On October 14, Helen Haller staff participated in a Professional Learning Community (PLC) coaching day with PLC coach Cheyana Levia. Each grade-level team spent two hours working alongside Cheyana to plan, refine, and align their instructional units, ensuring students benefit from clear learning goals, engaging strategies, and meaningful assessments.
The third-grade team focused on building a 20-day English Language Arts unit centered around identifying and using text features, locating information within a text, and supporting answers with explicit text evidence. To strengthen student understanding, they developed a set of key vocabulary words and hands-on strategies such as picture walks, tally marks for captions, glossary races, and table of contents searches. The team also planned to implement a common formative assessment to gauge student learning throughout the unit.
Fourth-grade teachers dug into essential vocabulary for their geology unit, creating learning targets and a common formative assessment. Their instructional strategies include giving students the main idea and having them find supporting evidence, as well as engaging them in partner summarizing activities to promote deeper comprehension.
Fifth-grade teachers collaborated on a poetry unit within the CKLA curriculum. With guidance from their coach, they used PEAR and AI tools to design an effective assessment. Their unit emphasizes vocabulary such as stanza, metaphor, idiom, simile, rhyme scheme, and figurative language. Students will even bring poetry to life by choosing a humorous poem to perform with a partner. To ensure alignment, teachers plan to take the end-of-unit test themselves to verify that questions best reflect student learning.
The PLC coaching day was both productive and inspiring. Each grade-level team walked away with a fully developed unit complete with strategies, vocabulary, learning targets, and planned assessments. The day was a true reflection of the power of collaboration and the dedication of Helen Haller’s teachers to designing meaningful, high-quality learning experiences for their students.