Friday, March 7, 2014

Looking at the "Why"

As part of my own professional development and to further my understanding of how massive, open, online courses work, I signed up for the Deeper Learning MOOC offered by a series of experts from High Tech High and a variety of other organizations noted for their work in deeper learning.  And while I have not done every task associated with the course, I have made it a priority to watch the archives of the panel discussions each week after my little ones head off to bed.  The discussions are engrossing and invigorating, and as I have felt like my motor has needed a bit of a jump start this week, I was particularly excited about Monday night's topic of 'Assessing Deeper Learning'.

Right now at our school, we are investigating how we can 'dig deeper' into deeper learning in each of our classrooms in our school.  We are being deliberate in our steps to lay the ground work for digging into deeper learning through:
  • creating a set of attributes that we want for our graduates (September)
  • refining those attributes with the help of our students, parents and community (October-March)
  • examining the 'whys' of why we need to have students learn deeply in our classes (Jan/Feb)
  • beginning to develop a common language around effective practices that require deeper learning (March)
  • co-creating a mechanism for every staff member to go into other classrooms to co-plan and observe deeper learning practices (March)
  • creating a culture of 'learning to see, unlearning to judge' so that we can observe and describe the deeper learning that is taking place (April)
  • inviting deeper learning practitioners to work with members of our district and our staff (May)
  • visiting schools that are requiring deeper learning of their students (June)
However, as much as we are now in March and have taken the initial steps listed above, my participation in the DL MOOC coupled with the conversations with teachers at our school has changed my thinking about this plan.

In Monday night's panel discussion on 'Assessing Deeper Learning', moderator Rob Riordan asked a question of the panel from the audience which was "Can you talk about the transition of schools that might have a more traditional, 'no excuses' type approach in their pedagogy moving to deeper learning?".  This question was interesting to me, because we are just beginning our journey to more pervasive, deeper learning in our classes.

Bob Lenz of Envision talked about data and the importance of using data to guide discussions, and of particular note to him was about the examining the resiliency of a school's graduates in college.  In his opinion, by looking at this resiliency data, schools who were moving in the right direction were seeing data that suggests students had not acquired the skills to be independent learners, and were at least asking the right questions as to why this was occurring. 

Interesting.  I do not have this data.  I would like to get such data.

Megan Pacheco from New Tech Network then spoke about how schools who are being successful in making such a shift have spent a great deal of time on the WHY, and understanding and making sense of the outcomes that will help develop this common why. She went on to discuss how we often jump to new instructional approaches such as problem based learning without spending enough time on the WHY, and that it was more important to spend the time developing a commitment to the vision of your graduate and the types of skills that you want to develop.

Even more interesting.  And as a result, I think I need to work with our staff to alter our plan.  I think it needs to look more like this:
  • creating a set of attributes that we want for our graduates (September)
  • refining those attributes with the help of our students, parents and community (October-March)
  • examining the 'whys' of why we need to have students learn deeply in our classes (Jan/Feb)
  • begin to develop a common language around effective practices that require deeper learning (March)
  • re-visit the WHY, and find ways to encourage people to speak, to tell stories and construct their own contexts and meaning around why deeper learning for students is important;
    • after re-visiting the why, co-create a mechanism for every staff member to go into other classrooms to co-plan and observe deeper learning practices (March)
  • again, re-visit the WHY, and find ways to encourage more and different people to speak, and find examples, data and research to allow the WHY to become even more authentic on a variety of different fronts
    • then, create a culture of 'learning to see, unlearning to judge' so that we can observe and describe the deeper learning that is taking place (April)
  • continue to re-visit the WHY, with teachers and students bringing back examples of how they demonstrate deeper learning as exemplars
    • then, invite deeper learning practitioners to work with members of our district and our staff (May)
And really, I think we will find ways to re-visit why until we find ourselves are asking ourselves "Why are we still talking about why?" because we are so committed to the attributes and the vision that we have for our students. 

We aren't in this spot yet---quite far from it, in fact.  And too often my implementation scale is tipped towards the 'how' as opposed to the 'why'.  Thanks to the conversations that I have had with our teachers at the school and the panel in the DLMOOC, I look forward to finding new and innovative ways to contextualize the why with and for our school.

