Core Collaborative Campaigns
Taking action for systemic change
We believe quality relationships are essential. Use your Back to School professional learning days to set your school community up for success in Academic Year 23-24.
Back to School Inspiration
Welcome your teachers back to school with keynote presentations that truly inspire and energize! Our Back to School keynote topics range from instructional practice (student engagement, culturally responsive and sustaining formative assessment, deliberate practice) to classroom climate and personal wellbeing for teachers. Each offering was specifically designed to welcome teachers back to school with tools to help rather than more to implement. Our engaging facilitators will set a tone of optimism and excitement that teachers will carry into the weeks and months ahead.
Facilitator: Isaac Wells
Success at the end of the year is the result of decisions made at the beginning. Students and educators alike face rapid changes in and out of school. Uncertainty impacts learners’ social, emotional, and academic capacity. Partnering with students to establish consistent routines increases their clarity, agency, and efficacy regarding expectations, behavior, and academics. Learn how to chart your path to success this school year.
Outcomes:
- Practice co-constructing clear criteria for expectations and behaviors.
- Outline a plan for the first 3-6 weeks of routines.
- Describe how to successfully organize and launch partner and independent work in either: Reading, Writing, or Math
Facilitator: Jamie Valenzuela-Mumau
The past few years have brought to light ways in which our current education system and the way we “do school” hasn’t adapted to the current needs of learners. Employers look for young adults who can self-regulate and have self-efficacy as well as skills in collaboration, reflection, and critical thinking. Educators must shift to meet these needs. Together, we will describe what a school that provides opportunities to meet these demands looks like. Discover strategies for partnering with learners to achieve in ways relevant to them and their world.
Outcomes:
- Apply learner-centered classroom differentiation strategies.
- Create an environment promoting intrinsic motivation.
- Develop awareness of gamification of learning.
- Collaboratively construct meaningful next steps for implementation.
Facilitator: Michael DeSousa
When students enter our classrooms feeling like they can’t, and then leave knowing they didn’t, it creates a vicious cycle where students feel they don’t belong. Conversely, students feel greater belonging when they succeed academically. Systems across the country are working to accelerate academic learning after the pandemic. We must also address the challenges many students face with social and emotional health. Intentionally focusing on students sense of belonging and their learning creates classrooms where students enter feeling like they can and leave knowing they did.
Outcomes:
- Explain the reciprocal relationship between belonging and academic achievement.
- Determine strategies to increase students’ sense of belonging and accelerate students’ learning.
Facilitator: Dr. Ingrid Twyman
By adopting a culturally responsive mindset and enacting Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE), we can better meet the needs of ALL students. Hear about two schools that have undergone a journey to look at their current practices. These schools are building culturally responsive classrooms where they strive to incorporate identity, skills, criticality, intellectualism, and joy into their current pedagogy so that all students have an equitable, meaningful learning experience. Discover small shifts you can make in practices starting tomorrow. Learn how adding a cultural lens and implementing culturally responsive practices can work for your students, too!
Outcomes:
- Identify strengths in your current practices.
- Explore strategies to make your curriculum and school experience more culturally responsive.
- Determine next steps to build learner agency.
Learner-Centered Instruction
Facilitator: Dr. Jeanette Westfall
Do you wish for students to take greater ownership of learning, while equipping them with a toolbox of strategies and engaging them in deep learning experiences? Join us to explore a framework for elevating learner agency featured in Jeanette’s new book, Learner Agency: A Field Guide for Taking Flight. This approach is based on core practices, supported by research, and features practical examples from Liberty School District’s journey. Explore how to get the ball rolling with proven practices, structures, and enabling conditions.
Outcomes:
- Craft a personalized vision to grow learner agency in your classrooms and organization.
- Explore a framework based on the enabling conditions that promote agency.
- Develop clarity around your current strengths, prepare to collect evidence from learners, and establish entry points to elevate agency.
Facilitator: Isaac Wells
Time is one of the most important variables in learning. Teachers have little influence over how much time they have with their learners, but they directly affect how that time is used. Incorporating deliberate practice into instruction accelerates learning by engaging students in focused, sustained efforts towards clear and relevant goals. For this to be possible, each unit of study must include opportunities for multiple attempts on all important tasks, as well as time and space for setting, monitoring, and celebrating goals.
Outcomes:
- Establish a plan for “Beginning with Goals”
- Describe key criteria for a “Unit Check-Up”
- Review their first unit(s) to ensure deliberate practice can thrive
Me. We. Community.
Embrace healing for self, others, and community.
The negative impacts of the pandemic are being felt in every community across our nation. Everyone has made extraordinary commitments and dedicated talents and energy to address their community’s needs. Families, caregivers, teachers, and school leaders have been supporting and guiding learners while responding to their own profound challenges.
Through restorative practices, instructional leadership coaching, or a little of both, The Core Collaborative Learning Network can help your school community heal.
Learner-Centered Climate
It can be challenging to find high-quality, dependable resources when you need them. The last thing you want is bad advice. That’s why The Core Collaborative learning network compiled a list of our favorite blogs, podcasts, and videos about restorative practices and instructional leadership during times of trauma.
Access resources
Learner-Centered Climate
A school culture rooted in self, healing, and community.
The Restored and Connected framework creates an integrated approach between cultural competency, trauma-informed care, and restorative-resiliency practices. We have team members across the nation available to partner with your school or system. We will listen to your unique needs and co-construct a personalized learning pathway for your learning community.
Learn more
Learner-Centered Leadership
Our nation’s schools and the students, staff, leaders, and families in them, are collectively experiencing the crisis and trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects are becoming impossible to ignore. Teachers and leaders are walking away from the system at alarming rates. Substitute teachers have also left the system, putting a strain on those who have persisted.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made instructional leadership feel impossible. But TCC can help. Our leadership coaching sessions cater to your needs, no more, no less. Find out how we can help you overcome the impossible.
Find out more