 Welcome back everyone to the third and final session with our guest speaker Jim Knight on Instructional Coaching Strategies to Facilitate Successful Coaching. This is a series that's consisted of two webinars and a face-to-face session in between. And it has been developed by ERLC as a result of a grant from Alberta Education to Support Implementation. My name is Jan Edney and I'll be hosting your session this afternoon. It's great to see you all. I know that we have multiple people at some of the sites. Denise indicated there's, I believe, three people at their sites and Greg and Denise have a couple of other people at their site as well. So welcome. And if I've missed introducing anyone or if there's extra people at your site, Gwen, you can surely let us know. I'm just going to turn the mic over to Jim though and we can get started on our session. So welcome back Jim. We're excited to work with you again today. Hi everybody. I was trying to figure out what would be the best use of our time this time to get together and I thought it would be good to talk about leading teams as another aspect of what you might do as a coach. So I'm going to talk through, Jan, I think you have to reboot me as a facilitator because I'm not able to run the slides right now. So I'm going to run through six big ideas related to creating what I call intensive learning teams. And what I'd like it to be is a little more interactive so that I would go about 10 minutes or so and then we'd stop and have a conversation and kind of go back and forth as much like a conversation as possible. There's six big ideas and so there's six opportunities for conversation. So don't be bashful about using your microphone. We have a small group in terms of the number of mics. We should be able to interact pretty easily. So I'm hoping we can make that work and it would be really, really nice. Many of you are put in the position, I'm guessing, of conducting teams and I wondered if we could just pause for a second and just hear from every participant or every group as to what kind of teams do you find yourselves leading? Is it professional learning communities? Is it data teams? Is it grade level teams? What kind of team leadership situations do you find yourself in when you're doing your work in your schools? Or just what kind of teams are you a participant on that maybe be as important a question? So anybody like to raise their hand and let us know they're ready to give us a response? Okay, go for it, Gwen. I'm very new to this. We're going to be introducing a lot of the stuff to grade level teams and also to our PLCs. So I haven't started yet. I'm trying to figure out how to do it before I start. I'll be brave. I'll go next. This is Jan. I'm with a PLP with Will Richardson and Cheryl Nussbaum-Beach and we, ARPDC team is participating in the powerful learning practice for leadership in schools Canadian cohort. So that's the kind of team that I'm working with. Denise? Yes, I'm here. We are a team of instructional coaches and we lead several different teams. We lead teams in our schools of teachers, multi-grade levels. We lead same grade levels within cohorts. We also do a lot of work with admin as well and lead teachers in our other schools. Is there anyone else want to share what kind of teams they're involved in? Okay, I think I'll roll along. Denise? Go ahead. Yeah, great. Okay. I'm going to roll along and talk about the six different ideas related to leading teams. The first is that the team would be embedded in a school that's focused on high-quality, focused professional development. You've probably heard me talk about these things before, but you have a clear sense of the direction you're going to take. You have a clear focus to your professional development. The principal knows exactly what that target is and knows what it looks like when teachers do it well and knows how well each teacher is doing towards hitting those professional targets. The target that we usually talk about involves classroom management, content planning, instructional practices like co-op and learning and effective questions and formative assessment, but it could be other things as well. And then the teams would support that professional development target and the coaches would support the professional development target and the workshops would focus on supporting that. So you know exactly what you're trying to, where you want to get to with your professional development over the next, say, three or four years. And everything in the school focuses in on making that happen. Now, the target, the part of it that's at the top of this is a one-page document that summarizes what the professional development is all about. And so I have an example here of a target that's broken down into teaching practices and student behaviors. The teachers post the expectations, for example. The teachers interact with a three-to-one ratio of interaction three times as much encouragement as corrections. Students are on task 90 percent or more. The disruptions are no more than zero to four for 10 minutes. So that becomes a target for every teacher in the school. And we can't go into the way it's constructed. We don't have time, but there's a whole process we use where the teachers are actively involved in constructing that target. It's something that they all ultimately agree is what their focus should be for professional development. So if you go back here, the idea is that the target is clearly articulated. The principal knows exactly what it looks like and exactly how well everybody is doing by doing multiple observations. And then workshops, teams, and coaching all focus almost exclusively on making that target become a reality. Now, within that context, the principal has to do observations to see what happens. And we have tools you can download online and how to do observations related to the big bore practices, but there could be other kinds of things. The workshops would focus on the practices. And these teams I'm talking about would do that, too. So that's the first thing. For the intensive learning teams to really make a difference, the team would have to be embedded into a system that's focused on a few key things with respect to professional development. The second thing is that it would be grounded in the partnership principles. And you've all heard me talk a lot about that, I'd