Featured Speakers
- Johanna Barmore, Senior Program Associate, Quality Schools and Districts Team, WestEd
- Melissa Strand, Senior Program Associate, Quality Schools and Districts Team, WestEd
Host
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 16th session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Revitalizing Your Professional Learning Communities.
Our featured speakers today are Johanna Barmore, senior program associate for our quality schools and districts team at WestEd and Melissa Strand, senior program associate, also with our quality schools and districts team. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, and school leaders providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices.
Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Melissa. Melissa, take it away.
Melissa Strand:
Thank you, Danny. Welcome. Our focus today is on strengthening professional learning communities by making collaboration intentional, visible, and impactful. We’re not only here to talk about the what and the why of VITAL approach, but also the how, so that you leave today with some clear strategies and tools that you can take and apply right away. Think of this as both a chance to zoom out and reflect on the bigger picture of PLCs and to zoom in and think about the specific practices that move collaboration forward in either your schools or your district.
So to get us started, we’d like you to just think about your most recent PLC experience, and think about which one of these to descriptions fits that experience. Is it number one, where it’s like a swirling storm? Maybe you felt like the PLC had a lack of direction, it was hard to focus. Maybe it was number two, where it’s sort of like a sleeping person, just another meeting going through the motions. Maybe it’s number three where it’s a puzzle piece where sometimes it feels like there is a clear direction and focus for the PLC. Or four, it’s like a mountain trail. We have a vision, it’s clear, and we’re making some steady progress.
Please go ahead and take a moment and identify which one most resonates with your previous experience in PLCs. Thank you, Rena. I see some people going ahead and putting that in the chat. Some say number three, it’s like a puzzle piece. All right, keep that in the back of your mind as we go through some of the learning today.
Here’s where we’re headed. We’ll start by grounding in the VITAL framework, our continuous improvement model for PLCs, and then we’ll explore teaching and learning cycles, and the power of the protocols that we have to make teaching and learning more visible. And then throughout, we’ll make some big connections to some of the big ideas and practical tools that you can really take back to your PLCs and start implementing right away.
And with that, I’m gonna pass it over to my colleague, Johanna Barmore.
Johanna Barmore:
Thank you, Melissa. So I saw a lot of people on that poll talk about their PLCs. Most folks said it’s like a puzzle piece. Sometimes we have a clear focus. And what I’m gonna do is share a little bit about the VITAL collaboration philosophy and framework. So first things I wanna say is VITAL collaboration is grounded in three tenets. Learning must be transparent to promote growth. Targeted feedback is essential for growth, and teachers are learners too.
And I wanna give you a little bit of analogy. My 79-year-old grandmother has a heart condition, and I want you to think about what kind of cardiologist I want her to have. Do I want her to have a cardiologist who hasn’t updated their training since they were in med school? Or do I want her to have a cardiologist that’s up-to-date on the most recent treatment and medicine and procedures that will help her live a long and happy life? I absolutely want the cardiologist who’s kept up with the research, and that’s what I also want for my stepsons when they go to school. I want them to encounter teachers who are constantly learning and updating what they know about what works best to support student learning and what practices we need to let go of because we’ve learned they don’t work.
And we’ve actually learned quite a lot about what works and doesn’t work in teaching and learning the last 30 years. And the truth is students really thrive in schools where teachers are reflective practitioners who approach the work with joy, curiosity, and an interest in continuously growing and improving. And we really observe a culture shift in schools when teachers start to make their practice visible to each other and give and receive feedback. And it’s really our responsibility as school leaders to create the conditions in our professional learning communities to make the space for that to happen.
So I wanna share a little bit about our theory of action. The gears on the right, this is what we’re all after. We wanna see improved student outcomes, and what we really believe is that improved student outcomes only come about as a result of improvements in teaching at scale. Those are those two left hand gears. It’s the improvement in teaching that drives the improvement in student learning, so let’s look to the left. The left is what most schools start. We set some goals for improving student outcomes. We might set some goals around student learning. Maybe we provide some high quality professional learning, and often we stop there. And what we’re trying to show in this graphic is that those three gears on the left alone are not sufficient to see improvements in teaching at scale. What teachers need is routine opportunities for feedback, especially peer feedback from their colleagues.
