Help your PLC+ group to work wiser, not harder. This practical guide to planning and implementing PLC+ groups in a collaborative setting is designed to equip professional learning community teams with the tools they need to work effectively toward improving student learning. Designed as an accompanying resource to PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design, the Playbook helps educators bring the PLC+ framework to life by supporting teams as they answer the five guiding questions that comprise a PLC+: 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? 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 team activation and facilitation. Tools to support implementation of the PLC+ framework are embedded throughout the Playbook: Blank templates allow team members to record their work for every module Step-by-step instructions guide PLC+ groups to facilitate productive discussion, engage in professional learning, and gather and analyze evidence of student learning Crosscutting themes provide cohesion and focus throughout the work PLC+ groups can utilize each activity in the Playbook or find an appropriate entry point and continue the work of building PLC+. 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.

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.

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

Provide students a clear view of what success looks like for any process, task, or product. What does success look like for your students? How will they know if they have learned? This essential component of teaching and learning can be difficult to articulate but is vital to achievement for both teachers and students. The Success Criteria Playbook catapults teachers beyond learning intentions to define clearly what success looks like for every student—whether face-to-face or in a remote learning environment. Designed to be used collaboratively in grade-level, subject area teams—or even on your own—the step-by-step playbook expands teacher understanding of how success criteria can be utilized to maximize student learning and better engage learners in monitoring and evaluating their own progress. Each module is designed to support the creation and immediate implementation of high-quality, high impact success criteria and includes: • Templates that allow for guided and independent study for teachers. • Extensive STEM-focused examples from across the K-12 STEM curriculum to guide teacher learning and practice. • Examples of success criteria applied across learning domains and grades, including high school content, skills, practices, dispositions, and understandings. Ensure equity of access to learning and opportunity for all students by designing and employing high-quality, high-impact success criteria that connect learners to a shared understanding of what success looks like for any given learning intention.

Keeping professional learning communities focused on goals: High functioning professional learning communities don’t happen by chance. They require deliberate efforts and structures to ensure efficiency and focus, and to ignite action. The PLC+ Activator's Guide offers a practical approach and real-life examples that show activators what to expect and how to navigate the PLC team on a successful and collective journey. Readers will find: Templates to help activators prepare for meetings Approaches for fostering and nurturing collaboration Vignettes from real schools that are implementing PLC+ Reflection questions with spaces for activators to record notes Solutions for addressing barriers that often arise in PLC+ teams

Watch: An Introduction to the Teacher Clarity Playbook On a clear day, you can learn forever— that’s the adapted lyric you’ll be happily humming once you’ve covered this playbook, because you will have mastered using learning intentions and success criteria, the twin engines of Teacher Clarity. This template-filled guide shows you how to own it, do it, and live it—and your students will be more successful as a result. Teacher clarity is both a method and a mindset, and it has an impressive effect size of 0.75 (Hattie, 2009). "It’s teaching that is organized and intentional," explain Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Olivia Amador, and Joseph Assof. "It brings a forthrightness and fairness to the classroom because student learning is based on transparent expectations. And when we are clear, our students can better plan and predict, set goals, and acquire a stronger sense of how to judge their own progress." Succinct, smart, and swift, this book’s nine learning modules takes you systematically through a process that begins and ends with standards. With abundant cross-curricular examples that span grade levels, planning templates for every step, key professional learning questions, and a PLC guide with video and PowerPoints, you have the most practical planner for designing and delivering highly effective instruction: Identifying Concepts and Skills Sequencing Learning Progressions Elaborating Learning Intentions Crafting Success Criteria Modifying Learning Intentions to Include Language Expectations Determining the Relevance of the Learning Designing Assessment Opportunities Creating Meaningful Learning Experiences Establishing Mastery of Standards Designed for PLCs or independent teacher use, The Teacher Clarity Playbook helps practitioners align lessons, objectives, and outcomes of learning seamlessly, so that the classroom hours flow productively for everyone. For any teacher striving to be more organized and have stronger relationships with students, this is the book that shows you how. Visible Learning® Supporting Resources The Teacher Clarity Playbook, has been recognized for focusing on practices that have high effect sizes and will help you translate the groundbreaking Visible Learning research into practice. When educators use strategies that have high effects (greater than 0.40), they can accelerate student achievement. The power of the Visible Learning research lies in helping educators understand which factors have the highest impact on student achievement so that educators can begin making strategic decisions based on evidence that will utilize their time, energy, and resources to the best extent possible. The Visible Learning research is based on Professor John Hattie′s unmatched meta-analysis of more than 1600 research reviews comprising 95,000 studies, involving more than 300 million students—the world’s largest evidence base on what works best in schools to improve student learning. From that research Dr Hattie identified more than 250 factors that have an impact on student achievement. View a full list of Visible Learning® Supporting Resources