Author
Maria Nielsen
Maria Nielsen is a former school principal and current education consultant who specializes in professional learning communities (PLCs) and collaborative unit planning for K–12 educators. She is the author of The 15-Day Challenge: Simplify and Energize Your PLC at Work® Process, published by Solution Tree Press in 2024, a practical guide that provides K–12 collaborative teams with a step-by-step, fifteen-day structure for unit design aligned to the core ideas and critical questions of the PLC at Work framework.
In The 15-Day Challenge, Nielsen offers daily exercises, tools, and templates to help teams identify essential standards, create common formative assessments, plan tiered interventions and extensions, and develop a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Her work is widely used in schools and districts implementing PLCs, and has reached bestseller status in the K–12 professional learning market.