Now, indulge me in one more little story about my family. I have a little niece, and I was lucky enough to be visiting her when my sister was teaching her how to ride a bike. And my sister talked about how to get on the bike, how to balance, how to hold the handlebars, how to keep momentum going, but, of course, the first time my niece got on that bike, she fell. She scraped her knee, but she didn’t get up and say, oh, “that bike, I guess I can never learn how to ride it.” And my sister didn’t look at her and say, oh, “I guess you’re not a bike riding kid.” They got up again, my sister gave her some feedback. She told her to go a little faster, maybe loosen her grip a little bit, and eventually my niece was able to ride the bike and ride it easily without even having to think about it.
And what we wanna be clear about is teaching, just like bike riding, is a practice. And learning about a new instructional strategy is very different than implementing it smoothly in the classroom. Oftentimes, when we try something for the first time, it doesn’t really go as anticipated, and that’s why teachers really need non-judgmental, growth oriented peer feedback to really improve at scales. And when you create a PLC system in your school, you begin to see improvements in teaching-learning that happens at scale across your building.
So I wanna dive a little bit more deeply into the actual VITAL collaboration framework. It’s a four phase process. But before I talk about each phase, I wanna highlight some broad trends that Melissa and I and our team see in PLCs across the country. We see a lot of PLC models where teachers are coming together and examining interim assessment data, and we agree it’s really important that we’re setting goals grounded in understanding what our students currently know and are able to do.
But oftentimes what happens is that teachers look at that data and then move on to the next unit in the curriculum, or they look at that data and they regroup students or reteach some topics using the same instructional strategies they used the first time around. But if it didn’t work the first time around for those learners, why is redoing it again going to work for them? And so what we really wanna see happen instead is to be examining student learning data in tandem with closely examining and reconsidering our instructional practices. And we try to do that in VITAL collaboration in a few different ways in each one of these phases.
So in phase one, we set both student learning goals and teaching practice goals so that school teams start to name the explicit instructional practices they’re gonna intentionally incorporate and use in order to bring about the improvements in student outcomes they wanna see. So for example, a third grade team with a high proportion of multilingual learners say they wanna improve their reading scores. That’s the improvement in student outcomes they wanna see. So their teaching practice they wanna get better at is opportunities for structured academic discourse to support reading comprehension. That’s the teaching practice that’s going to support the outcomes in student learning.
In phase two, and this is really what Melissa and I call the heart of our work, this is where teams spend most of our time. This is where teaching teams engage in teaching and learning cycles. This is where teachers are making their practice visible to each other. They’re analyzing standards. They’re tuning lessons. They’re actually looking at student work. They’re going into each other’s classrooms and observing each other teach. And this is where teachers are both giving and receiving feedback about their practice and trying to make connections between the instructional practices in the classroom and the student outcomes they’re seeing on the student work.
In phase three, that’s where we progress monitor. And, again, it’s an opportunity to connect what we’re seeing in student outcomes to the teaching practices we’re trying to get better at. So this is where not only we’re looking at interim data again to see improvements, but we’re reflecting upon how our teaching practice has changed and what new practices we’re putting in place and what kind of impact it’s having on student learning.
Finally, in phase four, and this is undeniably the most fun phase, it’s where we celebrate. It’s where we share our work with each other. It’s where we look at what gains we saw in student outcomes. It’s where we reflect on our changes in instructional practice, and it’s where we get together with other PLC teams within our school or even across our district to share our stories of improvement and growth and celebrate the work we’ve done together.
One of the things I want to share is the distinction between professional learning communities and common planning. On the left, you see what professional learning communities do. They’re learning focused. They’re setting goals for improvement. They’re applying new instructional practices. They’re reflecting on lessons and their impact on students. They’re tuning lessons to improve student learning. They’re analyzing common assessments. And on the right hand side, you see common planning. That’s about managing and coordinating logistics, pacing materials, where are the new books, where are the new number cubes, figuring out all the nuts and bolts that are important to make sure we’re coordinated across our classrooms, and it might also be about lesson planning using what I already know.
