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William & Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation

What We Do: Professional Learning and Leading Collaborative

The Professional Learning and Leading Collaborative (PLLC) team knows that dedicated and well-prepared teachers and leaders are key to the success of any initiative. We engage educators and education stakeholders across the PreK-16 education system to develop, share, and implement innovative models and approaches that support the whole student. We build capacity, grow educator leadership, facilitate strategic planning and research, and coach educators to implement personalized and blended teaching and learning to meet the needs of all students. We design with the learner in mind.

Our work is driven by a vision to help everyone reach their potential. We do this by:

  • Analyzing the unique needs of educators and the learning environments they work within;
  • Building networks of schools and districts in which they can, through continuous improvement, learn and collaborate together;
  • Creating personalized and blended learning environments designed to focus on the ‘whole student’, recognizing inequities and diverse needs have to be addressed;
  • Developing ongoing, job-embedded professional learning opportunities based on the data-driven needs of educators and administrators in an effort to support each and every student;
  • Empowering educational leaders to plan and implement innovative learning initiatives while co-developing a coherent long-term strategy that benefits all stakeholders; and, 
  • Facilitating one-of-a-kind professional learning experiences customized to meet educators’ individual and organizational needs.
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PLLC’s Core Services

Graphic handout for the Professional Learning and Leading Collaborative and its core services: Capacity building, Sustainability and Scalability

Professional Development

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Computer Science Training and Support Handout highlight core features including strategic planning, professional development and quality resources and support

Computer Science

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Image of a teacher and a student working on a project on the floor together. An orange square overlaying the image says, "Empowering the Whole Child. Transformative learning opportunities to address and foster the whole child.

Whole-Child Pedagogies

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AI with the Friday Institute handout featuring key services: AI literacy, AI ethical and responsible use, AI fluency, AI guidelines and guardrails, leadership development, strategic planning, professional learning and coaching, curriculum and instructional design

Teaching, Leading and Learning in the Age of AI

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Handout for Professional Development and Strategic Planning featuring key features: alternative pathway and beginning teacher support, equity-mindedness, and digital age teaching and learning

Strategic Planning and Support

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Handout for NC Computer Science Professional Development

Code.org Professional Learning Opportunities

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Download our one-sheets for additional information on how we can support you and your school/district/learning initiatives.

How the PLLC Can Support You

The PLLC team provides customized coaching and strategic planning support for schools and districts implementing new programs, with sustainability in mind. Additionally, the team works to build networks between schools and districts who share goals or who may be learning partners while launching a program.

We have expertise and can provide subject matter expertise and perspectives in the following:

  • Competency-based learning
  • Design thinking
  • Differentiated instruction
  • Digital learning initiatives
  • Equity-mindedness
  • Grant writing
  • Alternative licensure and beginning teacher support
  • Leadership and culture building
  • Personalized learning
  • Social and emotional learning
  • STEM and computer science education
  • Remote/virtual school learning supports

Dedicated and well-prepared educators and administrators are key to the success of any initiative within a school. Our focus on professional development and learning is geared toward the knowledge and skills necessary for planning and implementing innovative learning initiatives and provides a deeper understanding of the intersection of curricular standards and sound pedagogy through the use of content-specific/digital age resources, research-based methods and job-embedded strategies. Our professional development design is customized and tailored to fit critical needs, combining face-to-face and virtual opportunities and allowing participants to experience innovative learning strategies to support their own learning.

  • Customized in-person, blended and virtual professional development for teachers, coaches and/or leadership
  • Online professional learning for educator courses targeted for district, team and individual capacity building for all educational stakeholders
  • Coaching support 
  • Computer science education 
  • Learning differences
  • Micro-credentialing
  • Social and emotional learning
  • Virtual learning supports

School and district leadership need access to quality, relevant and job-embedded professional development that enables leaders to plan and implement innovative learning initiatives that build on the existing foundation within a school or district to develop a coherent long-term strategy that sets directions and priorities, supports innovation and provides resources to enable educators and students to benefit fully from innovative instructional initiatives, such as personalized learning, social and emotional learning.

