In the first meeting, Diane (Dir. of Advancement), Paula (Dir. of Admissions) and I planned a Mid-year New Parent Orientation event we're holding on Monday for the several families that have started at TBS since the school year began. Besides coming up with what we think is a very interesting and creative way to cover the information with families without talking at them (and one that I think we can use in future years), we simply had great synergy in sharing ideas, building off each other's ideas, and volunteering to take on roles and responsibilities.
In the second meeting, Kate Klaire (recess/social facilitation and EGG director), Danette Swan (2/3 teacher in Sweet Briar Creek) and I met to discuss the results of a Faculty Culture Profile survey that I had K-5 teachers complete during our division meeting two weeks ago. Using the tabulated data as a launching point, we were able to share our thoughts and wonders about the issues challenging our division, from the level of trust faculty hold in each other, to the nature of their casual conversations, to ways to make the division's meetings more worthwhile, to the consequences of the overload we all experience. While there was no single action item to result from this meeting, the opportunity to involve faculty (an open invitation was issued to all division faculty to attend this meeting) in helping me think through the next steps of conversations and activities for the faculty to do together was invaluable.
In the final meeting of the day, the entire faculty gathered after school to continue the curriculum review process that is the major all-faculty initiative of the year, building on our work last year of establishing school-wide learning outcomes. After a brief whole-group review of where we are in the process that we've designed for the year, we split into four small groups to share our observations about the "forward maps" that all faculty have created to guide their curriculum this year. In the small group in which I participated - with Danette, Missy (ECC), Kyla (K/1), Stephen (4/5), Marcella (6th), and Benicia (6-8) - we struggled at first to create a process to follow, but once we decided not to try to order our thoughts, and to just let them out as we felt moved to do so (compared to other groups, which decided to move methodically by either discipline strand, or grade level), our conversation picked up steam. Although the structure of the meeting was set up to follow the See Think Wonder thinking routine across this and the next meeting (since the amount of data on the maps is overwhelming to process), my group couldn't contain itself to sharing just observations of similarities and overlap, and spilled over into various questions such as, if we can all agree on the general topic or idea to plug into each box in the map at a given grade level, can we then give teachers autonomy around the implementation within the context of our shared pedagogic practices? And, are there disciplines in which we might want to be more regimented than that, and lay out all content by grade and sequence more tightly (examples of math, and ECC through 2nd grade reading were given as possibilities)? And, similar to the earlier meetings, what made this experience so great was the active role each and every participant took in contributing to our collective understanding and perception.
I don't know how many times in my life I'll say that I had three great meetings in one day!
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