Impact Team Digital Resources
Welcome to our comprehensive resources page, designed to be your go-to hub for valuable information and tools. Explore a curated collection of documents, guides, and downloadable assets that will support you in building a culture of efficacy and agency through Impact Teams. We’re constantly revising and updating these resources based on what we learn with all of you!
Protocol Templates
Take advantage of flexible “PLC Protocols that Guide BUT Don’t Prescribe” as you gather, analyze, and plan collective actions around a variety of sources of evidence. Use a cloud-storage service to track notes from your Impact Team inquiry cycles using the blank protocol templates to the right.
Data Triangulation Deep Dive
Take advantage of these easy-to-use tools to gather, analyze, and track evidence, or data, of student learning. A clear understanding of learners’ strengths and opportunities for growth is crucial for making informed instructional decisions and supporting students in setting and working toward meaningful goals.
Simple, modifiable data trackers ensure every student’s progress is accurately monitored so teams have the information they need to celebrate progress and adjust instruction and assessment as needed.
Learner Identity
Investigating learner identity is crucial to success with Impact Teams. Understanding each student’s unique strengths, challenges, and cultural background enables educators to foster a supportive and inclusive environment that encourages academic growth, personal development, and a sense of belonging, ultimately empowering students to take ownership of their learning. Use these resources to guide your journey throughout the school year.
Use this blog to explore ways you can personalize your approaches to partnering with, supporting, and engaging each student authentically, fostering a more inclusive and effective learning environment.
Exploring Our Strengths
Use this blog with your Impact Team/PLC to explore ways you can collect, analyze, and plan actions based on “street data” gathered from students, families, colleagues, and the community.
Learner Identity
Using identity surveys like this one from “Amplify Learner Voice through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment” helps us get to know learners while at the same time helping them clarify their own identity.
Engaging in Collaborative Inquiry with Human-Centered Design
Collaborative inquiry and human-centered design empower educators to address complex challenges in a culture of shared learning and creative problem-solving. Use these tools to develop innovative, evidence-based solutions that impact both student and professional growth.
Read Fostering Continuous Improvement by Dr. Paul Bloomberg to see how inquiry cycles drive continuous improvement.
Goal Setting
These resources will you and learners of any age in setting meaningful goals to guide deliberate practice for classes, groups, and individuals.
Check out our Impact Team Goal Setting Playlist for a growing list of readings and tools.
Bookmark the blog, Setting SMARTIE Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide for Impact Teams-PLCs, to support your team, school, or district in setting and using SMARTIE goals.
SMARTIE Goals Tracker Template
Bookmark the blog, Setting SMARTIE Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide for Impact Teams-PLCs, to support your team, school, or district in setting and using SMARTIE goals.
SMARTIE Goals Tracker Example
This tool enables teachers and students to monitor mastery goals built around clusters of prioritized standards.
Unpacking for Clarity and Learning Progressions
Looking for more resources tied to instructional content areas? Visit the Impact Teams resources page on The Core Collaborative’s website, where you’ll find resources for:
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Science
• Social Studies
These standards clusters outline some of the most important work students do in ELA each year. The suggested big ideas, enduring understandings, learning targets, and connections will serve as a guide for setting goals as PLCs and with students.
CCSS Nonfiction Anchor RI.2 & RI.5 Progression
These standards were selected because of the importance of understanding the key ideas and details when reading nonfiction.
Fiction: Navigating Key Ideas and Detail RL.2 & RL.3 Progression
These standards (RL.2 & RL.3) were selected because of the importance of understanding the key ideas and details when reading nonfiction.