imagine. So I won't go into too much detail. Just to say, though, that when it comes to teens, the same things that apply to the coaching relationship that it's an adult to an adult conversation, that's a lot of choice, that we treat people the way we would want to be treated, needs to a real humane kind of experience. In fact, I would argue, teens are one way in which you can re-culture the school to create meaningful conversations within the school. So then what it means is, as a facilitator of a team, I really see my office equal to the staff. I try to set up situations where everybody has as much choice as possible, even though we want to move forward and be productive. So that core concept of freedom within form is essential in the whole process. I want people to have a voice in what happens, but we also have to keep moving forward and be productive. And so the challenge you face as a facilitator of a team is how do I make this thing move forward at the same time that what I do is genuinely respectful of the choices that professionals make in the situation. So there are a few key ideas, and I'll talk about them. But the first one is kind of a stance that you would take if you were facilitating a team. I like this phrase, mine like water, which comes from David Allen. And what he says is this, I'll read the little quote. He says, imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input. Then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact. It doesn't underreact. And when you're leading a team, it's not like leading a workshop, because when you lead a workshop, you kind of have a plan. You're delivering the content, and you do it in a way that allows for lots of interaction. But there's a very clear sense of what the beginning is, what the end is, and what the process is you're going to follow. When you're leading a team, you're usually constructing something for the first time. There's usually something creative happening. And that means that it's in a live situation. And you're going to find yourself in moments where you go, what the heck am I supposed to do with this? You don't know how to deal with the situation. So I like the idea of a mine like water. The idea is that you respond appropriately and remain calm as quickly as possible, no matter what happens. I spent quite a bit of time working with the Canadian Department of National Defense. And one of the fun things I did was I used to help them when they would train their public affairs officers in experiential learning. They'd take them out and put them in real situations where they had to deal with all mock helicopter explosions. And the real press would show up and they'd videotape and they'd do a news story. And it was all just so the public affairs officers could learn how to deal with it. And my job was to watch this whole thing and just provide content. Anyway, as I was watching one group, I was standing beside the person who organized the whole thing. And one of the officers ran across the courtyard to another side of the courtyard because she was rushing to get there to take care of something. And he turned to me and he said, you know, an officer should never run. It panics the troops. And that little phrase has stuck in my mind whenever I've led a team of teachers in a group. But no matter what happens, you have to remain calm. That's the idea of the mine like water. You might reach a point where you have no idea what's going to happen. But if you let people see you, let your guard down, if they see you being anxious, that will amplify their anxiety. I once led a workshop with Canada Post and we had the two facilitators who helped me develop the workshop. And I, we brought all these people together for the first workshop and the two facilitators turned to me and said, in the midst of some kind of activity, I think it's what's called a force field analysis. And they said, this isn't going to work. And meanwhile, I had a room full of 20 people and they were ready to move forward with the workshop. And I said, oh no, this isn't going to work great. It's no problem. Let's move forward. And sure enough, we got through it. But at the moment when they said this isn't going to work, I was thinking exactly the same thing. But had I caged into that in that moment, I never would have got through. So the first thing I'd say with respect to being a facilitator is you have to have this concept of a mine like water. You have to stay calm in the midst of the situation. Now I'm wondering, does that resonate with any of you as making sense? Have you been in situations where it seems like the team is getting out of control or not being productive or you're getting into uncharted waters and you felt I have to stay calm in this situation? I'm just curious, what are your thoughts about the concept of remaining calm in the midst of the whole situation? How do you respond to that idea? So Jim, people can jump either on the mic or in the chat with your ideas. Right, that's the idea. This is not a brave attempt at interaction and I'm staying calm in the midst of this silence. Glenn, go ahead please. Well, I haven't had a chance to do the presentation yet, but it only makes sense that if you stay calm, everybody else around you stays calm. I mean, that's how you live your life as a teacher, right? The teacher freaks the kids freaked out. So it just makes sense to me. I would say it's very similar to being in the classroom if you lose your cool in that situation. But it somehow seems a little more amplified when all your peers are standing in front of you. It could be a pretty anxious moment, especially if it's an all day team, we have to accomplish a lot, and it kind of gets sad tracked. For me, at least, this first thing is we really have to never run, never let panic show make yourself move forward. The second thing I want to talk about is the concept of reducing friction. And when you lead a team, to me, the first thing is you stay calm in the midst of the chaos. Well, you work from the partnership perspectives and you've created a context for support. But the first sort of conceptual thing about facilitation is to remain calm no matter what kind of chaos comes along. The second thing is to do everything you can to reduce friction, to make it easy for the participants to focus on learning. And I've got a little quote here about what happens when there's