*cross-posted on The Learning Nation

Monday, February 17, 2014

The Shame of Classroom Visits

Coming to my new school this year, I made a concentrated commitment to be in classrooms more that I have ever been before.  Quite often, skepticism and eye-rolling tend to follow statements such as these, and rightfully so.  Each of us knows the typical pattern: the Principal makes these ambitious proclamations, does in fact show up in classrooms for the first few of weeks, and then steadily fades into the managerial quagmire that can consume school administration.  I know this because I have both seen this in my own administrators when I was a teacher, and followed this cadence as a Vice-Principal and Principal myself.  However, save for our monthly District Administrator Meeting that happens one Thursday per month and a couple of scattered meetings here and there, I have stuck to my regimen of being in classrooms during Period 2 each day.

And each day that I am in classrooms, I have the very same thought as I walk back to my office:  what a shame.

The shame comes not from what is going on in the classroom--quite the contrary, in fact.  The shame comes from the idea that the only person who really gets to see what is going on in our classrooms is, well, ME.  ME being the person who does not teach students on a daily basis.  ME being the person who does not regularly design lessons (except for faculty and team leader meetings) that are engaging, meaningful, and require the deep learning of our students.  ME being the person who does not develop and execute flexible, authentic assessments that allow students choice in demonstrating what it is they know in their courses.

This situation is going to change.  Not for me, because I still want to be in classrooms.  This situation is going to change for our staff.

Right now at our school, we are beginning our investigation  into how we require students to learn deeply in our classes.  Thanks to the hard work of our students and our staff, our results were very strong last semester--we had a 98.2% success rate in course instances in our school from September to January.  74% of our students achieved a "B" or "A" in each of those course instances.  And while not perfect, and while these are only gross, macro reference points, for the most part our students experience success.   However, as a staff, we want to probe deeper and look at things such as:
  • what tasks are we asking students to do?
  • what are students learning as a result of these tasks?
  • is that which students are learning in our classes preparing them for life in 2020, 2030, 2040, and beyond?
But if WE want get a better understanding of the answers to these questions, then WE need to have a chance to experience what it is that students and teachers are doing in other classes, not just our own.

Not just me.

However, going into other classrooms requires a number of different things (not just the release time) to take place so that we make the best use of that time.  These include:
  • Creating multiple entry points:  not everyone will comfortable having people into their classroom right off the bat.  We all know that when we have another adult in the room, we notice them.  Why? Because it happens so rarely!  However, others are very comfortable, and we don't want to neglect them either. Therefore, we need to recognize that there will be differing levels of comfort for everyone.  However, we don't want to have some of our faculty in classrooms observing and working with different teachers and not others.  So how are we going to do this? We will have three levels of observers and hosts so that people can move through this at their own pace.
    • Level 1:  Observer
    • Level 2:  Observer and Sa-Hali staff host.
    • Level 3:  Observer, Sa-Hali staff host and outside host(other district staff, Thompson Rivers University staff/student teachers)
  • Creating a Non-Threatening, Non-Judgmental Environment:  this is not evaluation, not at all. This is giving us a chance to get out of our classrooms and work with someone in our department, or another area altogether that is interesting to us!  Educators need to know that when a colleague is coming into their class, the colleagues are not judging, they are just seeing.  How do we do this?  Practice, of course.
    • Developing a common language of 'learning to see and unlearning to judge'
    • Developing our skills of descriptive observation using non-judgmental language
      • "when the teacher moved from Activity A to Activity B, 5 of the 17 students were able to move to Activity B" (descriptive) instead of "the pace was fast" (judgement)
    • Starting with video analysis from resources such as The Teaching Channel
  • Honing our skills of task analysis: we want to make sure that we have a clear idea of what students are actually doing (the task) as opposed to the activity that they have been given (the assignment).  We will begin to look at examples (here is a brief presentation that we will use to get started).
  • Being deliberate in our mechanism: we need to co-create a schedule that works for people and accommodates people, but it needs to happen.  The sooner we pre-load the activities above, the better so we can get started!
Yes, there will be some release time involved.  Yes, there will be some of my own time involved when I cover some classes for people.  But by being deliberate about getting educators in other educators classes, we will actually create powerful, meaningful and sustained professional development that is research-based in terms of its level of effect on student (and adult) learning (see below from John Hattie's 'Visible Learning').




