From Insight to Impact: Celebrating a Year of Shared Learning

At Lead by Learning, we believe collaborative inquiry empowers educators to uncover what works best for their students and colleagues. When this learning is shared publicly, it builds a shared vision for progress and focus. As the year wraps up, we support our partners in reflecting on their growth and sharing their insights through presentations, posters, and collaborative conversations. Take a look at how educators synthesized, shared, and celebrated to strengthen collective efficacy.

Oakland Unified School Teachers created artifacts of their learning using Google Slides to share their journey of learning, starting with their initial inquiry questions, the data they gathered along the way, and the changes in practice they made to best support students. On May 7th, teachers from the OUSD ELLMA and SEL communities of practice convened on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus to share with one another about their learnings this school year.

Monroe Elementary School Teacher Leaders in San Leandro Unified School District culminated their year by creating and sharing synthesis posters of their learning. Lead by Learning and Monroe ILT members, have been collaborating for the past three years to reimagine what teacher professional development could look like. Folks appreciated the opportunity to focus on an aspect of their instruction they wanted to work on, to collaborate with their colleagues, and to center student data.

Tamalpais Union High School District Principals engaged in a reflection and gallery walk activity in response using 4 prompts:

1. Here’s what I learned…
2. Here’s what I did…
3. Here’s what I am still curious about…
4. Here’s what I want to get better at…

School leaders wrote their response on salt shakers in connection to an article they read the previous month The Salt Shaker Theory of Leadership by Paul Stansik as a frame for continuing to recenter anti-racist action and high-impact instructional leadership.

Halkin Elementary School in San Leandro Unified School District Teachers celebrated both their learning and the success of their focal students in a culminating gallery walk-style activity that showcased their year-long inquiry into supporting Multilingual Learners as empowered writers using graphic organizers to tell their stories.

Chicago Public School Principals, who lead Professional Learning Communities and Master Classes for fellow Chicago Public School principals and assistant principals, with The Chicago Public Education Fund, reflected on the impact and outcomes of their learning communities on their own leadership and on the leadership of their participating principals using an end-of-year report. After reflecting on their individual data and outcomes, principals shared with one another in small groups to lift up patterns, themes, and collective impact across their city.

Alameda Unified School District PLC (Professional Learning Community) Leadership Teams engaged in individual, site, and district-wide reflection, sharing, and celebration. Grounded in two data sources, fall and spring survey data about collaboration, engaging with data, and focal student growth and their own leadership stories, teacher leader teams reflected on what worked and where they wanted to improve to name next steps for the 25-26 school year. After working within their school site leadership teams, each school then shared their next steps district-wide in a community circle share-out.

Instructional Leadership Teams from two Bay Area districts, San Leandro Unified and Oakland Unified, came together for their final Lead by Learning ILT Network convening to reflect on their stories of learning and progress. Teams prepared stories centered around four key questions:

• What are we trying to do?
• What is our impact? How do we know?
• Who are we becoming as we do this work?
• Where are we going next?

After taking time to craft their stories as individual teams, they shared with other sites in the network to practice the leadership capacity of storytelling, a key component to developing collective efficacy. The evening ended with a call to action and a moment to reflect as a network on where their stories might go, whether that be back to their school sites, community partners, district leadership, or parent groups.

Interested in working with Lead by Learning to support professional learning and leadership development in your system? Connect with a member of our team to learn more