League of Democratic Schools

For the next two days, I will be hosting about 15 folks for the annual regional meeting of the League of Democratic Schools. I'll describe this group in a later post. For now, I want to outline my ideas for creating a work oriented meeting for various schools. Later, I will reflect on how well these plans worked.

Here's the agenda
Theme: Making the Invisible, Visible
"...there is only one thing I would want schools to guarantee, it would be to help all young people acquire the skills and self-confidence they need to feel visible in the world." ~ Sam Chaltain from Degrees of Freedom

Thursday
8:30 am - Eagle Rock gathering: witness an Eagle Rock ritual for supporting youth voice
9:00 am - Framing of meeting: intro to Eagle Rock, emphasis on theme (we're all hear to get better at incorporating youth voice), and emphasis on process of work, sharing and producing content.
10:00 am - Restorative Justice training: folks from Boulder Valley & New Vista High School sharing their practices
1:00 pm - Dilemmas in Democratic Governance: Eagle Rock students will present dilemmas and challenges regarding youth voice and governance. Participants will provide feedback using a consultancy protocol.
2:45 pm - Sharing resources from member schools: Run as a World or Knowledge Cafe. Each school has a home base and participants rotate to different tables. Throughout, we are looking into the question of what makes us a network? Who are we as a region? Who are we to each other?
4:45 pm - Closure

Friday
8:30 am Eagle Rock gathering: witness an Eagle Rock ritual for supporting youth voice
9:00 am Featured Speaker: Sam Chaltain: Sam will highlight some principles of democratic principles in schools. Schools will then work on their own projects with Sam providing coaching based on his presentation.
1:00 pm Creating content on online community: Somehow (not sure how yet) help participants think in terms of creating a product based on our work together and posting that online.

We'll see how it goes.

Professional Development Center work

I'm drafting some ideas for how to best describe the strategy for The Professional Development Center at Eagle Rock School. Here's what I've got so far.

Guiding principles: Assets based and actionable. We begin from a place of working with schools and organizations from the stance that they already have all they need to move closer to their vision. They may need someone like us to unearth their assets and identify signs of positive deviance. Further, we are strict about turning any insights into actions. We provide clear descriptions of what the folks in an organization must do rather than just describe outcomes.

Given these principles, we engage in the following strategies.

1 – We choose to work with strategic partners. These are organizations that have a highly developed infrastructure for working (a) with small public schools and (b) directly addressing issues of high school drop out rate and secondary school experience for the kinds of students we work with at Eagle Rock School. Amongst our current partners are The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), Alternative High School Initiative (AHSI) and the League of Democratic Schools (LoDS).

3- We partner strategically with technical assistance providers like PEBC and Buck Institute. They offer to either train us in their professional development or have us cofacilitate their work. That enables us to deliver our work having had the benefit of their high quality approach -- builds our capacity as trainers, adds value to ERS and adds values to the schools we work with. We are low to no-cost help to them as needed facilitators and we, in turn, learn from their work which is in high demand due to their quality and reputation.

3 – We are using our capacity to host visitors at our school site more effectively by working with fewer schools with whom we can conduct follow up visits. We combine the retreat nature created here while remaining embedded in a school environment. Our follow up visits to their school sites supports the needed contextualizing.

I will continue to flesh out these thoughts and develop a fuller strategy document.

When to take action

I laugh when folks say, "We should have done this a long time ago," and then that insight somehow justifies not taking action now.

"The best time to plant a tree...was twenty years ago. The second best time, is today."

Chinese saying

Launching new initiatives

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."
~ Peter Drucker

Some staff want to experiment with instituting a study hall. We've been meeting about how to support the success of such a new initiative. I'm interested in seeing whether or not some "change strategies" (mostly from John Kotter and The Influencer) will help make this happen.

another action oriented quote

"You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind"

I think it's an old Irish saying.

