Educators increasingly are recognizing, and research is persistently revealing, that the jobs of teaching and leading schools are too demanding for people to work in isolation from one another. But calls for collaboration often fall on deaf ears because teachers and leaders do not have job-embedded ways of developing their lesson plans, revising curricula, and improving their assessment tools. So, how can educators better support each other while coping with the busy, everyday pressures of life in schools?  And because no system is perfect, how can we weigh the trade-offs involved in different models of collegiality and shared learning to understand which model is best for our schools?

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This highly interactive workshop will provide an overview of Four Ways of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs):

• A First Way of the educator as an ;

• A Second Way of PLCs focused on teaching and assessment;

• A Third Way of concentrated on pushing improvement forward through relentless pursuit of improved testing results; and

• A Fourth Way of that incorporates elements of the First, Second, and Third Ways while restoring to educators a broad repertoire of strategies to improve learning by re-engaging students with the full range of their diversity and talents.

The heart of this workshop will show school leaders how to identify the different kinds of PLCs as they are manifested in the everyday lives of educators in their schools.  With this information leaders will then focus on concrete, step-by-step protocols that they can take with them to shift and improve their current PLC structures and cultures.  Workshop participants will learn how to capitalize upon the strengths of their leadership strategies and how to avoid common errors and distractions in the start-up phase of implementation.  They will learn how to determine which approach towards professional learning is best for their school or system at the present stage of development, with special attention given to innovative forms of staff development that integrate their work with new information and communication technologies.