Professional Learning Community Summer Institute

Tucson’s CITY Center for Collaborative Learning believes that empowered teachers are at the heart of every successful school transformation.  Top-down efforts to transform classroom practice are destined to fail at the ground-level unless classroom teachers are empowered to collaborate together and support each other in safe, transformational spaces.

CITY Center uses the School Reform Initiative’s ‘Critical Friendship’ model of professional learning community to create and sustain ‘transformational learning communities fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence’.  They have created these teacher communities in their three demonstration schools here in Tucson and they also provide training to teachers from other schools and districts so that they can create and sustain these communities in their own schools.

CITY Center is providing a 5-day training, the ‘PLC Summer Institute’, on June 12-16, 2017 where participants can be immersed in the SRI ‘Critical Friendship’ model and come away with the skills, tools, and experiences needed to launch and facilitate powerful professional learning communities in their own schools and districts.  Areas of focus include protocols for collaboratively looking at student work and professional dilemmas, activities to build community and increase teacher collaboration, and an ongoing emphasis on equity and excellence for all students.