When School Let Out, the Learning Continued: Partners For Change invests a full day in the leaders behind after-school and summer learning
While returning teachers across River City Schools spent the week before the new school year in Back-to-School training, a different group of educators had a training day built just for them.
Partners for Change hosted a full-day workshop exclusively for Out-of-School Time (OST) leaders and district directors — the site coordinators, program directors, and intervention staff who run the after-school and summer programs that keep learning going once the classroom bell rings. It was a rare opportunity: a full day, carved out on the calendar, that treated after-school work not as an add-on to the school day but as a professional field in its own right, worthy of the same investment as any other.
That distinction was not lost on the people in the room. Participants said the chance to sit alongside peers from other districts and programs was itself one of the most valuable parts of the day. As one attendee shared, having time to work through the material together — rather than receiving it secondhand — meant the training could be “landed” specifically in the reality of their own programs, a rare luxury for staff whose work usually happens in the after-school hours, outside the normal professional development calendar.
To lead the day, Partners for Change brought in an expert from Solution Tree, the national organization behind the PLC at Work® framework — a professional learning model built around a simple but powerful idea: schools improve fastest when educators collaborate around evidence rather than work in isolation. Developed by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker, PLC at Work is used by school systems across the country and is widely regarded as one of the most well-researched approaches to sustained school improvement.
Rather than treating PLC as a tool for the traditional classroom alone, the workshop translated the framework directly into the after-school world, grounding site coordinators, directors, and intervention staff in PLC’s four critical questions, reframed for out-of-school time:
• What do we want students to learn and experience during after-school and summer programming?
• How will we know they’ve learned it?
• How will we respond when they haven’t?
• How will we extend learning for students who are ready to go further?
From there, the day built toward two practical goals: identifying the highest-leverage outcomes a program can realistically move within a limited after-school block, and establishing collaborative routines that individual districts can sustain on their own — regardless of size, staffing, or existing capacity. As one participant reflected, the day offered “a proven outcome of collaboration, teamwork, and communication when working through problems,” including real conversation about how to track and display growth over time.
“We had time to land the information specifically to our program.”
That is the heart of what this workshop represents for Partners for Change: a shift from simply coordinating programs across districts to building a shared, evidence-based language for improving student outcomes in out-of-school time. The four critical questions now give OST leaders throughout River City Schools a common framework to plan, reflect, and grow from — together.
It is easy for after-school and summer programming to be treated as separate from “real” school. This workshop was a deliberate statement otherwise: the people leading out-of-school time deserve the same caliber of professional learning as any other educator, because the outcomes they are responsible for matter just as much.
Learn more: Solution Tree’s PLC at Work® Event Hub
