Teachers and speech-language specialists at New York's Early Childhood Center, Rochester School for the Deaf, gather regularly to talk about their students and discuss strategies for expediting students' language development. These communities of practice meeting offer a collaborative approach to understanding students and helping improve their language instruction. The Learning Development Planning Meetings' descriptive review process requires that individuals discuss the children without judging, making snap decisions, or labeling and allows them to see the students from many points of view, to have new ideas and images to work with, to flesh out new meanings, and to imagine possibilities. Participants practice thinking about how to tie assessment information to instruction. Three forms were developed to facilitate the Language Development Planning Meetings: (1) a facilitator form for guiding teams' discussion of the focus questions; (2) a teacher form for describing the child; and (3) a notetaker form for recording participants' suggestions.