Reflection and Action Planning for School Teams
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The Art of Reflection and Celebration
In their presentation to Brevard (FL) Public Schools, Dr. Richard and Rebecca DuFour (2006) described the characteristics of professional learning communities:
1. Shared mission, vision, values and goals;
2. Collaborative teams, focused on learning;
3. Collective inquiry into "best practice" and "current reality;"
4. Action orientation and experimentation;
5. Commitment to continuous improvement;
6. Results orientation.
Part of the healthy function of any team or professional learning community, therefore, is the art of reflection, especially as we use it to help us in planning our next steps forward. By examining our practices as a team, we redefine and reaffirm our collaborative goals and our team focus, the end result being better service to the students and families in our care, as professional problem-solvers.
Staff from Northside Consulting recently worked with the School-Wide Data Team at Dr. Franklin H. Mayberry School, in East Hartford, Connecticut, to look back over their school year, as a building leadership team, and develop some action steps as they move forward into 2011-12. This article describes a 60-minute protocol that we used in our session, and will teach you how to use an Urgent-Important Matrix as a way to prioritize tasks or needs.
Updated: 09-02-2011
Kim M. Bennett
It's Back to School Time, 2011!
At Northside Consulting, we are keeping Americans from the East Coast, who have been affected by Hurricane Irene, in our hearts, our thoughts and our prayers as we go Back to School.
1. Review the Agenda (1 min.)
A Meeting Should Have a Purpose
Example:
"Today is our last School-wide Data Team meeting for the year, so I've asked Kim to help us reflect on the year and begin to plan for next year. Our goal today is to leave the meeting with up to three action items for our team, including dates for our next few meetings. What questions does anyone have?"
“I feel like this process has made me a better teacher -- 2nd Grade Teacher, East Hartford, CT”
2. Share Celebrations (15 minutes)
Accentuate the Positives
Cooperative Activity: Round Robin
Beginning with any volunteer at your table, invite each team member to share a celebration from the past year, moving from the first person, to the left around your table or room. These don't have to be team-specific celebrations: the goal here is to show your leadership team the fruits of their labor, as teacher-leaders, at the whole-school level. Chart each person's contribution on chart paper, on the white board, on the computer (with projection) or on the Smart Board -- it is important to have the visual, for biggest impact.
It is imperative that everyone has the opportunity to share, even if it seems like it takes a long time. The idea is to build your team by giving each member equal voice. If your team is large, someone might say, "Someone already said ______" -- put a check mark next to it. Allow people the chance to pass. After all have had a turn, first ask if anyone who passed wants to add to the list, then invite anyone else to add a second item to the list, as time allows.
Special Note Regarding Administrators: On a building-level team, the administrator has certain powers that the other members don't have: the ability to request district resources, bigger decision-making capabilities, building oversight, supervisory capacity, to name a few. These role-related responsibilities aside, the principal (or other administrator) on the team is an equal voice on the team, and should participate in all these activities in the same way as other team members.
This step, alone, can be a side-product: Mayberry decided to include their list of accomplishments as a springboard for their final staff meeting, which will be their year-end celebration meeting. For more on the importance of highlighting the adult achievements in your school, see Celebrating Accomplishments -- New Perspectives on the 'Gold Star'.
Data Teams in Your School
Your Meeting Schedule
Research has shown that teachers who collaborate to review curriculum, create assessments, examine student work and develop strategic instructional plans, demonstrate the biggest student outcomes. Data Teams are one type of Professional Learning Community that enables teachers to do this.
3. Identify Needs (15 minutes)
Where Do We Go From Here?
Here's an example from the field. I worked with a team once that cited, as a major impediment to learning, the "immature" behavior of their ninth grade boys, listing a variety of less-than-productive ways that these boys chose to use their time in school (mostly things that a therapist friend of mine, and fellow parent, referred to as 'boy-knuckle-headedness)." When pressed, finally, to say how many kids they were referring to, they conceded that they were talking about 3 boys, or 2% of the current ninth-grade population. Had we started our conversation with the strengths of the ninth grade students, they probably would have talked about these problem-few very differently.
Cooperative Activity: Think-Pair-Share
With your leadership team, first allow a minute or so of personal, silent reflection, focusing on the needs, not of the whole school, this time, but just the team present. Then, invite the group to turn to a "shoulder-partner" to discuss their thinking, before you have them share out. Again, use a round robin share-out.
This structure achieves two purposes: 1) it prevents the first, fastest and most confident voice from steering the conversation to a discussion of one particular problem; 2) it provides a time and space for every person at the table to talk about something that she perceives is a need or problem, even if she does not want to share it with the entire group. In this way, there is opportunity for everyone to say, out loud, what is on their mind, in a safe way.
