Every summer, before a single Peer Leading and Learning Network session happens with LEA teams, CEI’s Peer Leading and Learning Exchange (PLLX) facilitators meet on their own first. This year’s General Meeting #1 ran three days, August 5 through 7, in San Diego, and was once again designed to get our facilitators ready for the year to come.
Who is PLLX?
PLLX facilitators are practitioners who have already run this work in their own LEAs. Each one takes on three roles throughout the course of a year: presenter, facilitator, and thought partner. A presenter shares a story or a piece of improvement science from the stage. A facilitator teaches and runs protocols so LEA teams can go deeper into their own engagement work. A thought partner listens, asks questions, and supports a team without taking the work over. None of those roles are assigned once and left alone. This retreat exists to build and refresh all three, together, before facilitators go back out to their networks.
Day One
Day one opened with Conocimiento, a relationship-building session built around the idea of a “beloved community,” and moved into role clarity: a walkthrough of the PLLX Handbook and the CARES leadership principles that shape how facilitators are expected to show up (Courtesy, Acceptance, Respect, Esteem, Shared Space). From there, a professional learning block on listening, questioning, and facilitation skills, framed around a specific idea worth repeating: a facilitator’s job is not to be the expert with the answers. It’s to uncover the expertise already in the room. The day closed with a Strengths Spotlight, where each PLLX team built a “team crest,” mapping their community culture, professional connections, strengths, and what they hope to leave behind for future CEI teams, then walked the room to learn from every other team’s crest.
Day Two
Day two shifted toward the practical mechanics of the work: a review of the PLLX Journey Map, which lays out the year’s themes and cadence, a data session, and a walkthrough of how CEI sits inside California’s broader Statewide System of Support as one resource among the state’s other initiatives rather than a freestanding program. The afternoon moved into trust and communication exercises, including a “telephone” activity and a back-to-back drawing exercise, both built to show, concretely, what breaks down when people can’t ask clarifying questions and what changes when they can. The day ended with a fishbowl protocol on relationship building and peer feedback, where teams practiced presenting their thinking and receiving feedback in front of the group.
Day Three
Day three closed the retreat with gratitude and assignments. Facilitators spent time naming who had helped them see something differently over the three days, then moved into Network Exploration: finalizing which LEA teams each PLLX facilitator will support this year, and setting up the Peer Partner Exchange (PPX), the monthly check-in structure between a PLLX facilitator and their assigned team’s lead. The PPX runs September through May, twenty to thirty minutes a month, phone or video, built around a rotating set of connection questions and a short form each facilitator files after every check-in so patterns across LEAs are visible to the Lead Agency Partners. The retreat closed with a “letter to future me,” sealed and opened again at the year’s final PLLN, naming what each facilitator hopes to have done in the roles of presenter, facilitator, and thought partner by then.
Looking Ahead
None of this is a training in the one-time sense. It’s the yearly reset and onboarding for a network of people who’ve already done the work supporting people currently doing it, checked against the same framework CEI asks LEA teams to use. It’s how the peer-led model gets rebuilt and recalibrated every year before it goes back out into the field.
Learn more about who our PLLX LEAs are
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