BLT BITS
CRCSD School Improvement
Check In: How are we doing?
Does your BLT have a system in place for checking how teacher leaders are feeling about group norms?
If not, you may want to try using an exit slip. This quick way to gather feedback (shown in the picture to the right) comes from Madison Elementary. It just takes a quick minute!
Remember, the power comes in sharing the data back the next time with the group to celebrant and attend to concerns before they become larger, more difficult to handle issues.
Garmston and Wellman (taken from The Adaptive School: A Sourcebook for Developing Collaborative Groups) offer another way to have the group reflect on its processes. Try displaying the following questions on a chart for group discussion:
* Was this meeting successful? Why or why not?
* Did we achieve our objective(s) in this meeting?
* On what norm has our group shown progress?
* On what norm does our group still need to work?
These questions could be opened to the entire group for group conversation. Alternately, a person might be selected to start the conversation and continue in a round-robin fashion for each member to contribute.
Schedule it!
Many teams are finding the calendar to be an essential tool for planning. Using the calendar in the back of the SIP or using a school created tool helps organize the work the BLT will need to accomplish.
Take a look at this planning tool from Harrison Elementary. During a BLT meeting teams split up into groups to review assigned parts of the SIP and determine what BLT agenda items would need to be a part of the agenda. Teams considered many factors which included the timing of Benchmark Assessment data, monitoring adult measures, and professional learning dates. Notes were also made regarding implications for professional learning and PLCs.
See the in progress sample from Harrison by clicking the view link below.
Harrison plans using a template.
BLT used this as a tool to pre-plan the work the BLT wants to ensure they accomplish this year.
Use the link below to access the template.