My Report Card

Despite how focused I think I am and how much I preach focus in leadership, I find myself scattered as I try to juggle multiple initiatives. All of these initiatives are in addition to my standard work with other schools, presenting at conferences or hosting visitors. I launched these initiatives in order to meet needs of the school as I perceived them. I thought a report card on my self might be a helpful exercise. I need to figure out whether there's a pattern to those initiatives that fizzle out and those that get traction.

Faculty Evaluation – a year ago I attended the National Association of Independent Schools conference and ran across a form of faculty evaluation that focused on teachers setting their own professional goals. I adapted many of the forms and the approaches as I understood them.

• Grade: C Despite having run meetings to focus on these goals, not a single person mentions these goals unless I bring them up. It doesn't seem to be meaningful to the staff.
  

Instructional Meetings – I was tired of making up stuff to deliver some staff development. Like the faculty evaluation, there wasn't much demand from staff for anything in particular so I kept preparing topical sessions that were not part of a coherent plan as I would like. However, I was working to meet with smaller groups all the time. So, I proposed using this time to meet in groups.

• Grade: C I thought more people would want to meet in small groups to work on projects they were already a part of . There's little to no response to joining various groups. So far, the meetings have fallen into two groups each time and they don't seem to be very effective. I give this initiative a B however with respect to how much I have to work on it in contrast to past PD.

Restorative Justice – instituted to stem the expulsion of students for breaking non-negotiables while also providing a community building ritual.

• Grade: B+ Part of the culture, students expect to get restorative justice and we have a stable group of staff and students who can facilitate. Follow through is excellent. More trainings and reflection would move this to an A.

Fairness – in the spirit of restorative justice, I wanted to create a group that would deal with lower level behavior issues.

• Grade: D Exists in concept only. I haven't figured out how to make it work and there's no demand for it.

Night Patrol– I proposed doing random night patrols to look into how well students were sleeping and hopefully act as a deterrent to late night misbehavior.

• Grade: B+ Committed volunteers work on this. No complaints from students and some of them have reported their belief that it has been a deterrent. I feel really good about this initiative. Unfortunately we are short one or two volunteers to successfully fill all the slots.

Leadership Team Meetings – part of my earlier school critique was the lack of agenda and focus during leadership team meetings. I gathered all the items that people suggested we talk about and organized an agenda based approach to holding the meetings.

• Grade: B+ ...maybe an A. Since proposed, we have never failed to have an agenda and minutes for the leadership team meetings. A digest of the minutes is provided to the staff and we have received great feedback on our greater transparency.

Power Standards – Some time ago I proposed we revise our curriculum guide to focus on fewer standards. Little to nothing was done on this work until there was a recent resurgence in interest. It may now be the focus of an all day instructional meeting.

• Grade: C or B The resurgence of interest is welcome. However, staff seem real confused about how to proceed. I feel like there's a lot of work to do to make sense of this initiative for the staff.

Results of Assets Based House Focus Experience

I facilitated an assets mapping experience with those interested in working on improving the living village through houseparent orientation and houseparent staff development. This is the summary of that experience.

1.Asset Mapping for What
We want to establish some way to orient houseparents. Through developing an approach to orientation, we hope to develop ourselves. We have no idea yet what should be included in the orientation nor what form it should take. Now's the time we're going to look at what the assets suggest.

18 staff freely chose to work in this group today. All are on house teams and all 6 houses were represented. Only one house did not have its houseparents in attendance.

Rather than allow them to self-select smaller groups based on affinity, I had them count-off to create four groups. I wanted to increase the chances folks would connect with new folks and new assets.

2.Debriefing
I introduced the entire agenda and provided context for why I had decided to use this exercise when thinking about how to best help houseparents and think of orienting houseparents in the future. At this point, I had a couple of people who didn't understand why we were talking about assets. N. asked, “I don't see how this has any relevance to houseparents.” However, the majority seemed to either understand or be willing to go along with the activity.

Recognizing Our Assets
I used prompts from the following categories: individual, physical, associations, organizational (in place of institutional) and resources (in place of economic). I also made the final prompt a version of the “needs transformation” exercise. Had them think of needs and modeled finding the asset at the core of that need.

