Impact

Over the past four decades educational experts have agreed upon the characteristics of high-quality professional learning. When the learning of teaching is done collaboratively and teachers’ every day work becomes the source for professional learning, it has a lasting effect on classroom practice. Collaborating for improved student outcomes makes sense.But beyond theory, do educators know where to begin and furthermore, do they know how to sustain the work? In this session, participants will learn how to support purposeful, productive, impactful collaborative work in schools.

The session introduces characteristics of high-quality professional learning and the barriers that get in the way. During this session, we’ll focus on what it means to intentionally interrupt the status quo to overcome barriers to learning that impede permanent change and improvement.

Participants will be able to:

• list and describe the characteristics of effective professional learning.
• identify the psychological processes involved in learning and which biases get in the way of making professional learning stick.
• determine how to utilize protocols to help in overcoming common pitfalls of collaboration.
• build common understandings about the role teacher leaders and administrators
• play within an adult learning environment and how that affects collaboration and implementation.