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“Sometimes the best things going on are happening in your own building, and you might miss them because you’re doing your own thing,”

teachers meet regularly outside of class time to examine their students’ coursework as a team.

“The reason we look at student work is to help teachers become better teachers,”

“are better able to guide and facilitate a deeper level of student learning.”

community of learners who use planned, peer-to-peer feedback to help raise student outcomes throughout the school.

Each three-hour teacher lab focuses on a specific instructional topic that teachers choose to explore together, such as student engagement strategies.

To encourage more teacher collaboration in your school, you’ll want to consider: Time: Where will you find time within the regular school day for teachers to step outside their own classrooms and learn together? Structure: How might a protocol or specific observation prompt help to focus the learning experience? Who will play a lead role in facilitating the teacher experience and encouraging reflection? How will you capture takeaways? The National School Reform Faculty publishes a number of protocols for professional learning, such as this one for looking at student work. Follow-up: How are teachers applying what they learn together? How do students benefit as a result of teacher collaboration?

Simple changes can have an outsized effect. Knowing the names of all the students in school, being generous with “hellos,” and encouraging teachers to greet every student by name in class, for example, are low-burden but powerful exercises,

“kindness strategies” are short and focused, rooted in relationships, carried out repeatedly, and related to actual events in school,

Two of the most fruitful exercises Carrollwood Day embraced, both borrowed from the Harvard project, were “Circle of Concern” and “Relationship Mapping.”