Approximately 200 assets were generated and posted on walls. The space wasn't great. Lots of furniture in the way of walls. People actually got on chairs and taped some assets to the ceiling. Others interesting spaces included podiums, windows, and a piano.

Connecting the Dots
Some confusion – J. asked, “Is this specifically for houseparents or can it include students?” My struggle here was trying to avoid censoring while maintaining some generally connecting towards the target of houseparent staff development and orientation.

One thing I think I did well here was use an example of something that has already happened at the school that was already an example of connecting assets: Current Events class on Saturday connected with the Science teacher = Science based current events that lead to meeting graduation requirements. The person was in the room who had thought of that, so I thought it made the connecting real. I also pulled together two random assets and asked folks to brainstorm an action. Classic Rock knowledge + Resiliency Skills teaching = putting a band together with resiliency lessons woven into meetings.

20 minutes later 14 actions had been generated. Tough to see them because they were somewhat buried within a sea of 200 other sheets of paper. I promoted noting where things were during the report out.

Here my only concern was that some of the actions were less within the locus of control of those suggesting them. For example: assets were that three different groups of people live on campus. These were connected to the action: “more staff presence in the houses.” When questioned, it seemed that they were thinking we “should” have more staff presence given these assets rather than “I want to take action on being more present since I live on campus.” I thought this was worth redirecting to what was within their control. I had to do that two or three times.

Another comment was “It's almost like these directions are limiting. I see one asset and it stimulates many ideas but I don't know what to connect it with.” I suggested that the participant share his idea with the small group and see if they could make any connections or suggestions.

Voting with your feet
With direction, folks moved to 5 actions out of the 14. Some actions were combined.

Some asked, “what if I can't decide or I want to do more than one?” I said for now just pick the most engaging and we'll revisit this work in the future.

While everyone moved into actions, I didn't feel there was the kind of energy described in the consultant's journal on p. 24: “...people would come out of the ...experience smiling, laughing, and bursting with new energy.” This did not happen. It was more slow movement to actions, some low level buzz of conversation. Nothing negative but definitely not what I would call uplifting.

Debriefing the experience
I asked (1) taken together, can you imagine the contribution these 5 actions will make to the houseparent body, (2) what do you need next and (3) what feedback do you have about the process itself?

About a two-thirds of the comments were “creative, liked it, good starting points, can imagine benefits, etc.” The remaining third were split between, “when will we do this or how will we do this” and “I'm confused...why did we do this?”

3.Readiness for next steps
I think EVERYTHING that follows depends very much on my ability and follow through to support the actions suggested. I feel like I need to find time in the schedule for the action groups. I also think I need to help some get clarity on how these actions are tied to the support of houseparents. As I've mentioned before in other threads, I did a full day Appreciative Inquiry Summit with design groups generated and no one ever met again after that day.

How do I best support follow through?

Steps for applying ABCD to staff development

JP asked me how the PDC applies strengths and assets based development to staff development. I referred to work in an earlier entry about Skyview Academy . I took the following steps as my attempt to incorporate strengths and assets applied to what the school wanted to get better at.

1. Identify what the school wants and agree to a model they aspire to. (They showed me a model for block instruction that they liked).

2. I study the model to make sure I understand it.

3. I conduct a series of low-inference observations and produce an observation report for that teacher. It presents the low-inference data and then I add at the end what I think they did well in terms of the model they aspire to.

4. After observing every teacher (not necessary to do everyone), I produce an Assets Based report of the school with a matrix of their strengths.

5. Design a full day (or some session) of PD that is focused on folks sharing their strengths and promising practices. Near the end of the session design next steps....usually a focus on a narrower aspect of the larger topic. Repeat steps 1 to 5.

Michael

John Kotter steps to change

I don't remember the source of this cut and paste. I attended a workshop on this and probably clipped the following from Kotter's site. I think it has some parallel to my draft of steps for change posted earlier.

John Kotter's highly regarded books 'Leading Change' (1995) and the follow-up 'The Heart Of Change' (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change (see a more detailed interpretation of the personal change process in John Fisher's model of the process of personal change): Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:

1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognise progress and achievements.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.

