Discover a practical, comprehensive model of effective professional learning communities. In this user-friendly guide, educators explore research-based steps and strategies designed to increase the effectiveness of collaborative teams and enhance PLCs. Examine how the PLC process can transform critical components of education—including curriculum, assessment, instruction, and teacher development—and use reproducible agendas, scales, and checklists to improve schoolwide practices.

Usher in the new era of school reform. The authors help you transform your schools into organizations that take proactive steps to prevent failure and ensure student success. Using a research-based five-level hierarchy along with leading and lagging indicators, you’ll learn to assess, monitor, and confirm the effectiveness of your schools. Each chapter includes what actions should be taken at each level.

The sequel to Pyramid Response to Intervention advocates that a successful RTI model begins by asking the right questions to create a fundamentally effective learning environment for every student. RTI is not a series of implementation steps, but rather a way of thinking. Understand why bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy, compliance-oriented, test-score-driven approaches fail. Then, learn how to create a focused RTI model that works.

This anthology brings the ideas and recommendations of many of the world’s education leaders into one resource that illustrates the many perspectives on effective assessment design and implementation. From involving students in the assessment process to ensuring accuracy and applying assessments to English learners and students with special needs, you will find compelling insights and proven strategies.

Accessible language and compelling stories illustrate how RTI is most effective when built on the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ process. Written by award-winning educators from successful PLC schools, this book demonstrates how to create three tiers of interventions—from basic to intensive—to address student learning gaps. You will understand what a successful program looks like, and the many reproducible forms and activities will help your team understand how to make RTI work...

Learn how to integrate formative and summative assessments seamlessly into instruction. The research, rationale, strategies, and examples provided in this book will help teachers develop their own repertoire of formative and summative assessments to monitor, grade, and make inferences about a student’s ability to meet standards and curriculum goals. Exercises at the end of each chapter provide opportunities to reflect and plan action steps.

You’re ready to start collecting and utilizing school data, but what data? How exactly will you find it, and how will you use it once you have it? This informative resource takes an in-depth look at best data collection practices and guides the elementary school principal on how to reach struggling learners, strengthen instruction, and achieve schoolwide improvement.

Knowledge is power, and this book puts assessment data and instruction together in a step-by-step format. Instead of dreading the time testing takes from teaching, you can harness its power to define learning targets, build standards-based assessments; gather and use test data in the classroom, and develop data-driven teaching strategies. Assessment expert Nancy W. Sindelar provides practical tools that help teachers: Use formative and summative assessment results to enhance instru...

How is your school data performing for you? Examine the ways your school can better use student achievement data, nonacademic student data, staff data, and parent/community data to identify areas for improvement. This book will help administrators and leaders with school improvement planning and implementation, and teachers will find that good data can be used to plan instruction and monitor and motivate students.

This guide drills deep to deliver the nuts and bolts of RTI. Clear examples of effective implementation include systems and checklists to assess RTI progress. Learn specific strategies for realigning your school system. Respond to the needs of struggling students by building pyramids of intervention, solving problems in collaborative teams, monitoring student progress through data, and employing customized solutions to help every unique learner succeed.

What is Response to Intervention and why should we care? With this question, Margaret Searle begins her exploration of the RTI approach to classroom instruction and intervention from her perspective as a seasoned teacher, principal, and administrator.Built on a solid foundation of best practice, RTI draws on the strengths and successes that many districts and schools already have in place. For the plan to be effective, however, proactive and consistent leadership is essential. With...

Teams that engage in designing, using, and responding to common formative assessments are more knowledgeable about their own standards, more assessment literate, and able to develop more strategies for helping all students learn. In this conversational guide, the authors offer tools, templates, and protocols to incorporate common formative assessments into the practices of a PLC to monitor and enhance student learning