Protocols for Professional Learning Conversations: Cultivating the Art and Discipline, April/2011

Collegial conversations focused on improving student learning may be the most powerful professional development an educator will experience. Examine four collections of protocols to support professional learning conversations, and use them with your colleagues or with students in the classroom. Detailed directions ensure learning teams know what to do and when to do it, and how to get the results they want.

Building Connections Publishing, Inc. is the exclusive distributor of this title in Canada.

1. Learn protocols that facilitate structured conversations to ensure that less-verbal participants are drawn into the conversation.
2. Discover ways to ease educators into the conversation process while establishing a culture of collaborative communication.
3. Find guidelines to customize the ground rules and processes essential to the specific goals of collegial conversation participants.
4. Gain guidelines to create advanced protocols.

The protocols we have established for team meetings, action research, staff development days, School Committee meetings, and adminstrative team meetings have greatly influenced the collaborative culture of our school system.
--Kenneth Murphy. Ph.D., Superintendent

When students use protocols in the classroom, it has a powerful effect on their learning, it promotes engagement and collaboration among all students and increases student ownership in the process of learning.
--Melissa Noack, Teacher

Protocols provide the scaffolding professionals need to maximize their time together and to become producers of knowledge.
--Jane E Golding, Director od Instructional Support

As the person with lead responsibility for the Maine Principals' Association professional development activities, I have seen the power of protocols in structuring collegial conversations. Protocols are very useful tools for savvy school adminstrators.
--Phyllis A. Deringis, Ph.D., Assistant Executive Director

"Cathy Glaude is a wonderful facilitator and I am thrilled to have a collection of her outstanding protocols available to me to use in workshops and institutes. This book is terrific!"
--Anne Davies, Ph.D., Classroom Conections International

About The Author:
Catherine Glaude, Ph.D., is an experienced educator with a strong background in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. She has taught elementary, middle, and secondary students, as well as university and district classes, and consulted at a state level. Catherine also served as a district-level adminstrator spporting team, professional, and organization development by offering tools and resources to help educators work toward improving student learning. Currently, She is Principal of Bryantville Elementary School in Pembroke, Massachusetts.