  • Creating and analyzing needs assessments specific to the school or district focus areas
  • Setting direction and priorities based on identified needs
  • Developing educator and staff supports for innovation
  • Providing resources for leading school and district programs

The PLLC team has extensive knowledge and experience in instructional design, facilitation and application in a variety of mediums, including but not limited to, online course design, personalized lesson planning, learning management systems and needs and task analysis to get to the root of your professional development needs. Customized train-the-trainer models in which learning experiences are provided for your on-site support staff in instructional design and adult learning theory is available through contracting.

  • Needs assessments
  • Task and gap analysis
  • Online and blended course/ curriculum design
  • Personalized lesson planning
  • Customized train-the-trainer models
  • Andragogy and adult learning theory
  • Data-driven planning and decision making personalized to the needs of your learning/training needs

PLLC Newsletter

Keep up to date with all the news and learning opportunities the Professional Learning and Leading Collaborative has to offer. Sign up for our newsletter.

Contact

919.513.8515 l pllc@fi.ncsu.edu

current Projects

Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools ITF Training

This hybrid capacity-building program develops the coaching and leadership skills of instructional technology facilitators, coaches and media coordinators in K-12 schools. This work leverages the Friday Institute’s existing “Foundational Coaching Practices for the Digital Age” online course.

Code.org Regional Partnership

The Friday Institute worked together with Code.org to build and adapt the summer week-long Computer Science Principles and Computer Science A training to an asynchronous model. We produced the professional development materials and prepared the PLACE, our online platform, to help regional partners bring these trainings to educators across the United States.

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CS4NC

CS4NC is the North Carolina chapter of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance — a consortium of states taking the lead to innovate with coordinated statewide computing education initiatives. CS4NC is focused on increasing awareness of computing education and coordinating activities and initiatives that will help us grow our computing education networks of educators and computing industry professionals alike.

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Fostering Learning, Identity, and Participation within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (FLIP-STEM)

The aim of the FLIP-STEM Hub is to center racially, linguistically and neurodiverse middle school students’ knowledge and experiences in technology design and development. Designing with (as opposed to for) students, the group will document a landscape of students’ experiences from which innovative technologies grounded in generative artificial intelligence, augmented reality, place-based learning and/or game-based learning can use students’ knowledge and experiences as inputs for STEM learning and discourse opportunities.

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Lexington City Schools Personalized Learning Capacity Building

The PLLC has partnered with Lexington City Schools to enhance their development work around personalized learning. This initiative has supported administrators and educators across six schools by providing both asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities, in addition to individual coaching support.

Navigating the AI Maze for School and District Leaders – STEEM PTEC

This is an in-person event in Spring 2024 aimed at empowering up to 150 school and district educators with the skills and knowledge necessary to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into K-12 education. This event is part of a comprehensive professional learning program with goals to transition from awareness to adoption of AI in K-12 settings, equip educational leaders to support AI-driven teaching and learning, provide hands-on experiences with AI applications and address the ethical implications and policies required for responsible AI use in education.

North Carolina Computer Science Professional Development

In partnership with the NC Department of Public Instruction, the PLLC team plans and organizes a year-long professional development program to support the implementation and facilitation of courses created by Code.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups. The Friday Institute is Code.org’s regional partner for North Carolina.

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NC DPI Innovative Assessments

A team from the Friday Institute has partnered with the Testing and Accountability Division at NCDPI to provide professional development and evaluation for the North Carolina Personalized Assessment Tool, currently under development.

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Oak Foundation Micro-credentials

The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation and PLLC Team has designed and facilitated a range of online professional development experiences that focus on learning differences, social and emotional learning (SEL) and learner agency in partnership with the Oak Foundation. In support of this work, the PLLC has also developed a SEL guide for administrators and added a new stack of learner agency micro-credentials to provide an elevated personalized experience where educators can construct their own pathways and have the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned.

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Online Professional Learning: Professional Learning and Collaboration Environment (PLACE)

Built on research-based models of effective professional development, professional learning communities and online communities of practice, our courses focus on job-embedded, peer-supported and self-directed learning in which educators are exposed to a variety of perspectives on course material.

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Systems for Un-correlating Poverty and Reading (SUPR) in North Carolina Schools

Reading achievement is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, such that many children in high-poverty North Carolina schools and communities are not learning to read proficiently. Some schools defy this trend. The goal of the SUPR (Systems for Uncorrelating Poverty and Reading in North Carolina Schools) Hub is to both expand the narrative to highlight the possibility of equitable reading outcomes in North Carolina schools and to carefully examine, from an interdisciplinary systems approach, the people and processes at work in these schools and communities that may differentiate them and serve as models for other schools and communities.

