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.

Next Meeting January 25, 2010

Our next Inquiry Team meeting will be held on Monday, 1.25.10 in the Library.
We will be reflecting on last weeks Quality Review. On our agenda are the following topics:

Revisiting transcribing with StoryTown
Steps to an Effective Inquiry Team Process-Phase 1
Creating Protocols for teacher teams

What are Protocols? A protocol consists of agreed upon guidelines for a conversation, and it is the existence of this structure(which everyone has agreed to)that permits a certain kind of conversation to occur--often a kind of conversation people are not in the habit of having. Protocols are vehicles for building the skills and culture necessary for collaborative work. Thus, using protocols often allows groups to build trust by actually doing substantive work together.

We would greatly appreciate your thoughts/comments on: Why use protocols?

Welcome Back Inquiry 2010!

We would like to wish our colleagues a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! At our first meeting of the new year, we discussed the low inference transcriptions taken prior to the break. We recognized that the transcribing was not in line with our newly implemented Storytown literacy program. We will start transcribing next week, implementing our new transcribing protocol. Our next inquiry team meeting will take place January 11, 2010. At this meeting we plan to reflect on quality review and curriculum audit, which will take place January 6-8, 2010. As part of the inquiry process, we will examine the role of EPAL in second grade.