The resources below offer a starting place for additional fiction and nonfiction standards.
| Next Gen Informational Standards | Next Gen Literary Standards | ||||||||
| RI.1 | RI.2 | RI.3 | RI.4 | RI.5 | RL.1 | RL.2 | RL.3 | RL.4 | RL.5 |
| RI.6 | RI.7 | RI.8 | RI.9 | RL.6 | RL.7 | NA | RL.9 | ||
| Common Core Informational Standards | Common Core Literary Standards | ||||||||
| RI.1 | RI.2 | RI.3 | RI.4 | RI.5 | RL.1 | RL.2 | RL.3 | RL.4 | RL.5 |
| RI.6 | RI.7 | RI.8 | RI.9 | RL.6 | RL.7 | NA | RL.9 | ||
Unpacking for Clarity ELA/General Template
Rubric Templates
Blank rubric templates to clarify success criteria for products and performances aligned to focus standards.
Formative Assessment Process
In Leading Impact Teams: Building a Culture of Efficacy and Agency, Dr. Paul Bloomberg and Barb Pitchford define formative assessment as, “a process in which educators partner with students to support reflection, goal setting, and progress through curated instruction, experiences, tasks, and feedback” (2023).
The tools shared here guide students and their teachers through the self- and peer assessment process as they reflect on co-constructed success criteria to monitor progress toward their goals.
Determining Rigor
We address rigor in two major ways. One is to ensure students’ engagement at three levels; surface, deep, and transfer. The other is to use tools like those here to understand state standards’ depth of knowledge, or how deeply students must understand a concept to be successful on a given task. By aligning instruction with these deeper levels of learning, educators can better prepare students to meet and exceed academic expectations and to transfer the skills and concepts they have practiced.
Explore this blog, Impact Team Strategy Toolkit: Ensuring Engagement at Three Levels of Rigor, to elevate teaching and learning at all levels.
EduGains Self & Peer Assessment Videos
These resources include brief (7-10 minute), practical instructional videos from Ontario, Canada to support deep and lasting implementation of self- and peer assessment and other aspects of the formative assessment process. Use the clips and accompanying guides to support professional learning with your Impact Team/PLCs and with students to support implementation in the classroom.
Module 1: Planning Instruction Planning Assessment
Module 2: Making The Learning Transparent to Students
Module 3: How Will We Know They Have Learned
Module 4: Gathering Evidence That Demonstrates Learning
Module 5: How Do We Design Assessment With Instruction
Module 6: Designing Instruction to Empower Students
Module 7: Aligning Assessment With Instruction
Module 8: Students As Partners in Learning
Planning Assessment With Instruction Video Series Transcript
Module 1: Planning Instruction Planning Assessment
Module 2: Making The Learning Transparent to Students
Module 3: How Will We Know They Have Learned
Module 4: Gathering Evidence That Demonstrates Learning
Module 5: How Do We Design Assessment With Instruction
Module 6: Designing Instruction to Empower Students
Module 7: Aligning Assessment With Instruction
Module 8: Students As Partners in Learning
Planning Assessment With Instruction Video Series Transcript
Module 1: Using Assessment for Learning
Module 2: Planning to Make Learning Visible
Module 3: Sharing Learning Goals With Students
Module 4: Developing Success Criteria With Students
Module 5: The Power of Feedback
Module 6: Using Assessment For Learning in Kindergarten
Module 7: Using Success Criteria Play Inquiry Based Learning Environment
Assessment For Learning With Young Learners Transcript
Video Playlists: Learners in Action
Peruse these playlists for video clips of the formative assessment process in action. Use them to create a shared understanding of student-centered learning with educators, students, and the community.
Video Playlists: Impact Teams in Action
Watching Impact Team/PLCs in action is one of the best ways to develop a shared understanding of expectations and to improve the impact of self-assessment and reflection as a team. View and debrief the videos you find most relevant together using the micro-teaching protocol (above under Protocol Templates) to celebrate your successes and plan your next steps.
Professional Reading
These short reads are some of our “go-to’s” for professional learning.
We also recommend spending time, preferably with a few colleagues, digging into Leading Impact Teams: Building a Culture of Efficacy and Agency and the accompanying text Amplify Learner Voice through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment for a more complete understanding of how to engage in continuous improvement cycles matched to your specific strengths and needs.
