Rick and Becky DuFour, both keynote speakers at the conference, spoke powerfully about the need for building a collaborative culture within the professional learning community of a school. As a teacher who is new to the process of creating learning communities that are focused and planned, I appreciated how they broke the process into steps, from the beginning stages to the complex community. I was struck by a quotation in Rick’s presentation, “Collaborative cultures, which by definition have close relationships, are indeed powerful, but unless they are focusing on the right things, they may end up being powerfully wrong.” Teachers have always collaborated and created informal relationships that strengthen teaching, but collaboration must be focused and sustained to become effective.

The Critical Corollary Questions presented by Rick are a powerful, yet simple, place for schools to begin to set up teams that will be effective. The questions are as follows:

1. What do we expect them (students) to know?
2. How will we know when they have learned it?
3. How will we respond when they don’t learn?
4. How will we respond when they already know it?

As I analyze Idaho Arts Charter School and the steps we are taking to create learning communities, I feel encouraged by our progress. We have spent time aligning our curriculum not only to the state and national standards, but also within and across grade levels. We are creating common assessments, both pre and post learning. The Professional Learning Communities at Work™ continuum is an invaluable tool for the district to assess the reality of where our school currently stands. The session then went on to help schools define what their next steps should be. The sessions with Rick and Becky both introduced learning communities and highlighted how to create, structure, implement, and build strong communities within schools.

I attended a session with Hector Garcia, “Small Schools and Singletons: Structuring Meaningful Professional Learning Teams for Every Teacher,” which proved to be applicable to our situation in a small school. This session focused on how a teacher can create a learning community when he or she is the only teacher in the department or who teachers a particular subject. Hector also addressed other challenges that small schools face. He discussed how the focus for collaborative learning needs to be reduced to common denominators so that the collaboration becomes more than just collegiality.

Another helpful session was “Learning CPR: Creating Powerful Responses When Students Don’t Learn.” This session focused on intervention strategies within schools and challenged some of the traditional interventions such as remediation, summer school, retention, and special education. The RTI model is an innovative way to focus on learning at a much earlier stage in a student’s development and will transform the way schools respond to intervention. I was particularly struck with the way in which RTI is timelier and more targeted then current intervention programs. I am encouraged by what Idaho Arts Charter School has already implemented in our RTI program, targeting at an early stage those students who are at risk for failure.

I appreciate the opportunity to attend this conference and the impact that it will have on my teaching as well as the overall learning community in our school.