Collaborative Growth International
April 2020 Newsletter
Our Guiding Question
If you thought times were tough!
You are not in this alone!
We hope you, your families and friends are all well and taking care of yourselves as best you can. Remember - you are not alone.
Just a quick note from the Collaborative Growth team. I have really valued the visits we had with schools this term - prior to the world going down with pandemic. The subsequent follow up conversations and online activities have also been really productive.
A common question that has been expressed over recent weeks is how can we maintain a focus on the 'big rocks' and team projects that were identified at the start of the year?
As schools are hurriedly managing a transition to delivering learning experiences to students across many platforms during rapidly changing contexts this is taking 150% + (?) of your attention ( and the time and energy of your team).
Staff welfare, adjusting staff work arrangements, technology, finance management and properties issues don't magically disappear whilst you are coping with this huge new challenge.
It can seem almost impossible to get back to any of the big picture focus areas.
This may be the case, and if this is so then do not beat your self up about it (not that you need me telling you this but hey - it's true). Remember our CGI motto - all of us can only go forward one step at a time.
Try the guerrilla approach to going forward
Did your guiding question focus on building effective teams?
Some schools trialing online meetings have taken the opportunity to use this new approach to emphasise the need to make meetings productive and useful. It has been a good time to focus in on using protocols and creating team norms. One school set itself the challenge of ensuring that no online meetings went longer than 20 minutes and so far their longest meeting has been 15 minutes. A couple of resources that you might find useful in relation to setting protocols can be found at:
- https://blog.sharetolearn.com/curriculum-teaching-strategies/how-to-run-a-meeting/
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/12p1_mBJjVyvEhxn_5bed1XKZqglXuznK/view?usp=sharing
It has been the experience of these schools that they can keep teams meeting and moving forward. Exec teams that have more effective communication and inclusion with and of staff as a team goal have found the current situation to be a perfect vehicle to step up and try new approaches to support staff (and in some cases - to give staff a new voice).
Did your guiding question focus on a particular pedagogical area?
An interesting diagram that might be of use to frame how you might strategically move into delivering online learning can be found at:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathannalder_covid19-samr-covid19-activity-6650170506450432000-NwkZ
Some schools were going to focus on a particular pedagogical area such as literacy, numeracy, effective questioning or effective feedback.
As these schools have designed new learning experiences or activities for students they have looked for ways to build parent engagement and knowledge. In some cases they are trying to leverage the fact that more parents are involved in what students are doing on a day to day basis. They are providing simple, plain language explanations to parents of some of the key terms or concepts the school has been using. Schools who have experienced the most impact from this approach have been very strategic in picking the number and type of terms or concepts they want to introduce to parents per week. They have looked for strategies that are useful to parents. They have been clear in their messaging to parents.
One area that has been of interest to schools I have spoken to this week is exploring opportunities to engage parents with some of the learning dispositions material that schools have been introducing to students. I have provided a link to a parent booklet produced by Lane Cove West Public School that might prompt some ideas:
Other schools that were planning to focus on assessment and quality feedback in 2020 have found the perfect vehicle to give teachers space to be innovative in these two important areas.
There are many other wonderful things happening in schools that I will share in the next edition of this newsletter. I will finish with one other example of an idea that captures how skills school leaders can be in adapting an approach to a school focus area to meet the time. Some schools who were aiming to spend time this year building staff engagement with PDPs have used their conversations with staff as an opportunity to capture the many ways staff are adapting to meet the new challenges in effective teaching and learning. They are feeding this back to staff in a range of objective and descriptive ways. They are reminding staff that although the circumstances might have changed and the work might be very difficult some important things stay the same - teachers care about students, they adapt and grow when needed because that is the nature of the profession they are part of.
We are still here helping schools
I hope you have a chance for some down time over the Easter Vacation period but I will also be available to talk with people during that time to help plan for term 2.
Take care, let me know if I can be of any support. All the best on behalf of the Collaborative Growth Team.
How to contact us
David Silcock
+61 0417553074
Twitter: @DavidJSilcock
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-silcock-6144468/
Website: https://northcoastinitiative.weebly.com/
Publications: https://www.canadianscholars.ca/books/powerful-questions