…and What I Learned at AMLE
I walked into Autumn Baltimore’s session this morning at AMLE — Remix the Routine: Collaborative Planning Reimagined — expecting another conversation about making PLC time more efficient. I left thinking about something bigger: the quiet, structural conditions that determine whether ambitious instructional work (like project-based learning) actually takes root in a school.
Baltimore, a Coordinator of Secondary Redesign in Anne Arundel County Public Schools, walked us through a thoughtful redesign of Collaborative Planning (CP). The core shift was simple but powerful: move CP from a logistics and compliance activity to intentional, standards-aligned instructional planning. In her words, it’s the difference between planning to teach and planning to learn.
What stood out
The session made clear that high-quality collaborative planning doesn’t happen by accident. It requires:
- Clear purpose and boundaries. A strong “supports / does not support” frame keeps teams focused on data-informed decision-making, intentional planning cycles, fidelity to high-quality instructional materials, planned differentiation, and shared responsibility for diverse learners — while actively pushing back against last-minute reactive planning, isolated work, or treating planning as a compliance task.
- Defined roles. Principals and APs ensure time, focus, and accountability. Academic coaches guide instructional decisions and monitor progress. Department chairs and content leads facilitate discussion and keep documentation accurate. Teachers come prepared, engage in planning and reflection, and provide feedback on the process. When everyone knows their lane, collaboration becomes productive rather than chaotic.
- Intentional structures and tools. Templates, shared protocols, and clear “fit items” (data dives, unpacking standards alongside high-quality materials, reflecting on instruction, planning tiered supports, aligning pacing) give teams a shared language and reduce the cognitive load of figuring out how to collaborate while they’re trying to do the actual work.
Why this matters for schools implementing PBL
PBL asks teachers to do sophisticated work: design authentic projects, align them to standards without watering them down, plan scaffolds and differentiation in advance, reflect on student learning in real time, and continuously improve. That work is hard to do well in isolation, and it’s even harder to do well when collaborative time is unstructured, inconsistent, or dominated by logistics.
What I appreciated most about this model is how transferable it is. The same design principles — clear roles, intentional cycles, shared tools, and a focus on planning for learning rather than just covering content — are exactly what teacher teams need when they’re learning to implement PBL with integrity. In a PBL context, collaborative planning time becomes the place where teachers:
- Internalize the project and the standards it serves
- Anticipate where students will struggle and plan scaffolds
- Look at student work and adjust in real time
- Develop shared language and expectations across a team
Without structures like the ones Baltimore described, many schools end up hoping that passion and individual teacher effort will carry the load. Hope is not a strategy. Structures are.
A question for instructional leaders
If your school is implementing (or considering) PBL, how intentional is your collaborative planning time right now? Does it have clear roles, shared tools, and a focus on planning for student learning; or does it still lean toward logistics and compliance?
The schools that make the most progress with complex instructional shifts are usually the ones that treat professional learning structures as seriously as they treat the curriculum itself. Baltimore’s session was a clear reminder of what that can look like.
Disclosure: This post was developed in collaboration with Grok (xAI). All ideas, insights, and framing are my own, grounded in my experience as an educator and the session I attended at AMLE 2026.
About the Author: Jenny
