NM PED 2026 Literacy and Humanities Summer Conference

Professional Learning Communities can be powerful drivers of instructional improvement, but only when they are supported by clear leadership, purposeful structures, and a culture of trust. As a school leader, you play a critical role in shaping PLCs that are focused, collaborative, and worth your educators’ time. In this session, you will explore the leadership moves that help build and sustain strong PLCs, including how to incorporate structured dialogue through the use of protocols.

You will examine an example of what a year-long PLC cycle built around consistent Critical Friends Groups looks like, covering everything from establishing norms and trust to examining instructional dilemmas and analyzing student work. By engaging in reflective inquiry throughout the school year, you can move your teams beyond routine meetings and toward meaningful professional learning. You will leave with practical strategies and a sample PLC structure that supports meaningful collaboration, strengthens teacher practice, and creates sustainable systems for continuous instructional growth across your campus.

Strengthen student comprehension and content achievement through the power of intentional academic vocabulary instruction. In this session, you will explore Marzano’s Six-Step Process for teaching academic terms and examine how systematic vocabulary routines can be implemented across math, science, and social studies.

You will engage with practical strategies for selecting high-leverage Tier 3 vocabulary, supporting student discussion, and reinforcing learning through structured review activities and games. The session places special emphasis on using student vocabulary notebooks as a tool for building conceptual understanding, promoting equity for multilingual learners, and monitoring growth. Throughout the hour, you will collaborate to apply a menu of research-aligned practices and develop SMART coaching or classroom implementation goals. You will leave with a clear plan to support consistent, cross-disciplinary vocabulary instruction that ensures all students can access complex content.

In many literacy classrooms, implementing high-quality instructional materials with fidelity has come to mean using curriculum questions exactly as written. While well-intentioned, this practice often leads to one-size-fits-all instruction and superficial comprehension.

Drawing on research from SRI International, this session argues for a shift from implementation with fidelity to implementation with integrity, preserving the intent of high-quality materials while responding to how students actually build understanding from complex texts across grade levels.

Participants will examine examples of “before and after” questions, analyze how different questions shape comprehension, and collaboratively revise questions from existing instructional materials. The session will also introduce an AI-supported tool to help educators continue refining instructional questions beyond the session.

Participants will leave with:
1. Practical strategies for revising questions to deepen comprehension
2. Sample revised questions for implementation
3. Access to an AI-assisted question-revision tool