And I really wanna be clear, the kind of shared inquiry and reflective practice in a true professional learning community, it’s not common across the United States. And what we often see happening during collaborative time is planning focused, not learning focused. And no doubt, teachers need time. They need that common planning time, they need time to coordinate their plans with one another, but we’re not going to see real gains in student learning at scale unless we increase teachers’ opportunity to have a learning focused collaboration with their peers.
And with that, I’m gonna turn it over to my colleague Melissa to talk more detail about the teaching and learning cycles.
Melissa Strand:
Thank you, Johanna. So as Johanna mentioned, how do we have PLCs that are more learning focused? We’re gonna spend a little bit of time digging into what we call teaching and learning cycles, which is really, as Johanna mentioned, the heart of VITAL collaboration.
We wanna share more about this with you so that you can see how after teachers set goals, what it looks like for teachers to engage in these types of cycles so that their learning becomes visible. As Johanna briefly shared in phase two, this is when teams engage in what we call, again, the teaching and learning cycle, where they use VITAL protocols and tools to examine and reflect on instructional practice and student learning side-by-side. The focus here is on making instruction visible. You’ll hear us say that a lot: make instruction visible.
How do they do that? They do that by analyzing standards to collectively understand mastery, by tuning lessons to best meet the needs of their students, and then observing each other’s instruction and analyzing the outcomes, the student work. And it’s in these cycles that teachers shift from those surface level discussions to real inquiry about the teaching and learning that’s happening in their classrooms.
So what might this look like? On the screen, you’ll see a typical teaching and learning cycle that lasts roughly four weeks. In this cycle, this is what occurs. Week one, teachers collaboratively analyze an upcoming high priority content standard, and if it’s applicable like states in California that have English language development standards, they’ll analyze those in tandem with a content standard.
In week two, a teacher from that PLC will bring a lesson with a focus for feedback, and the PLC team will collaboratively work together to tune that lesson and make a plan to observe a portion of the lesson. In week three, the PLC members will go observe that lesson in the teacher’s classroom and they’ll debrief it. And then in week four, the presenting teacher that brought that lesson originally will bring back some predetermined samples of student work to analyze together to understand what students learned as a result of that tuned lesson.
What’s different here and what makes this cycle really powerful is that focus from week-to-week. Teachers move through these steps together, and they repeat the process again after those four weeks have concluded. So the consistency is what makes this collaboration really purposeful and then starts to elevate the visibility of the instruction that’s happening in each other’s classroom.
So let’s take a look, an example of what this might look like. On the screen, you’ll see an example of how a team sets goals to inform the work that they’re doing. Johanna mentioned this in phase one. So the goals that they set in phase one of VITAL collaboration has two parts, two types. One set for students and one set for the teachers. So the first one on the screen is a student learning goal. It’s focused on what students should know and be able to do. So, for example, it might look like this. By May,2025, at least 55% of our multilingual learners will meet projected growth on our reading assessment. Last year it was 48%, and 100% will grow at least one language proficiency level.
The second goal on the screen is aimed at what are the teachers going to do differently in order to see these gains in the student outcomes? This is what we call a teaching improvement practice goal. So for example, it might be the third grade PLC team will accomplish this by developing strategies to provide more opportunities for academic discourse to support reading comprehension.
The dual focus here really helps PLC teams throughout the school year so that at the end of the year they identify not just what students learned, but how the changes in their instruction really made that learning possible.
The second week after they set their goals, they then come together and they analyze standards, and these standards are chosen based on their upcoming unit and lessons and are high priority standards. So you can see here on the screen two standards that this third grade team chose. The first one is an English language art standard, which was determine the main idea of a text, recount the key details, and explain how they support the main idea. This is a third grade team in California that has a high population of multilingual learners, was part of their goal. So they also are going to analyze the ELD standard that aligns with their ELA standard. So reading literacy and informational texts closely and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly through language.
They will analyze these standards for mastery for the year, and then they will identify an upcoming lesson that they will teach that will help to get their students towards mastery. In the second week, they will come together to tune a lesson. So one teacher from that third grade team will identify a lesson they have coming up over the next few days, and they will bring that lesson to the PLC with a focus for feedback in mind that is aligned to their teaching improvement practice goal.