Action Needed

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle. - Kahlil Gibran

"Talking does not cook rice." - Chinese Proverb

Recommendations based on critique

Now that I laid out my critique, I want to list recommendations that follow from the critique:

Overall: Build a stronger infrastructure of processes and structures that take the burden off having to make as many personal, emotional and ad hoc decisions.

Leadership

1.Commit to long term strategic thinking and follow the plan (i.e., Good to Great – but doesn't have to be that). Commitment to strategy and discussion should be a weekly event.

2.Identify schoolwide problems and make those issues the heart of leadership team meetings. Use the collective talent to dialogue, argue and problem solve.

3.Adopt the process of running big decisions by the rest of the leadership team (i.e, dismissal of students, approaches to clean up in houses, launching the New Orleans trip, etc.). Final authority remains with one person in the most appropriate department and all remains the final call of head of school should he choose to exercise that call. But, from now on decision makers get to hear the perspectives of others before proceeding.

4.Commit to open and frank conversation about topics and issues. Do not say what we really feel after the meeting is over and some folks have left. Call each other on adhering to this practice.

5.Develop and adhere to agendas for leadership team meetings rather than showing up and reporting out. Maintain and distribute minutes.


Strategy

6.Once a strategy is adopted (see #1 above), run future decisions through the strategy filter. Should we follow through with Akosha Fdn and New Schools for New Leaders, how do we roll out “Everybody Writes Every Day?” etc. Again, not bound by the strategy but bound by running it through the filter with all leadership team members.


Processes

7.Adopt standard processes for the following
Decision making within leadership team, decision making with staff involvement.
Making proposals and getting feedback / responses
Conducting whole school conversations (i.e., community meeting)
Student behavior / culture system
Reactive: i.e., restorative justice, fairness committee
Investigative
Proactive
Group Counseling
Leadership Development
Character Development
Structures in light of students' poor decision making (i.e, night duty, strong circles, etc.)
Staff supervision
Crisis management
...and more



Management

8.Every initiative / event must have a leadership team “sponsor.” Someone responsible for supervising the success of the initiative or event (i.e., House Focus, Community meetings, etc.)

9.Once agreed upon a process to supervising staff and holding accountable, we must diligently follow through.

Latest draft for moving on any initiative

This is my latest thinking of the sequence of steps needed to move on any initiative. I'm sure it will undergo revisions in the future:

Here's my latest version:

Procedure for launching any initiative

1. Establish unequivocal leadership. Establish strong leadership where the buck stops -- someone ensures it is executed and who protects the initiative in its infancy. Someone stands up and says, this is my initiative. I am responsible and I will take action to ensure execution and protect this initiative.

2. Establish the working team. It's more important that these be the “right people” instead of some democratic ideal of seeking representation. The latter is only necessary to the point that representation will ensure execution. The right people means “mission appropriate,” loyal to the organization, doers.
A team of interested staff and students - small, workable, interested team with energy for this sort of thing / You pull together a committed group to work on this issue and meet as frequently as necessary.

Alert: I think this group needs to determine what process it will use to resolve conflicts, make decisions and solve problems. The problem is that either or both (1) folks just want to get to work and trust they'll work through things so this stage is perceived as a waste of time and/or (2) folks don't want to preemptively commit themselves to a process “in theory.” The time may come when they feel so strongly about a decision that they don't care what the process generates. I don't think it matters what the process is as long as there is a rational, agreed upon process. Doesn't matter if it's voting, consensus, using matrices, etc.

3. Invite controlled community involvement. Following meetings; share proposals and invite feedback via email. Hearing proposals at a staff meeting for the first time (as we did with the chore proposals) does not provide sufficient time to process the issues. Also, frequent communication reduces the possibility that you are doing something in conflict with another group {Again, the chore proposal had an action that directly conflicted with the house focus proposal regarding house clean}.

