EDcamp ND

On June 11th, Magic City Campus located in Minot, ND will host the first annual Edcamp in North Dakota.  Currently there are around 50-60 people planning to attend.  It will be an exciting day and we are looking forward to it.  If you unfamiliar with what an edcamp is please view the video below.  It will be a great of participant driven professional development!

Lessons learned from year one in PLC's

In a few weeks we will wrap up the 2011-2012 school year.  I have been thinking and reflecting quite a bit about how we can improve our PLC's, as well as the lessons learned after year one of full implementation.  I must say from a school climate stand point I feel that it has done wonders in increasing the communication among staff.  There are many more professional conversations occurring now.  I feel that we are on the same page, and focused for the most part on the same goals.

Some lessons learned after year one:

1. Clarification is so important in any change initiative.  I found that I had to reiterate several times as to what we should be doing and what it should look like.  We spun our wheels for a while, and I appreciate my teachers willingness to work through a very messy process.  Even after a year, I still find myself clarifying what it is we want to accomplish.  This will continue as we move to each different stage.  As administrators we must take an active role.  
2. Monitoring is equally important from me, teachers must know that I have bought into the change initiative too.  If we just throw 4-5 people in a room with no goals or direction and expect them to collaborate, we won't accomplish much.  There is also a point where you could over monitor.  I needed to find that happy medium, and give them autonomy to put their own spin on it.  
3. Many people talk about celebrating success, with year one there wasn't much data to back up what we were doing.  We devoted time at staff meetings to talk about what we were doing in our PLC's.  They shared documents, and discussed at length.  You could feel a sense of pride develop over time with the work they were creating.  I thought this was beneficial for all, it allowed them to compare and give feedback to each team.  This was our way of celebrating.
4. Most PLC teams are highly effective at this point.  I found that I had to focus time on some of the groups that were more reluctant.  Sometimes we need to be the guide to our groups to make them effective.  

Vision for next year:

Quite a few groups have developed all Powerstandards that are fully transitioned to the Common Core.  Our next step is to take a deeper look at our assessment of those standards and begin developing formative assessments that link to our intervention times.  I look forward to watching and taking part in our continued growth as a PLC.  

Formative Assessment Ideas

We have been dabbling as a school on what our common formative assessments may look like.  I threw together a possible layout of what it could look like down the road. I used Lucidcharts to create chart.  Its not groundbreaking, but I thought it could easily be tied to our RTI program.  An argument one may have is that formative assessment needs to happen on a quicker basis.  My thoughts on this relate to a recent post on standards based grading.  I anticipate these assessments would happen on a weekly basis to check for 4-5 of the major concepts teachers choose as part of their power benchmarks.

Initial ideas of how it would work:

1. Give all students the quick assessment - check for understanding.
2. Students that are not proficient will be placed in our ELA/Math intervention rooms.
3. Small group setting - focused on mastery development of the benchmark assessment.
4. This will allow us to diagnose the learning breakdown faster.
5. Students take a similar assessment to "test out."

Below I posted some recent Tweets from some users in response to my question related to formative assessments.  I was impressed with some responses.

We need to focus on formative assessments not summative assessments as means to improve student performance!

How are you implementing common formative assessments?

Do you ask for feedback?

Recently, we have been discussing grades and more specifically feedback.  I started thinking about how I as principal ask for feedback.  Like most leaders I would say that I don't ask for enough of it.  I have been reading The Leadership Challenge and there is a good piece on feedback.

Kouzes & Posner reference a leader that sought out feedback from his team.

"The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear...And that was really one of the benefits to the group.  To take that personal risk; to model for the group that it's okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback."

Asking for feedback from your constituents is risky business, we may uncover the truth of what is really occurring in our organization.  I think we all know what we will hear from them, but are either too afraid of it or don't want to take the risk of knowing the truth.  As they say, the truth hurts.

"Learning to be a better leader requires great self-awareness, and it requires making ourselves vulnerable.  Modeling that for others makes it easier for them to do the same when it comes their turn." - Kouzes & Posner  

How do you ask for feedback from the constituents of your organization?

I personally need to do more of this! I would be curious to hear how you gather feedback.