no friction. Suddenly the boats get quiet. We appear only eight oars grabbing the water together, finishing as one. This is from a book about rowing teams in England. Some energy flow grips us like a river current, synchronizing our emotions. We row as one body. The body is perfectly level, set up beautifully. We skim the surface on an invisible laser beam running from horizon to horizon. There's no friction. We ride the natural cadence of our stroke, a continuous cycle. The crew breathes as one. And I know it's probably highfalutin to say this, but that's essentially what you're striving for when you're facilitating a team. But the whole team is so into what they're doing that they will blow off the break so they can stay and keep doing the activity. And they would just have to do that by reducing every possibility of something interfering with them being able to focus on the task at hand. So I have a bunch of suggestions for how you can reduce friction. And then I'd like to see if you have any thoughts about this. The first one is that you have to spend an enormous amount of time planning your sessions. You can't just show up and let it happen because then you're going to find yourself in areas you weren't prepared for. And that still might happen, but it's much less likely going to happen if you plan out exactly how you want the team to function. In the book on Mistakeable Impact, I break down in five-minute sections different ways in which what all the activities are going to be, who's going to say what, what's going to happen. We have a very explicit step-by-step plan. Now, once the team starts, you might not follow the plan. But by going through and being really clear on what we expect to happen all down the way through the whole process, we've reduced the likelihood of friction. The second thing is we train facilitators, in our case they're instructional facilitators, to facilitate small groups. So if we have a team of, let's say, anywhere from 15 to 30 or 40 people on the whole big team, every small group is facilitated by either a culture or a facilitator. And we spend a lot of time preparing those facilitators of the small groups for small group activities so they know exactly what the activities are and so they realize that they too are people who reduce the friction by not panicking in the situation. If they don't understand what's going to happen, they come to us. The thing is, you don't want the participants to ever have a moment where they don't know what the activity is. They can just turn the facilitator of their small group and say, well, how does this work? And the facilitator helps them do it. So because they don't have to worry about the activities, they can totally focus on doing whatever the learning is that's going on. The third thing is to make sure that whatever handouts you have, whatever materials you put in the hands of participants are extremely simple to follow. Clearly organized, high font, big fonts, colored for organization. You don't want people to be shuffling around trying to find left paper. You don't want things missing. You want to make it sure that it's simple and easy to follow. Along with that, you want to have as high quality materials as you can afford. You want to advocate for having it in a nice place with nice food and good coffee and a lot of water. I mean, I know you have to be financially prudent, but the more you can make it a comfortable environment, the less likely the participants are going to be, less inclined to participate in a positive way. I also think there's a pretty clear idea that you could all probably agree with me on this of what the ideal location would be. It would have windows. It would be bigger than necessary. You want quite a bit of space. Sometimes for a presentation, small isn't such a bad thing, but when people are getting up and moving around and working with different people, you need a lot of space. Ink and death and light is really nice if you can have it. Round tables, comfortable chairs. If you can't have the right temperature, at least have the thermostat where people can adjust it. All those things come into play in terms of reducing friction. What I mean by doing the dirty work is you do everything you can to simplify the process for whoever involves you in this. That might mean you type up notes. That might mean you take the flip chart and you put it together. That might mean you help rearrange the tables when you're there. You debris everything in your power to make it easy for the process to work. You could skip any one of these things. You could say we really don't have time to do the careful planning. We'll just have to do the best we can. You could say we really don't have time to prepare facilitators for each of the small groups. We'll just explain what's going to happen. You could say we don't really have time to carefully organize the handouts. We'll just store together what we've got and run with it. You could say we can't afford to have treats and snacks and coffee and high-quality looking materials and markers that are brand new and thanks to our paper. You can say we only have this one room. We don't have to do it in this one room. You could say I don't have time to do that dirty work. They'll be able to take care of it. You can do all those things, but every time you do one of those, you run the risk of increasing the friction and the more friction there is, the less likely the participants will focus on the actual learning that's meant to happen, the actual creation that's meant to happen and the more they'll focus on the stuff that's getting in the way. I'm wondering how you feel about this. Are there things you do that help you when you work with a team to reduce friction or have you tried any of these things I've talked about with respect to reducing friction? I'm curious to know what your thoughts are. Does anybody want to share any ideas they have about how they go about the business of reducing friction in a team situation? Once again, we'll just invite you to open your mic and jump on, raise your hand, or put a comment in the chat. I think Greg's typing. Wait time is always a killer in the webinar, but it's just part of the environment. We'll give you a minute to see if you have anything to contribute because we don't want to miss out on your good ideas. We know that at some of your sites you've got