The teachers coming to this PLC you can see with some informational text on the left-hand side of the screen. The title is called “Election Day.” It has a photo of Thurgood Marshall. And on the right is the student work that the students are expected to complete by the end of the lesson. Now remember the week prior, the team unpacked the standard that this addressed and that this particular lesson will cover.
The teacher is also coming to this PLC with the feedback in mind. So aligned to the teaching improvement goal, they’ve identified, or this particular teacher has identified that she would like help thinking through how to provide more structured opportunities for academic discourse so that her students are better able to answer some of the comprehension questions in writing. So be able to speak about it before they actually have to do some writing.
So they leave this PLC, this group of third grade teachers with a plan to observe the lesson after they have tuned it with that focus in mind around academic discourse. After they have observed the lesson, they then will come back together and take a look at some samples of student work, and they’ll identify some big key questions that you see here on the screen. What is the work showing that students know and are able to do? And what instructional next steps might support students’ continued growth?
So by looking at the work tied to the lesson, the teachers are able to see the extent to which, in this case, the differentiated sentence frames, that’s what they identified as an adjustment to the lesson, supported the student learning. Note the additional powerful piece here is that if they have the opportunity to get into each other’s classrooms and observe this lesson, they might also have witnessed the impact that routine had on students in real time. Or they might have even seen ways in which that they could refine that routine based on what they observed in addition to just looking at the student work.
And with that, I’m going to pass it back over to Johanna to dig a little deeper into the power of the protocols used during what I just described of that teaching and learning cycle.
Johanna Barmore:
Yeah, so we have publicly available many of the protocols that we use. Our team is gonna put in the chat the example of one, the lesson tuning protocol, but I wanna talk a little bit about why we care so much about protocols. Protocols really provide the structure teachers need to engage in transparent conversations that really make the teaching and learning visible to each other.
And we have protocols to support the standards analysis, the lesson tuning, the observing each other, the analyzing student work that Melissa just talked through in the teaching and learning cycle, and each of one of those protocols is organized in a predictable way. There’s the organized where the team engage in tasks to ensure time is used well, like setting roles, having a timekeeper, a note taker, committing to some shared norms, and making sure everybody understands the purpose of the day’s meeting.
Teachers then learn more in the review phase where they familiarize themselves with the lesson materials or the student work, or they review their notes from observing to prepare to give feedback. During the discuss phase, teachers engage in an open conversation about ways to improve lessons or patterns in classroom observation or student works and the next steps the presenting teacher might take with his or her students. And ultimately it is the teacher that brought the sample lesson or student work who decides what next steps he or she will take during the evaluate phase of the protocol.
And, finally, the team recaps the next steps, so they’re prepared for their next meeting, and it’s this predictable structure that helps teachers move the discourse from superficial conversations around instruction and teaching to a more detailed depth learning oriented conversations to push each other to shift and improve our practice.
And as I said before, a suite of our protocols are available to anyone online to either use or review, that website is also in the chat. You’ll also find some other free protocols there and a preview of two other resources, “A Teacher’s Guide to VITAL Collaboration” and “A School Leader’s Guide to VITAL Collaboration.” And a parting gift we also wanna share is an article called “Achieving the Promise of PLCs.” This is a short article that outlines everything we’ve talked about today. It’s a great conversation starter to use with your leadership team, and it’s a great backdrop to use to reflect on the current professional learning practices present in your system.
And with that, I’ll turn it to Melissa.
Melissa Strand:
Alright, and to close for this afternoon, on the screen we have one of our favorite quotes around the power of collaboration which is, “As teachers join together to solve problems and learn from one another, the school’s instructional capacity becomes greater than the sum of its parts.” When we make teaching and learning visible, collaboration really strengthens not just our individual practice, but the whole school’s capacity to improve.
So with that, I’m gonna turn it back over to Danny to close us out for today.
Danny Torres:
Alright, well thank you Johanna and Melissa for a great session today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. Please feel free to reach out to Johanna and Melissa via email if you have questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Johanna at [email protected], and you can reach Melissa at [email protected].
And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together Webinars. We’re covering a range of topics, including literacy, AI, and more. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about our Leading Together Webinar series, visit us online at wested.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates and information about new initiatives. You can subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.
And with that, thank you all very, very much for joining us. We’ll see you next time.