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Virtual Schools Network (VSN)

The Virtual Schools Network, a partnership between the PLLC team at the Friday Institute and NC Virtual Public School has committed to building a support system for virtual schools that puts the needs of educators, students, and their families first: tackling issues of personalization, data literacy, engagement, project based learning, and offering connections with other virtual school educators.

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PAST Projects

Digital Learning Plan Initiative

Partnering with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the Professional Learning and Leading Collaborative offered focused professional development workshops and webinars for Digital Learning Plan Initiative grantees and their planning teams, complete with Digital Learning Plan visioning, planning and implementing templates to guide working teams towards personalized learning successes.

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FACES

FACES​ for Autism is an advocacy and educational program for parents and caretakers of Black children with autism. To expand the program to reach more families, the FACES team, supported by the design work of the PLLC, developed a “train the trainer” program.

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Learner Agency Online Professional Learning

Building on years of experience, these three free self-paced online learning modules help educators and leaders understand learner agency and put it into practice in the classroom. The content focuses on learning differences, social and emotional learning (SEL) and learner agency – based on feedback and support from educational leaders, equity advocates, researchers and practitioners.

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Making Computer Science (CS) STICK: Systemic Change for Teachers at Wake County Public Schools

The Friday Institute, in partnership with the Wake County Public School System, is developing a sustainable community of elementary teachers to support ongoing integration of computer science (CS) concepts into core content areas. By implementing a scalable professional development program and co-creating locally relevant curricular materials with teachers, the project team aims to increase access to computing education in elementary schools, ensuring that every student in North Carolina has the opportunity to experience CS regardless of historical stereotypes and institutional barriers.

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Professional Learning Institutes

Professional learning institutes provide educators, coaches and leaders with the knowledge and resources necessary for planning and implementing successful innovative learning initiatives, both in the classroom and across a district. We offer large-scale face-to-face institutes, giving participants opportunities to experience educational uses of technology to support their own learning, plan and develop systems and procedures that encourage innovation, and begin the process of innovation with the support of peers and experts.

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Remote Learning to Support NC Educators

The Friday Institute recently partnered with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to provide professional learning opportunities for educators in support of their transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Though the Remote Learning Support webinar series is no longer synchronous, the content is still relevant and can be helpful to educators in schools and districts as they prepare for future remote learning plans.

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Southern Wake Academy: Professional Capacity Building

In collaboration with Southern Wake Academy, the PLLC has designed processes for practical and impactful differentiated instructional practices and lesson design, specifically designed for beginning and lateral entry educators.

The Innovation Project Early Learning Network (TIP ELN)

With a generous three-year grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, The Innovation Project (TIP) and its partners have developed and supported an inter-district network focused on redesigning learning environments to better address the early learning needs of vulnerable children. In its first two years, the Early Learning Network (ELN) engaged school design teams and principals from 36 schools in 12 North Carolina districts.

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Trauma Informed Practice Support (TIPS) in Schools and Communities: Collaboration Between Education and Social Work

The core of the project focused on conducting focus groups that explored teachers’ and social workers’ experiences with the dual pandemic of racialized violence and COVID-19 using a trauma-informed framework and an interactive design method. Overall, we found that an interdisciplinary approach between education and social work provided insight related to trauma-informed approaches in educational contexts. Results of this study demonstrate that teachers and social workers articulate a need for professional development that could have an important impact on the experiences of children and families.

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Virtual Academies in North Carolina: Examining Profiles, Issues and Trends

This project aims to further develop the Virtual Schools Network by creating school profiles and studying the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators in virtual academies. It focuses on promoting equity in education, enhancing teaching and learning through technology, and fostering innovation across educational systems. Given the emergence of virtual academies in K-12 education, it is crucial to provide administrators and teachers with the necessary resources for effective virtual teaching while ensuring equitable access and quality in this school model.

Wayne County Professional Capacity Building: Teaching and Leading in an Age of Complexity

In collaboration with Wayne County Public Schools, the PLLC has designed processes for leading and teaching in an “age of complexity” and provided a unique opportunity to develop innovative and responsive solutions specifically for administrators and beginning classroom teachers. School administrators utilized the liberatory design process to create equitable outcomes for their students once they identified a challenge among their feeder pattern schools.