So I will continue my classroom visits, but I believe that if we get our staff into each other's classes, not only will we learn, it will be meaningful, fun, enjoyable, and create a new culture of wall-less staff development.  And when I walk back to my office, I will no longer be thinking that it is a shame that more of our faculty do not get to see other classes and work with their colleagues.

Cross-posted at The Learning Nation

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Giving Students More Credit

This past Friday, I was fortunate enough to be in beautiful Kelowna, British Columbia to attend the British Columbia School Superintendents Association Conference on Innovative Practices.  It was an outstanding day of learning, marked by brief keynotes, short and direct breakout sessions, and plenty of opportunities for questioning the presenters, each of whom was a practitioner that was proudly sharing their innovation with smaller groups.

But most the most impressive and impactful piece from the conference took place in the first hour of the day. Hugh Gloster, Superintendent of Schools in Kelowna, had arranged for each of the 45 or so tables filled with educators to be paid two fifteen minute visits by STUDENTS from his district.  Each of these middle school students gave a brief presentation about how problem-based learning had impacted their educational experience to a group of complete strangers.

They were unbelievable.

Two different students came to our table and candidly described the pros and cons of PBL and how it had made a difference to they learned in their classrooms.  And after the students had finished, they answered every question that we could possibly ask them.  And they answered the questions well.

Each of the students was able to clearly articulate the attributes that they were required to develop and demonstrate.  They were

  • learner
  • thinker 
  • collaborator
  • innovator
  • contributor

I was impressed that each student was so keenly aware of what it was they were supposed to learn.  However, our time with the students got better:  each of them described how they saved artifacts of their learning in a digital portfolio, and then had to select a representative cross-section of them so they could best demonstrate each attribute through a Presentation Of Learning (POL) that they (and every other student) was required to do at the conclusion of each course.  And to top it off, they had to select a community member (which could be their parent, but didn't have to be) to be a part of the audience to whom they would present.

One of the students' set of responses was particularly intriguing:  she said she hated PBL.  More specifically, she hated problem-based learning AT FIRST.  She liked what she called a 'traditional class' with lecture, a video, worksheets, and a test at the end of the unit.  Why, I asked?  "Because it was easy.  You were always looking for one right answer.  So I could learn something for the test, and then forget it and move on."  (these were her words). But now, she was dreading heading back to a more 'traditional' style class (still her words)--she felt like in a traditional class, she would have little or no choice in what she was going to learn about, how she was going to learn about it, and how she was going to demonstrate her learning.

Wow.  This was a STUDENT speaking.

She said with PBL, she would never forget what she had done in her class because of the deep learning that she had done and the numerous reflections that she did over the course of the term.  She described how in the past in science, her whole class would have made a 'cell cake' to replicate a cell in Biology.  Everyone would have.  In her class, students needed to create their own analogy (she chose her home city), and as a result, the whole class made different ones and then learned even more ways to think about the cell from each student's presentation.  And then she said "I don't think that will happen in a traditional class.  I wish all of my classes were problem-based learning classes."

Again, I want to be clear, these were HER words. That is truly how she was talking.  She was speaking about HER learning.  She was not only able to critically evaluate WHAT it was that she had learned about in her project, she was able to critically evaluate HOW she learned best--a level of metacognition that I can say without equivocation that I have NEVER heard from a ninth grade student.  And the best thing was, the next student spoke in very similar terms.  And when I spoke to other educators who were at the other 40 plus tables in the room, they said the same thing about the students that had come to their tables.

How did this happen?  How could each of these students be able to speak to a group of adults about their own learning with such clarity and conviction?

Hmmm.

I began speaking to some of the adults in the room from the Kelowna district.  And when I spoke to them, each of them spoke of the five competencies.  Each of them knew what was happening in many of the classes at the middle school level.  And each of them believed that they were seeing success.

I asked an administrator where these competencies came from.  They told me that a process was developed to involve every partner group from support staff, teachers, administrators, students, parents and community members in the examination of research of the skills that students would need to be productive members of the future workforce.  They developed a mechanism for students to store authentic archives of these competencies (a digital portfolio).  And they created an evaluative tool that would allow students choice and the opportunity to showcase their learning in a setting that would further their skills in presentation and allow them to learn about how others approached the same problem.  And then they dedicated (and continue to dedicate) resources and professional development to make it happen

In my experience, it would not be uncommon when we have these sorts of committees to meet, to come up with ideas and methods of implementation, to put it out there, to get traction in small pockets, and to see very little evidence of that work coming to fruition.

