Every School, Every Team, Every Classroom: District Leadership for Growing Professional Learning Communities at Work, Oct/2011

The PLC journey begins by articulating a moral purpose: a dedication to ensuring that every student learns. Using many examples and reproducible tools, the authors explain the need to focus on creating simultaneous top-down and bottom-up leadership to align district- and school-level policies and procedures. Learn how to grow PLCs by providing direction and encouraging innovation at every level of the district.

1. Understand the real work that districts must do to ensure that every school implements PLC practices.
2. Explore how to build excitement and commitment to the PLC mission.
3. Build shared knowledge of PLC practices with school board members, principals, teams, individual teachers, and the broader community.
4. Gain strategies for district leaders to support and monitor the critical work of principals in creating collaborative teams.
5. Get strategies and tools to help teacher teams focus their collaborative work on student learning.

About the Authors:
Robert Eaker, EdD, is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also served as dean of the College of Education and interim vice president and provost. Dr. Eaker is a former fellow with the National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development. He has written widely on the issues of effective teaching, effective schools, helping teachers use research findings, and high expectations for student achievement. He was cited by the Kappan as one of the nation s leaders in helping public school educators translate research into practice. Dr. Eaker was instrumental in the founding of the Tennessee Teachers Hall of Fame and was a regular contributor to the Effective Schools Research Abstracts series.

Janel Keating is deputy superintendent of the White River School District in Washington, where she ensures districtwide implementation of professional learning communities. An accomplished educator with more than twenty years of experience, Janel has served as an elementary and middle school teacher, elementary principal, and director of student learning. Janel first put PLC concepts into practice while principal of Mountain Meadow Elementary School in Buckley, Washington. During her time there, Mountain Meadow was recognized as one of the highest academically performing elementary schools in the state.