Your school’s professional strengths and needs are unique, and our tailor-made professional development services will ensure you emerge stronger and confident.
We are experts in designing customized spectacularly memorable and transformative learning experiences, centered on but not limited to the Common Core State Standards.
Because we are a group of diverse teacher leaders, our expertise is broad and deep in all grades and subject areas ranging from: reading-writing connections; digital and communicative practices; interdisciplinary learning; assessments as learning technologies; to developing passionate Professional Learning Communities by nurturing creatively confident principals and teachers to collaborate for powerful outcomes. Download informational brochure!
Drawing on our human-centered, ResponsiveDesign™ theoretically-driven methodology, we facilitate teachers’ professional learning as they collaboratively examine their instructional practices. They learn how to reformulate their existing instructional practices within a human-centered framework we call Principled Intentional Literate Actions (PILA). In doing so, PILA™ enables teachers to explore, envision and enact transformative learning within their classrooms and beyond into the community.
Our Expertise Informs Professional Learning Experiences Tailor-Made for you Including:
- K-12 Reading & Writing as Inquiry Tools for Learning in all Content Areas
- Unleashing and Focusing Creativity in the Classroom & School
- Common Core State Standards
- Response To Intervention
- Nurturing Professional Learning Communities – Authentic ones that work!
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Models in action:
East Saint Louis Charter High School and the CoLab partnership over a two-year period (2010-2011AY and 2011-2012AY) was launched in August 2010 for day-long intensive workshops whose activities orbited around exploring, envisioning and enacting the most passionate classroom where learning is rich and learning is strong. From that day, the 16 passionate and talented high school teachers had a plan of action for how to envision and enact the classroom of their dreams. Over the course of the year, the CoLab met in monthly morning meetings with the teachers to engage them in a series of unfolding learning experiences, or exemplars, each touching upon a different disciplinary area. Unifying and central to the experiences was our Professionals Developing Professionals approach and writing as a tool for learning to become bold and creatively confident teachers who are explorers of learning alongside their students. The year concluded with a 2-day workshop that highlighted teachers articulating their professional journeys of enactments, failures, insights and successes from the first year. Onto these surfaced understandings, through a carefully structured DesignChallenge the teachers engaged in a process of identifying the Principled Elements of a Writing/Learning-Rich and Writing/Learning-Strong classroom. Teachers developed an individual and collective brave and bold plan of action to guide its learning partnership with the CoLab during the coming 2011-2012 academic year.
Belleville District 118 is an amazing collective of 11 K – Junior High schools with nearly 350 passionate and committed teachers and administrators. Over the 2010-2011 academic year, the CoLab worked with Belleville 118 to identify its areas of strength and build upon them to create classrooms that were Writing-Rich and Writing-Strong. The four-phase tailor-made model involved a district wide launch involving individual schools meeting to envision who they wanted to become paired with grade and content level meetings to explore their strengths and needs as learners. The second and third phases, unfolded over several months, involved two day-long meetings per grade and content level teachers that centered on teaching becoming bold and brave writers and experts of their craft to re-envisioning the writing-rich and strong classroom by identified Principled Elements of practice. The fourth phase involved individual schools, where teachers taught each other the learning, successes, failures and insights from the entire year in order to develop a plan of action, grounded in these evidence-based insights, to sustain their growth for the coming year.