MODIFICATION: If your group is large, consider using a 1-2-6 Consensus Building Structure to generate your list of top needs.
As you did with the celebrations, chart the needs publicly, for all to view (this will be important for the next step, prioritization.
For another perspective on collaborative problem-solving from the business world, see Key Steps in Collaborative Problem Solving, by Brian Ward.
Decision-Making at Your School
Today's school leaders are faced with many decisions, every day. The types of decisions that leaders make fall into three general categories: authoritative, consultative, and collaborative. Authoritative are, for all intents and purposes, mandates or directives. Sometimes, a leader will invite a selected group to give feedback on an idea or decision, with the understanding that the ultimate decision-making responsibility, based on this feedback and other factors, will fall on the leader. This is a consultative decision. Finally, in a true collaborative decision, the leader sits as part of a team, and holds no greater amount of authority over the decision than anyone else on the team.
No one form of decision is better than the others. In fact, a healthy leadership requires an administrator to be prepared for all three types. Problems occur, however, when one of two things happens: 1) there is such a gross imbalance in the kinds of decisions made, that the team is unable to handle or even identify other types of decisions; and 2) one party thinks the decision is one type, while the other thinks it's another.
Here are some examples:
Scenario 1: A Superintendent convenes a team of representatives from each grade level, to review and revise the district's English language arts curriculum. The team meets after school twice a month, as well as over three summer work sessions. Meanwhile, the Superintendent leaves, and is replaced by a new administrator. The team presents the newly-drafted document. The new Superintendent says, "Thank you, but I was thinking of something different," and re-writes the curriculum, herself. The team was invited to participate in a collaborative decision, but the new administrator considered it a consultative one.
Scenario 2: One building principal sits on every decision-making team in her building, including the Early Intervention Team. Her team is high-functioning, and gets things done, largely because she ensures that things happen. After five years as principal, she leaves to take a position in another district, and the new principal asks the Early Intervention Team to put forward two team members to serve as the leaders of the team. The team doesn't know what to do. They are accustomed to authoritative decisions, and are now confronted with a collaborative decision, and are unprepared.
Scenario 3: A Department Head is considering a number of new English language arts programs, and invites feedback from his staff. They review the programs, and put forward their recommendations. The Department Head considers their feedback, then chooses a different program. The staff are disheartened and feel their opinion wasn't valued and honored -- they thought they were part of a collaborative decision, but the administrator was actually making a consultative decision.
For interesting reading on different styles of decision-making and problem-solving, see Problem-solving and Decision-making Style Inventory (PSI) -- A Self-Report, the online tool which can be purchased here.
4. Prioritize! (10 minutes)
What's most urgent? What's most important?
Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First, made popular the concept of a "Time Management Matrix", based on urgency and importance. Here is a graphic which illustrates how this might look with typical household events:
Cooperative Activity: The Urgent-Important Matrix
You already have your list of needs posted. Direct your group to get into small groups (3-4 per group). In their groups, they will consider each "need," and give it two scores. First, they will score each item, 1-5, based on its urgency. An item gets a "1" if it is a great idea, but there is really no hurry to get it done. Give an item a "5" if it needed to be done yesterday. After all items are scored based on their urgency, go back and score them again, 1-5, based on their importance to student learning. Give something a "1" for importance to student learning, if it clearly centered on adult needs, and a "5" if it is likely to yield big results in student outcomes.
After groups have scored each item, they total the two numbers, to get a number from 2-10. Go through each "need" and invite groups to report out their scores, then collaboratively decide on the final score.
So now each item has a score. Does this mean you have to do 10 first, 9 second, etc? No -- there is always professional conversation and experience. For example, maybe one item that scores a 7 is clearly something that needs to be done before another (score, 8) can be. The 7 has to go first. Based on the team's results, choose the top three needs for the group to tackle first, but hang onto the others for later on in the year.
MODIFICATION: Our Mayberry team didn't have enough time to really do the full "Urgent-Important" Matrix, so we modified it, by giving each team member 3, 1"x1" sticky notes, and labeling them 1, 2 and 3. We then asked them to choose their top three needs, using urgency and importance as guides, and put their sticky notes directly on the chart next to the corresponding need. From there, it was clear to see, not only which need was chosen most often, but also its relative rank.
5. Plan Your Next Steps (15 minutes)
Don't just talk about it -- BE about it!
