Before the new UFT-DOE contract set aside time in the workday for professional development, educators at PS/IS 121 in Mapleton, Brooklyn, had already formed a professional learning community. In collaboration with the school’s principal, the community’s members developed a schoolwide instructional focus and a facilitation guide using well-known books on professional learning as “anchor texts.”

But participation was limited by funding because their community was an after-school per session opportunity. So when time for professional learning was extended to the rest of the staff as a result of the contract, members of the school’s instructional team conducted an informal needs assessment to refine their instructional focus and expand their learning community.

The team homed in on three areas of need and chose an anchor text to guide their work in each area. In the first area, teachers build expectations for conferring with students, using Carl Anderson’s “How’s It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers,” a text in the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project curriculum. In the second, teachers use “Thinking through Quality Questioning: Deepening Student Engagement,” by Jackie Acree Walsh and Beth Dankert Sattes, to refine questioning and discussion techniques. And in the last area, teachers use various texts to explore Universal Design for Learning, a framework for providing students with multiple means of representation, expression and engagement.

During the professional learning time, staff members at the small pre-K–8 school are divided into three groups by grade level and spend the first three weeks of each month rotating through the three series, all facilitated by teachers. In the final week of each four-week cycle, teachers look more closely at student work and best practices.

“We’re happy that it’s systematic. We know what we’re working on and people know what’s expected of them,” says Lucille Randazzo, an ESL teacher and the school’s chapter leader.

On a recent Monday afternoon, teachers in the questioning and discussion series were using a jigsaw reading strategy to study their anchor text together in small groups. Spirited discussion broke out across the room as teachers highlighted passages and added their reactions to a large chart.

In the group about conferring with student writers, teachers were discussing the benefits and challenges of having students hold peer conferences with each other.

“How do you get in there and facilitate constructive criticism without making them feel like they’re wrong?” one 8th-grade teacher asked.

The staff already has plans to refine their routine for next year.

“We are always learning from each other,” says Randazzo.