4. Focus on the smallest unit possible that will still be a contribution. Start small with your proposals. Start with one table in the lodge that is a no cursing table (that's an exaggeration...you could probably start with meal time and kitchen work as the small unit to begin with). Have success with that before expanding the work. / a clear but small scope of behavior to take on at first and a singleminded focus to only deal within this scope until it has traction in this community

5. Overdetermine success by looking at every aspect of needed support. a system for supporting the success of this initiative: incentives/disincentives, peer support, assistance, removal of barriers, training, etc. / Once you have settled on a proposal; think of all the ways you would have to follow through to ensure that expectations are met. I have a model (6 cell model of human behavior) that I use to try to cover all angles on follow through. / Figure out how you will
(a) follow up with new events - celebrations, recognitions...some plan to keep it in the community's consciousness
(b) strategically build out the approach (expand from the smallest unit or expand in terms of overdetermining success)

Alert: How to address issues of execution? How to talk about it while implementing? Can the team actually carry out the play? Possibility: Need to do step 5 (overdetermine success) with the working core team itself.

6. Have a mechanism for review. a feedback mechanism for reflection and improvement


Keep doing steps 3 through 6.

Principles to follow:
1. Any action that is to be taken needs to be written out and explained in actionable language.

i.e., No foul language used in the kitchen (we have students working in the kitchen) NOT Everyone shows each other respect during KP {that's not actionable}

2. Any action for which someone must take responsibility must have a name and time attached to it.

i.e., Mike will explain the foul language rule to every student over weeks 1 and 2 NOT We'll make sure we tell the students not to use foul language {who will do it, when? Likely will fall through the cracks}

Using PB Wiki for our Values Discussion

I created a wiki that has a separate page for each value, theme and commitment at our school.

You can create your own wiki at http://www.pbwiki.com

Hedgehog Concept: Reflection with Council

Hedgehog Council:

I cc'd or bcc'd you on the results of my meeting with Skyview because
it reflects my understanding of how our work might proceed with others
if we took an exclusive ABCD view.

I think if Eldon had asked that we come down and teach their teachers
how to do POLs, for example, I would have said no.

I said we could conduct observations of what they do and try to
capture the strengths and high points relative to their goal (block
instruction). Then we would develop some asset map: where can they
find the strengths within their own community.

Then we would design PD -- probably a protocol -- based on the
strengths analysis that would support their tapping into their local
knowledge and talent.

_______________

I'm wondering if this makes sense to you. I'm also wondering if you
have had any insights regarding using ABCD as our hedgehog concept?

Skyview Work Plan: Applying the Hedgehog

Summary of our discussion today:

Skyview has identified "effective use of block instruction" as one of
your primary goals for next school year. Using an assets based
approach, Eagle Rock will spend 2 to 3 days at Skyview between now and
May 18th conducting observations and producing a strengths analysis.
With Skyview, we will codesign a PD session that is built upon the
strength analysis to be held on May 29th or May 30th. We will
schedule a follow up session to reflect upon the strengths analysis
and the PD session to plan for next steps for the 2007 school year.

You will confirm whether Apr. 24, May 4 and May 8 will work for
conducting the observations. We will try to coordinate the work with
Annie from PEBC.

You also mentioned wanting to visit Eagle Rock School over the summer
vacation. You can coordinate with Dan regarding whether or not there
are dates open for visits.

From the Archives

We have all completed the course where we had to do this assignment. I'm looking over old email archives and ran across this email from Al who was helping us think about what we had to do next. I don't think we captured it in the blog.

January 2005 email from Al

What we need to do for the assignment:

Identify a cohort of students in need of support.
Gather as much data as you can about them, and look carefully at this data in order to assess current outcomes. Data should include but not be limited to: results of standardized- and curriculum-based assessments, student work, and teacher observations. Data should be analyzed and broken down by sub-groups.
Determine what structures, decision rules, and mental models underlie the practices that lead to these outcomes. To do this, ask yourselves: If these were in fact the desired outcomes, what would you have to think and do in order for this to make sense? What would one have to believe, and what current practices are logical outgrowths of these beliefs?

