Planning a PLC or professional development session can take a lot of time.

As an instructional coach, you want your teachers to leave with something they can actually use in their classrooms—not just another strategy they heard about and promptly forgot.

But between coaching teachers, visiting classrooms, planning PD, and responding to whatever pops up that day, who has hours to spend creating the perfect PLC?

That’s why I love the idea of a ready-to-go strategy toolkit.

This free Mix-Pair-Share PLC Toolkit gives you the materials you need to introduce a strategy, get teachers talking about how they could use it, and help them make a plan to take it back to the classroom.

What Is Mix-Pair-Share?

Mix-Pair-Share is a simple strategy that gets students thinking, moving, and talking.

Students prepare a response to a prompt, move around the room, find a partner, and take turns sharing their thinking. The strategy can be adapted for different subjects, types of thinking, and levels of scaffolding.

And that’s exactly what makes it useful for a PLC: teachers can experience the strategy themselves and then think about how they could use it with their own students.

Start With the Thinking, Not Just the Activity

One of the most useful parts of this strategy is that Mix-Pair-Share isn’t just about getting kids up and moving.

Before using it, teachers identify the kind of thinking they want students to do.

For example, students might:

• predict what a character will do
• explain a scientific process
• compare ideas
• defend an opinion
• summarize learning
• match vocabulary with definitions

Then teachers can choose a scaffold to support that thinking, such as a graphic organizer, sentence starter, sketch, written response, or matching cards.

That makes the strategy flexible enough to use across content areas.

Try It With Teachers During Your PLC or PD

Rather than simply telling teachers about Mix-Pair-Share, let them experience it.

The toolkit gives you a structure for learning about the strategy, discussing it, brainstorming classroom applications, making a plan, and reflecting afterward.

You can also use the challenge cards included in the toolkit to have teachers create their own Mix-Pair-Share activities. They combine different content, thinking purposes, and scaffolds to build an activity they could use with students.

That’s a great way to turn a PLC from “Here’s a strategy you could try” into “Let’s figure out exactly how this could work in your classroom.”

Help Teachers Make the Connection to Their Classrooms

Professional learning is much more useful when teachers leave knowing where and how they’re going to use what they learned.

The toolkit includes brainstorming and planning pages that help teachers identify lessons where Mix-Pair-Share could fit and create their own prompts.

The strategy can work across subjects, too. The toolkit includes examples for reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.

You can even use the discussion questions to help your PLC think through what students would need to learn explicitly and which scaffolds would make the strategy more successful.

A PLC Meeting or PD Doesn’t Have to Mean Hours of Prep

As a coach, you’re already doing a lot.

You shouldn’t have to spend your evening building a PLC from scratch every time you want to introduce a new instructional strategy.

A ready-to-use toolkit can give you the structure, materials, discussion prompts, and planning tools you need to get teachers learning and applying a strategy without starting from a blank page.

And once teachers try the strategy in their classrooms, you can use the reflection guide to revisit what happened, what worked, what they would change, and what support they need next.

Download the Free Mix-Pair-Share PD Toolkit

Want to try a ready-to-go PD Toolkit to introduce an instructional strategy with your teachers?

Download the free Mix-Pair-Share PD Toolkit and use it for your next PLC or professional learning session.

The toolkit includes presentation options, strategy materials, discussion resources, brainstorming tools, planning pages, and reflection materials so you can spend less time prepping and more time supporting teachers.

Want More Ready-to-Go PD for Instructional Coaches?

If you love the idea of having ready-to-use professional development resources without all the prep, you’ll want to check out Instructional Coaching Club.

The Club provides instructional coaches with new PD and coaching resources designed to help you turn around a meaningful professional learning experience without spending hours creating everything yourself.

The free Mix-Pair-Share Toolkit is a chance to try out the kind of ready-to-go support available inside the Club.

Check out Instructional Coaching Club and see what’s included.

Because your teachers deserve thoughtful, engaging professional learning—and you shouldn’t have to spend your whole weekend creating it.

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