Questions for teacher team meetings

Here are some questions to ponder as your teacher teams develop:

What is the focus on your team's work at present? What goals does the team have?
What group of students has the team targeted/focused on? Why/how was this group chosen? How are you accountable to/for them?

Please feel free to post comments/thoughts.

Thanks!

Inquiry Team

Inquiry Team Meeting

Today we flagged the Fabulous Fifteen on ARIS. We are not quite sure of whether or not the students included and targeted by the inquiry team will be flagged for individual teachers to see when they access their class list on ARIS! We are going to wait 24 hours to recheck ARIS to see if these students are flagged.

How Do We Choose a Sub Group that is Right for Our Grade?

In your teacher team meeting creating a sub group can be easy. Start by deciding how many students you want to target, 5, is a nice small number to begin with. Let's talk about Kindergarten! Kindergarten has 19 students with IEP's and 12 students that are ELL's. In order for Kindergarten to decide upon a sub group we might consider these two groups of children. From these two groups we may find students that fall into both categories. If the students that satisfy both criteria (IEP and ELL) equal 5, you have made your target group. What do you do if your are still left with a group larger than 5? Consider additional subgroups. Some considerations may be high attendance percentage, economically disadvantaged, ELA performance, etc.

Introducing Inquiry to Grade Leaders

Grade leaders met with the inquiry team today to discuss what the inquiry process is, the structure of common preps, what data we will be using, and the steps that need to be implemented in order to follow an effective inquiry team process. The grade leaders will be given templates to use during their inquiry grade meetings that include agenda, next steps etc.

This week's agenda:

The Inquiry Team is inviting our grade leaders to 2 meetings in February. At the meetings, we will discuss the process of inquiry as well as the protocol and ground rules necessary to run productive teacher team meetings. The Administration, along with the core Inquiry Team members are taking steps to expand the inquiry process to the staff. Our objective is to meet our school wide goal of 90% for 2009-2010. In the future, we plan to invite more members and expand to multiple mini-Inquiry Teams. These teams will further examine data and school wide trends that may be influencing our students’ progress and achievement.