Effective Planning
College and Career Readiness
Purpose of Collaborative Planning
The primary purpose collaborative planning is to bring teachers together to learn from one another and collaborate on projects that will lead to improvements in lesson quality, instructional effectiveness, and student achievement.
Factors leading to improved results
- The improved coordination and communication that occurs among teachers who meet and talk regularly.
- The learning, insights, and constructive feedback that occur during professional discussions among teachers.
- The lessons, units, materials, and resources that are created or improved when teachers work on them collaboratively
While the primary activity of common planning time is PLANNING, these may happen as well:
- Discussing teacher work: Teachers may collectively review lesson plans or examples of how standards can be assessed, strategies used to teach a concept, and then offer critical feedback and recommendations for improvement.
- Discussing student work: Teachers may look at student work samples turned in for a class, and then offer recommendations on how lessons or teaching approaches may be modified to improve learning and the quality of student work.
- Discussing student data: Teachers may analyze student-performance data from a class to identify trends—which students are not progressing or underperforming—and collaboratively develop proactive teaching and support strategies to help students who may be struggling academically. By discussing the students they have in common, teachers can develop a stronger understanding of the specific learning needs and abilities of certain students, which can then help them coordinate and improve how those students are taught.
- Discussing professional literature: Teachers may select a text to read, such as a research study or an article about an instructional strategy, and then engage in a focused conversation about the text and how it can help inform or improve their teaching techniques.
- Creating courses and curriculum: Teachers may collaboratively work on lesson plans, assignments, projects, and new courses, such as an interdisciplinary course taught by two teachers from different subject areas (for example, an art-history course taught by an art teacher and a history teacher). Teachers may also plan or develop other types of learning experiences, such as capstone projects, demonstrations of learning, learning pathways, personal learning plans, or portfolios for example.