Leading Professional Learning: Building Capacity Through Teacher Leaders provides practical tools, examples, and processes for developing, implementing, and evaluating systems of job-embedded professional learning led by teacher leaders. Developed by ASCD faculty member and author Judy Carr, the course provides a necessary alternative to older "train the trainer" models of professional development. It emphasizes instead sustainable approaches to long-term capacity building for deep professional learning that leads to routine use of essential practices in classrooms and schools.

In this PD Online course, Carr defines job-embedded professional learning and identifies approaches to needs assessment that highlights professional learning needs within a school. She then provides guidance and criteria for the identification and selection of teacher leaders and includes examples of various means of learning with colleagues in a job-embedded system – such as action research and other study groups, collaborative planning of lessons and assessments, and differentiated professional learning in which teachers engage with and provide feedback to one another.

Participants in this course have the opportunity to analyze the critical role professional learning communities (PLCs) play in the implementation of job-embedded professional learning and to explore various protocols that can strengthen the interactions and results achieved by educators working together to deepen their own learning and that of their students. The course concludes by having participants reflect on the essential "look fors" for high quality, job-embedded professional learning and by asking them to consider essential elements for the monitoring and evaluation of systems of professional learning.

Once embedded in the culture of a school, this systems approach to professional learning led by teacher leaders becomes the vehicle for bringing each best practice to life in classrooms, from curriculum to instruction to assessment to use of data to improve student learning to respectful classroom relationships. The course takes ASCD’s years of experience using capacity building models for professional learning in schools and districts across the country and offers local options for teacher leaders working together with administrators to build capacity for ongoing, high quality, job-embedded professional learning.

Course Objectives

• Analyze professional learning needs in relation to an innovation.
• Draft an assessment of educator learning needs.
• Plan ways to make time for professional learning during the work day.
• Analyze teacher leadership roles and the value they bring to a school.
• Evaluate essential criteria for identifying teacher leaders.
• Develop processes for identifying and supporting teacher leaders.
• Analyze approaches to teacher collaboration that have a positive effect on professional learning.
• Collect tools to support implementation of a collaborative study group.
• Define professional learning communities (PLCs).
• Analyze the critical role PLCs play in the implementation of job-embedded professional learning.
• Identify protocols to use in collaborative work with colleagues.
• Analyze protocols to use for a variety of professional learning purposes.
• Implement a protocol and evaluate its effectiveness.
• Identify essential elements needed for evaluation of professional learning systems.
• Develop a process of creating look fors to identify essential elements of implementation.

Syllabus

(ASCD PD Online course, 2013) Self-paced asynchronous online course. Upon completion, learners will be awarded an ASCD Certificate worth up to 20 Clock Hours.