PLC Blog Archives

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC at Workâ„¢ associate

Bill Ferriter has been working to introduce learning teams and singletons to a range of free products and services that can make collaboration more efficient. This is an excerpt from his blog “The Tempered Radical.”

One of the questions that I’m asked all …

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC at Workâ„¢ associate

Bill Ferriter has been working to introduce learning teams and singletons to a range of free products and services that can make collaboration more efficient. This is an excerpt from his blog “The Tempered Radical.”

One of the greatest challenges in …

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

Preparing for our upcoming conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the steps that highly functioning professional learning communities take to provide enrichment and remediation opportunities for every child has gotten me thinking a ton about the intervention efforts of my own learning team.

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

In preparation for our upcoming conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the steps that schools can take to develop effective systems of intervention that reach beyond the classroom, I just finished reading their newest book, Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap. Here’s my review

Here it is, Radical Nation: The first day in our four-day conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities with Solution Tree authors and school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour.

Interested in joining the conversation?

Then click this link:  Enter Revisiting PLCs at Work Conversation

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

As regular readers know, we’re in the middle of planning for an asynchronous Voicethread conversation with school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour (see here and here) who will be helping us to think through the nuts and bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities from September 8th and the 11th.

For those new to Voicethread, here are a few tips:

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

It’s still hard for me to believe that we’ll be spending four days in September (the 8th through the 11th) exploring the nuts and bolts of professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour.

Talk about a great opportunity to listen to and learn from two nationally recognized school change experts!

In preparation for our conversation, I will be posting a

By Bill Ferriter, teacher and PLC associate

About two years ago, I had one of the singular most exciting moments of my professional career.

At a dinner meeting designed to introduce the members of our State’s Board of Education to the core principles of professional learning communities, Rick and Becky DuFour who, along with Bob Eaker, were the guests of honor recognized me because of my writing!

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“Are you the Bill Ferriter who wrote a terrific piece in the Journal for Staff Development a few years back about how professional learning communities have changed who you are as teacher?” asked Becky in front of the entire room of policymakers and juiceholders.

By Bill Ferriter

I’ve got an interesting admission to make: I’m a HORRIBLE guy to have on a learning team!

Kind of strange, isn’t it? I mean, how could a trained Solution Tree associate and author who has written about the beauty of professional learning communities for years possibly be bad to have around the ole PLC meeting table? You’d think that somewhere in the thousands of pages I’ve churned out, there’s got to be at least something valuable to learn.

By Bill Ferriter

Bill Ferriter, Solution Tree Associate and sixth grade classroom teacher, has been working to introduce learning teams and singletons to a range of free products and services that can make collaboration more efficient. This column will be the first in a series titled “Tech Tools for Teams” where Bill will spotlight individual tools that you might be interested in exploring.