Our brainstorm and thinking

What we would believe if we wanted the outcomes that we got

1. believe that time is not a factor in how they get credit (that it always can be made up, easily)
2. hope that they would learn a lesson by not getting credit (so we’d use those credits as a tool for “teaching them a lesson”)
3. think that we have little or nothing to do with them getting credit (that it’s all up to the student)
4. believe we ought to allow them to figure out how best to be successful (we would assume that their reason for not being at school was about them doing the right thing)
5. believe that we don’t have to work very hard at improving our teaching practice
6. believe that we should make them guess what’s in our heads
7. believe we should give up on really difficult kids
8. believe that a “presenting” interest is what’s going to get us to their passion


These are the practices that we engage in that reflect the above beliefs

ª Tell them “you are not going to earn credit” (belief #2)
ª Tell them “it’s easy to make up credit”(belief #1)
ª Allow them “incompletes” (belief #1)
ª We don’t keep track of “abandoned” projects or “failed” classes (belief #3)
ª don’t use the grids well to show incremental progress (belief #6)
ª don’t have a standard policy for looking at what “makes up” a credit (belief #6)
ª we do not as a cultural practice, keep student work as artifacts of their learning (belief #3)
ª we don’t (as an institutional practice) share common criteria for what meets expectations (belief #6)
ª tell them that time is not a factor in how they get credit (that it always can be made up, easily) (belief #1)
ª we don’t have systems that identify and assist kids that are failing (we leave it up to the parents and kids) (beliefs #2 & 3)
ª we teach to compliant kids and allow non compliant kids space to fail (and then believe that they are “learning a lesson”) (belief #7)
ª when the interest projects don’t pan out, we blame the kids. (belief #8)
ª do not engage with staff development (belief #5)


These are the beliefs and practices that we abandoned because we don’t think we believe or practice these things:

ª believe that ability is innate and finite
ª change everything so that it’s unfamiliar
ª not check in to let them know where they are on their journey
ª ask them to do stuff that has no meaning for them
ª not care if they didn’t get it
ª not pay attention to how they learn

The Data Is In!

It has been 2 months and 8 days since the semester began.

We had intended to take actions to address the problem of the undercredited 11th graders. Our first action was to institute or increase conferencing with an emphasis on instruction. We would record conferencing events and measure the success by tracking progress towards credit achievement. The grids were to be used as ways to capture fractions of credit.

Finally, today we have a full set of credit achievement data for this subgroup. 2 months and 8 days seems to be the current delay in implementing an action cycle and receiving data on that action. At this rate we would not have data again until the end of the school year.

I want to collect this data three more times. How can we cut down the turnaround by a third?

Michael

Push to collect data

Michael writes:

Hopefully this reinforces Al's previous post.

In February, staff were required to conference, maintain conferencing records and collect data on credit accumulation. To date, one-quarter through this final semester, only two staff members have provided data. One is on the leadership team and one is not. The fact that the leadership team is not getting this data together is a big problem.

The problem now in late March is the lack of data regarding student progress and correlation to conferencing. We have to look at how we’re doing and ground it in data. We can’t do that if the data isn’t collected and provided. Please do that.

What I have now is limited to two crews. This data is based on progress of students between January 31st and March 28th.

Crew #1
5 undercredited 11th graders

Past Record (data from Semester 1)
5/5 earned less credit than their average earning power.
5/5 increased their burden (have more to do per semester than in the past)
1/5 fell off track (previously on track)

Based on 20 class days since January 31st (data from 1/31 through 3/28)

5/5 are earning more credit than they did last semester
5/5 are earning more credit than their past average earning power
3/5 increased their burden
2/5 meeting or decreasing burden – moving from off-track to on-track

Correlation to conferencing: unknown. No conferencing statistics provided.

Crew #2
Information was provided in aggregate form. That is, overall 14 students have earned a total of 8 credits in the first 20 days. Not broken out per student although range is earnings of 0-2 credits per student in first 20 days.

