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According to your responses, the most meaningful indicator was teachers professionally discussing relevant issues on a regular basis.
I think it's really interesting that this indicator, more than any of the others, was chosen as the most important to you. I have a sense from this that it's become quite apparent to most of us that this kind of collaboration, wherein we meet together regularly as teams of teachers to discuss relevant issues, has become a deeply embedded and persistent part of our professional practice. I think we get that. And that's pretty cool.
As a follow-up to this survey response, I asked your groups two questions.
Question 2a: Are we meeting together in the most productive manner possible, in order to improve teaching and learning? And...
Question 2b: How can we enable ourselves as a faculty to meet together more productively in order to collaborate for the benefit of our students?
Reading through your written responses to these questions, the following ideas appear consistently throughout:
- There is a desire to see our meeting times include time for collegiality as well as professional development and collaboration.
- We should enable our special education teachers to meet with our collaborative teams.
- We should meet vertically, between grade levels and specializations, as well as within our grade-level teams.
- We need to find time to meet as teams to discuss issues and ideas that are above and beyond data and scheduling.
Based on these responses, I will make the following assurances to you:
- From now on, our monthly professional development meetings will always begin with a short time (15-20 minutes) for social interaction. Of course, it is sensible to assume that this time will not be productive if you do not arrive on-time and in the mood for collegial discourse. Snacks will continue to be provided a these meetings as funding allows.
- I will meet with Joy, Jenny, Eliza, and Sarah as soon as possible to determine if there are any opportunities available to us in the schedule which will allow us to more regularly include Eliza and Sarah in our CT meetings. However, it may be that we are forced to conclude that this is not a need that can be realized on a consistent basis until next year.
- We will commit at least one, if not several, of our remaining monthly professional development meetings to working collaboratively in a vertical sense, between grade levels.
- Joy and Jenny and I will meet as soon as possible to determine when our best opportunities exist to provide time in our weekly CT schedule to allow for your teams to discuss issues above and beyond data and RTI schedules. I believe opportunities for this already exist and that many of our teams are already taking advantage of them. For teams that desire more time to be devoted to this, it may be as simple as including a time for the discussion of "other topics" within the Open section of your weekly agendas.