This was not the case in the Kelowna district.  And to use Instructional Rounds parlance, my evidence is that, without coaching or a script, STUDENTS were able to demonstrate the products of the committee in their 'interviews' with the educators in the room--they were educating the educators.  There was a direct line from the work that was done in that group at the district office to the classroom. And it was amazing.

After this past Friday and a great deal of reflection on the way home, I have decided that, in my time as a teacher, I did not give students enough credit.  I thought I needed to be the person out front.  The one to sift through curricula and find for them what was truly important.  I gave them tasks that challenged them to do little more than find one answer that could be found on page 26, in boldface, near the end of the third paragraph.    I gave them tasks that had a single answer, or that created a single product like a poster at the end of a unit.  I evaluated them using a single instrument that, at least in some cases, worked best for...me. Something that was likely relatively easy to mark, but was probably quite exclusionary in that it required students to demonstrate their learning in a specific way, not demonstrate their learning.

I did not give students enough credit for being able to direct and demonstrate their own learning.

For me, this does not mean that tomorrow, we are going to simply throw our students and our educators out there on their own and say 'go find some problems, solve them, and show me what you learned'.  Not at all.  At Sa-Hali, we spent a great deal of time articulating the attributes of a Sa-Hali graduate that would help them meet the challenges that will confront them in their future.  We have started some of the leg work.  However, we need to get more stakeholders involved.  And we need to look at the existing structures and constructs that we have in our school that both help us and inhibit us in moving forward to create a model that allows students choice and flexibility in meeting and demonstrating the learning outcomes of their classes.

This will require time.  This will require resources.  This will require in-servicing and training for staff and for students. But most of all this will require a clear vision and subsequent commitment to that vision that we as educators will be co-learners and co-creators of the educational experience at our school with our students.
And at our staff meeting on Monday, we will get started on the process of giving students more credit for their ability to determine and demonstrate their learning.

This post was cross-posted at The Learning Nation.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Committing to Commitments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called "Inclusive Staff Meetings" - a description of how we were trying to create meaningful, and engaging staff meetings that encouraged risk-taking through a safe and collegial environment.  From that post:

"...we worked again in small groups on a Google Doc called "Staff Meeting Commitment Brainstorming" in which our entire staff worked together to draft ideas for commitments to make our faculty meetings safe for all of us.  A number of faculty members had never worked simultaneously and collaboratively on a digital document such as this in such a large group, and it was amazing to see every staff member engaged in meaningful dialogue with their peers...

Early in my career, in the interests of not wanting to 'take too much time on this stuff', I would have taken all of the information myself and tried to sort, classify, paraphrase, and make inferences in a process to pare down the information we had gathered into palatable chunks for the staff. At that point, I would have moved the commitments in a direction that I felt we needed to go, truncated the whole exercise, and moved on.  Without malice and in the interests of time, I would have inadvertently hi-jacked the process.

Like any school, we have hundreds of years of experience on our staff.  Our Coordinators are highly motivated, creative problem-seekers and solvers that are tremendously invested in their students, their classrooms, and their colleagues.  So regardless of how long the process takes, we will involve our entire staff in making a set of commitments that will allow everyone to be a contributing, engaged and valued staff member during our faculty meetings.  The information that we collected will come to our Coordinators, who will help to design an exercise with all of the feedback we collected that
  • requires the engagement of each staff member 
  • models the use of higher order critical thinking skills for our staff (interpretation, prediction, selection, synthesis, etc) in an exercise they can adapt and apply to their classes 
  • leads to the implementation of a tangible product (such as the chart from our Social Justice class) that is reflective of each of our voices, and subsequently guides us for all of our future staff meetings
  • has them touch a piece of technology so that the exercise can be as efficient and replicated/archived (in our Sa-Hali Educational Sandbox, which we just created yesterday!) for future use in classrooms or collaborative meetings."
As a result of our work at that staff meeting, our Coordinator Group put together just such an activity--the 10 Dot Gallery Walk--which allowed our staff to interact with each other around the ideas for staff meetings that we had collected.  As a group, our staff were able to prioritize the suggestions and ideas in front of them for creating the norms of an inclusive staff meeting.  It looked like this:



The engagement of the staff in this activity was notable--people were asking each other for clarification, looking for similar threads on other sheets, and truly being thoughtful in the placement of their 'priority dots'.  And in the end, we got a product that gave us a distinct visual in terms of where the priorities of our staff truly were.  