When this aggregate earnings is compared to aggregate earnings for past semester’s undercredited 11th graders, we see no significant difference in earning. That is, students on average earned 2.25 credits last semester and projecting from this current report will earn 2.42 credits per student.

Every student in this group has had at least one conference. Each student has experienced 1-3 conferences.

Checking in on conferencing & grids

On March 21, Marc reported the following status on use of grids amongst Explorations crew leaders:

3 crew leaders - sending grids this afternoon
1 crew leader- no updates on grids, offering learning plans instead
2 crew leaders - no updates on grids since they are using binders to chart progress
4 crew leaders - no updates on grids, nothing offered in its place
2 crew leaders- absent

I sent out the following email on March 25th in response.

It's clear we are still struggling with collecting results on conferencing and using the grids for record keeping. You each broke up the teachers into smaller groups that you were each responsible for to check in on conferencing. Please add to that task that you should check that those teachers are actively using the grids on a weekly basis. Show them how.

What I'm interested in now is the extent to which you have done these practices within your own crew. I would like each of you to tell me your status to each question:

1. Does each person in your crew have a learning plan for this quarter (whether it's foundations or explorations)?
2. How many conferences have you had with your crew members since this action was first initiated? Only count those that you recorded in your conferencing notebook.
3. What is the total credit accumulation according to your grids for your crew since January 31? Report this number as average number of credits per student (so that's a single number) and a range from lowest accumulator to highest accumulator. You would get these numbers by calculating partial credits as indicated on your grids.

So, possible responses might look like

SAMPLE
Crew of 10 students
1. 6 have learning plans.
2. I have done 1 conference each with 3 students (total of 3 conferences recorded in the manner it was presented in PD...one where you taught something).
3. One average, my students have earned a 0.25 credits per student. The range is from 0 to 1. (This means you have grids that show this)

That's it. Please do this as soon as possible.

Michael

Minutes 03.22.03 Manager: Sue

March 22, 2005

Admin Meeting

One Minute Items:
ELL Meeting
Sue and possibly Jeff will be at a meeting tomorrow leaving around 11:45. Jeff will play it by ear.

Jeff Out Thursday
Going to HPA to see Fairness, and then to Outward Bound

March 30th LIS visit
There will be a visit. We need to make a learning walk folder for our school. Also the school wide thing they will be looking at is operations. Collectively the Building Council is thinking about this issue and are debating having an operations person who is not one of the principals.


Agenda:
Conferences
We are having difficulty meeting with our small group. We need to do this. We are going to report back each meeting on how this is going. We will also be brainstorming ways to support each other. For example helping with coverages, and other issues that take time out. We are also considering using PD time.

After School
There are eight hours worth of per session that we can use for supporting under-credited students (priority to 11th grade). We will be seeking proposals from teachers to help us figure out what the after school program will look like.

Attendance Procedure
Marc sent out an email. It got an interesting response from Dana

Teacher Attendance
Dana’s email was great. We want to follow it up. Marc is interested in collecting data. Al was concerned about being reactive and wants us to have individual conversations with our two biggest offenders

Hats/Hallways
Stevenson is going to take hats in the morning, starting next Monday morning. We are going to see how it goes and then determine policy. Jeff will tell crews today, Al is going to talk to Hamilton about enforcement on our floor, and he is going to talk to Mike about the policy and provision him with a bag and stickers to label hats that are confiscated.

PD
Task analysis
Conferencing
Liz suggestion – “teach teachers to teach kids to teach themselves”
Research Groups – Work session on creating the sourcebook. This is our choice for Wednesday – Marc will be facilitating.

Impact Report Out
Dov reported back on our Impact status. We are very close to moving into phase one of the phase down portion of the protocol. We have met on criteria and have not yet met with a second. If you want the details, I have the documentation and am happy to share it and explain it if necessary. Lucille was concerned that we will lose the police presence in the building as we move into phase one. Peter seemed to think that the crime statistic will keep us on the Impact list forever.

Grid Use – saved for next meeting
Retreat – saved for next meeting

Minutes distributed by Sue