By narrowing your focus to the top three needs, this next step is much easier, Not only have you broken your big list into more manageable chunks, but you've also selected, first, the items that the group feels most pressing and to which folks feel most closely connected. Both of these factors help ensure that the tasks will actually get off the ground.Here is a simple action planning form that your team can use to record this step.
1. The first column, "What Will Be Done?" is merely a transcription of your three prioritized needs, re-written as actionable items. So, "need updated referral flowchart" becomes "develop first draft of referral flowchart."
2. The second column, "Person(s) Responsible?" seems self-explanatory. But how many meetings have you sat in on where the "team" decided to do something, but no one is quite in agreement on which actual BODIES were going to do the work? It is important to talk about it, and write it down.
3. The third column, "By When?" is important. Qualify if you have to -- for example, in the example above, maybe all the group wants to do for the first step toward building the new flowchart is to print out the old one and compare it to new state recommendations. The moral of the story is, it's okay to set interim goals. But write dates, and make the dates coincide with meeting dates for your team. The idea here is that the team is going to be together, and hold one another accountable for the action items.
4. The presence of key building decision-makers becomes important at the fourth column, "Resources Needed?" Often, principals have ways of getting things done that are not readily known to the other staff members on the team. Also, there are sometimes larger issues or outside factors of which the team is not aware, that need to be taken into consideration when securing resources.
5. Finally, the last column, five, is a place to record any "Follow-up" checkpoints that you have on the way to accomplishing the goal. As you work through these three action items, you will go back to this form, and date and note the final column, as you discuss and work through each item. For example, continuing with our example, above, perhaps at the next meeting, the assistant principal shares a referral flowchart that he received when he went to a leadership workshop, and he thinks the team might be able to use it. He might share it at the meeting, and this would be noted next to that action item, as a kind of "track record" for the team.
6. Wrap It Up (4 minutes)
Bringing the meeting to a close...
You'll notice I put 4 minutes for this step, not 10, or even 5. I said the protocol was 60 minutes, because that was the meeting time available. And it would be dishonorable to my colleagues to go beyond 60 minutes. So we have 4 minutes left to the hour. And this means, in order to have the time we need here, we need to manage time well along the way. Enough said.The next few words must be written across the back of your hand, on your forehead, or wherever they need to be so you'll remember them:
DO NOT CLOSE THE MEETING WITHOUT SETTING THE NEXT MEETING DATE!!!
You think you will do it by email, but you might not, and people don't all read their email, etcetera, etcetera. While everyone is there, set the date. You should have a calendar handy, and everyone should come to the meeting with theirs. Better yet, set aside a regular time to meet (e.g., the second Tuesday of each month) and just look up the meeting time. Say it out loud. Make people repeat it.
Be respectful of people's time. Nothing will kill a collaborative spirit like the feeling that you are held hostage in a meeting. If you have to mark one of your action items "tabled -- put on 9/2/2011 meeting agenda," then do it, but don't keep folks late.
Always, always, always, thank your teammates for their time, and check in with everyone to make sure that all is well. Help the recorder get the last bits of information on the form. Clean up the room where you are meeting -- someone will need it tomorrow, and you'll feel less like doing it the next day.
Make sure that the minutes from the meeting are distributed to all on the team within 24 hours, so they can catch any errors while things are still fresh in everyone's minds.
That's it! You've done it! When you walk away from this meeting, you will have dates set for very concrete action items, you will have set broad goals for the coming year, you will have the start of your yearly meeting calendar prepared, and you will have made everyone feel good about the hard work they put in the previous year.
More By Stephen Covey
Literature Cited
Covey, Stephen R. 1994. First Things First. Fireside (NY).
DuFour, R. and R. DuFour. 2006. Professional Learning Communities at Work. Presented at the 2006 Charge Session, Brevard Public Schools, Viera, FL.
Moorman, Hunter. 2005. Celebrating Accomplishments -- New Perspectives on the 'Gold Star'. Education Leadership Newsletter, March 2005. www.reinventingeducation.org.
Savara, Sid. 2007. "Covey's Time Management Matrix" Personal Development Training, with Sid Savara.
Ward, Brian. 2007. Key Steps in Collaborative Problem Solving. Excellence 2.0.
Need more information?
If you have questions about team-building, school-wide data teams or meeting facilitation, leave a comment, below, or fill out a contact form with your contact information and the specific question you have, and one of us will get back to you promptly.
We at Northside Consulting look forward to serving your professional development needs. Come visit our web site, for more information about professional development opportunities with us.
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May 30, 2011 @ 1:39 pm | delete
- Learned something here -- thanks!
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It's So Nice to Meet You!
Notices
Reflection and Action Planning for School Teams by Kim M. Bennett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.northsideconsulting.org.
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