But that wasn't enough.  

In order to continue to make this process authentic, we needed to take these priorities and craft them into a concise and easily articulated list of commitments that reflected the views of the group.  Again, it would be quick and easy for me to just put these into words that I thought represented the views of the group, but that would not be in the spirit of the activity (nor would it be terribly accurate).  So, as a Coordinator Group with representatives from each department, we began to sort and collect similar terms that were the highest priority for staff (denoted by the dots) and find themes.  The group came up with three temporal themes for staff meetings--Pre-Meeting, During the Meeting, and After the Meeting. Then, I became the scribe, the group became 10 'muses', and we thought with our mouths, debated, wordsmith-ed, re-wrote, and teased out 10 commitments.  They look like this: 

Pre- Meeting
  • we will submit items to the agenda, read the agenda and supporting documents prior to the staff meeting
  • we will attend the meeting and be engaged and involved
  • we will clear purpose and agenda to each staff meeting
  • we will have food for the meeting

During the Meeting
  • we will maintain a light, positive tone with a spirit of collegiality
  • we will come to the meeting with an open mind and consider new ideas and points of view
  • we will have the parameters of the decision-making process will be clearly articulated prior to the discussion
  • we will respect that there may be a need for additional time/input about a decision
  • we will use a variety of creative solutions (ie. anonymous votes, small group forums) to ensure each staff member has a voice

After the Meeting

  • we will trust in our collegial decision-making process
  • We will honor the decision made at the meeting and move forward!

But we are not done yet!  At our November staff meeting, each member of the group will present one of these commitments to the staff and talk them through how we got to that particular commitment from the original, gallery-walk document.  Once we have done this for each of the bullets above, we will ask the entire staff for any further refinements that need to be made.  At the December staff meeting, we will unveil our commitments to each other so that staff meetings actually honor the vision that we have collectively articulated.

From the outside, what we have done here might seem like a long and arduous process.  I guess I could have just made up some commitments and said this is what I want, what I expect.  Or I could have grabbed a list of norms from a book or article, and had us modify them to work for us.  That would have been much faster.

But this is not a race.  With something as important as how we will work together in a large group setting, faster is not better.

I think it has been time well spent.  The product that we are creating is authentic and representative of each of us:  through the tasks that we have done, we have been required to participate in the process, we modeled and used higher-order thinking skills, we are implementing a tangible product, and we have even touched a technology that we can use in our classes in the process.

Sounds a lot like what we set out to do in the first place, and I look forward to the final product.  I am very proud of our teachers for working through this--congratulations to our staff!






Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Working on Our Interventions

Over the last few weeks, our staff has been working feverishly to create structures that enhance and ensure adult and student learning.  We are refining our collaborative commitments to one another to ensure positive communication, problem discovery and risk-taking in our whole staff and collaborative meetings.  We have designed and begun to implement a collaborative model that enables self-organized learning within a framework of defining guaranteed curricula and recognized struggle points.  And we have done all of this within the context of a collectively defined vision that has been initially formulated by our teachers, but will also be co-created by our parents and our student body. 

As we are doing this while the school year is in progress, suffice it to say the first five weeks have been crazy.  Crazy good.


But this afternoon at our faculty meeting, we had more work to do in terms of the interventions that we have in place to ensure student learning at our school. Over the course of last year, Sa-Hali made a commitment to Pyramid Response to Intervention. As we know, PRTI strives to blur the lines between general and special education to create a systematic means to serve all students, regardless of whether they are learners who struggle significantly or just need some minor 'fine-tuning' to get back on track. And while we have created our CORE team and numerous structures to support student learning through the lens of PRTI, we realized as a group at our Student Services collaborative team meeting last Wednesday (which I was lucky enough to be a part of) that we needed to find a way to familiarize our staff with these structures in such a way that they would be comfortable using them in the future.  

Hmmm. How about a flashy Powerpoint with lots of bullets and animations describing each of the structures that we have at our school followed by a handout at the end that the faculty could take with them?

Yawn. Paper airplane coming up. The Student Services team scuttled that thought in a hurry.

Our Student Services team wanted to stay aligned with our guiding principles for faculty meetings around staff engagement and adult learning (from a post early last month called "Inclusive Staff Meetings"), which meant co-creating an activity that:
  • requires the engagement of each staff member 
  • models the use of higher order critical thinking skills for our staff (interpretation, prediction, selection, synthesis, etc) in an exercise they can adapt and apply to their classes 
  • leads to the implementation of a tangible product (such as the chart from our Social Justice class) that is reflective of each of our voices, and subsequently guides us for all of our future staff meetings.
So, in the span of a 45 minute collaborative meeting (and an incredible effort from our Student Services Coordinator and her staff leading up to our faculty meeting), the team created an activity that looked like this (yes, these are the actual handouts below--cool).


  • our staff was divided into groups of 5-6 and given five blank "Scenario Sheets"--these sheets had a large space for "Teacher Interventions" (Tier 1) interventions for group brainstorming plus a blank flowchart below
  • each of our twelve Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions with detailed descriptions were put on to different colors of paper, and each group member given two of these to role play for the other group members
  • the staff was presented with 5 "Student Scenarios" that described fictitious student situations of varying levels of complexity -- things such as

  • in their groups, teachers (equipped with their roles) brainstormed their Tier 1 responses, shared their roles with the group, and evaluated the scenario, and then assessed which other interventions would be most appropriate to help the fictitious student in question as well as the sequence in which they would be enacted.
  • groups then had to report out to the large group so that we could compare solutions, clarify any questions about our intervention mechanisms, and suggest alterations.
I was amazed by the response of the staff to this exercise. Because of the structure of the exercise that our Student Services team presented, I saw 40 professionals dig in, ask questions, respectfully challenge the responses of members of their own groups and other groups, wave the activity leaders off and shout "we need more time with this one", flip through the interventions and shake their heads while saying things like "we don't need to go to that level yet" and "we need to make a connection with kids like this". It was awesome.

And at the end of the exercise, our amazing Student Services Coordinator collected all of the scenario sheets from each of the groups so that she and the rest of the Student Services team could analyze each of the responses to see if there were any gaps that she needed to fill with the staff during their next collaborative meeting. She also wanted to use the results to shape and tailor our PRTI flowchart to ensure the staff could efficiently use the interventions available to them for our students.  

But that's not all.


Our Technology Coordinator and English Coordinator are well-versed in Photoshop for poster creation. With their assistance, our school will design and implement a less-conventional, student-appealing PRTI graphic complete with terms in 'kid-speak' that will be posted in each classroom (and on our webpage). This will allow our students, parents and staff to know each of the supports that will be enacted should students struggle with the outcomes in our courses.

This process took (and will continue to take) a great deal of effort from numerous people on a variety of fronts. However, the very thrust of PRTI is to blur the lines between special services and the regular classroom. By having the entire faculty co-create our PRTI model through an collaboratively developed "case-study"-style activity that requires adult participation and learning, I believe we will have significantly more buy-in than we would have by simply listing our interventions on a Powerpoint and hoping people would utilize them.

If you have ideas or suggestions on how we can improve this process at our school, please comment and let us know!








Friday, September 27, 2013

The Sa-Hali September Pro-D Day!

What an amazing day with our faculty here at Sa-Hali today.  Over the course of the day we:


  • Worked with QR codes in our staff scavenger hunt
  • Utilized literacy strategies in our activities such as Save the Last Word and Multiple-Perspectives Carousel (see links in our "Engagement Strategies that We Are Modeling"
  • Designed a visual aide to guide us in terms of our vision of attributes that we want for our graduates.
  • Demonstrated divergent thinking and respectful relationships in each of our discussions 
  • Worked with Bloom's Taxonomy to begin to examine the tasks that we use in our classes to require the behaviours that we want from our students and from ourselves.

  • Created a video archive of our day.
  • Had a great day working TOGETHER!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Setting the Stage For Collaboration

This week, we will be having a whole group collaboration session.  During this meeting we will:

  • determine our prior knowledge and some of our beliefs around effective collaboration
  • understand the vision for collaboration, along with the tangible products we will produce by the end of this school year

  • discuss SOLE (self-organized learning environments) in the context of collaboration and through the lens of the tasks that we need to complete
  • prioritize the groups that we would like to work within to accomplish these tasks as well as things that are germane/interesting to each of us over the course of the year.
Should be an action packed 45 minutes, and the surveys that we will be filling out are located in the "Staff Workspace" section to the left!