multiple people there, so there may be a discussion going on offline that you could bring into this conversation. Greg says we mostly rely on our thorough planning. We also have fun with it to put participation. We make people participate in activities. We make them. I'd like to hear more about we make them participate, Greg, and we are always clear with our intentions. Jim, did you want to comment on that? I really like the idea of an emphasis on fun. I think it's a personality thing, though. I mean, some people are better at that than me just because they're maybe more fun. I don't really talk enough to some activities, but I do want it to be like, I love humor. I love laughter. I love people doing those things. But I think that's definitely the case is you would use the style of facilitation that would work for you. What do you mean, Greg, given the option to participate? That clarification there. I see. So they have the choice of participating. Good. So if we have to line up according to our sign, we don't have to necessarily do it. I think a small amount of that is really great. I think the big thing is people, I think to have it be lighthearted and fun is a great, great idea. But I also think people really want to be productive. And so what you're doing by doing that is creating a culture where it's going to be more likely it's going to be productive. Well, I'm going to move on to the next one. And that's the idea of freedom within form. And I see a hand raised so we can respond to that. Is that you, Jane? That's me. And I just wanted to go back to... I just wanted to go back to... Oh, I'm going to ask you to toggle your microphone for just a second. Oh, I'm going to ask you to toggle your microphone for just a second. Okay. Thanks. I'm getting too much echo. I just wanted to go back to your comment about, you know, people want to be productive. What if you're... you're... in being productive, what if it's more of a process oriented team? So part of being productive is developing some processes or some relationships in an online community, for example, or something of that nature where, you know, sometimes the work that you do in teams isn't always task oriented. Sometimes it's more process oriented. And I'm just wondering if anybody has bumped into that or would want to comment on that. That can be a real source of friction with those two, the people that are process oriented versus the people who are task oriented. There's a real opportunity for those types to blend their strengths together, but it can also be a source of friction. So that's just what I'm getting at. Well, I think it might be part of the next thing that I'm talking about, which is freedom within form. And so let me ask you about that as we sort of work our way through. Greg's got a question and maybe we can come back to it at the end of this piece. What would be an example of a process oriented task that we would do as coaches? So let me walk through the freedom within form and ideas and then come back to that question. And what I'll do today, Greg, is paint one picture of one way in which a team moves forward and see if that's helpful. Freedom within form is a little concept that goes back at least to Aristotle. The idea is that you construct structures that allow for lots of freedom. A sonnet, for example, is a structure and then an artist, a writer or poet, can create something within that structure. The structure actually unleashes you a little bit as kind of the idea. So I think it's really important to use structures that enable that to happen. There's a handout you can download from the Wiki of a number of different what I call dialogue structures you can use. So you can guide your team through different situations so that they can be productive, but at the same time have a voice and have a choice and move forward. Nobody wants to sit around for four hours and accomplish nothing, but everybody wants to have a voice. So the challenge is how do you give everybody a voice, but at the same time accomplish a lot as you move yourself through the process. So here's a few examples. One of them is what's called OpenSpace, and I use a version of it called Modified OpenSpace. You could Google OpenSpace technology and find out quite a bit of it just on the web. You've probably participated in it in some cases, but OpenSpace is where you bring together a group of people and the group is going to spend time talking about something that matters. Let's say it's coaching. And so people right on the wall, a topic that they'd want to take chart paper and if I wanted to talk about principle involvement in coaching, then maybe I'd write that on a chart paper. If I wanted to talk about technology and coaching, maybe I'd write that on chart paper. Whatever it might be, maybe I don't really have a strong opinion about what I want to see, so I wait and see what gets posted, but then eventually a number of different topics get posted around the room and everybody goes and joins the discussion they want to discuss. So if I put up technology and coaching and no one comes to work with me, I have the opportunity of reflecting on my own or joining another group. And I just say that means that you're probably the only one qualified to have the conversation and you have a choice of doing it on your own or working with somebody else. So people go to their topic and they have their conversation. There's a rule called the law of two feet, which is that if your discussion isn't productive, you go and join another group. And the two feet are your two feet moving you to whatever kind of conversation you can contribute to or you can learn from. Now in my workshops and in my teams I often have situations where we have to tackle different things and so we use a modified version of open space where people post topics they want to discuss and different people go and join them and then whoever posts the topic is the host of the conversation and we keep the law of two feet that people can move from one space to another. The second thing is we often have situations where choices need to be made and for example I was in a situation a while back where a whole curriculum was being developed and the group got hung up on well should we move this activity to the end of the year should we keep it where it is or we should take it out of the curriculum and so everybody had an opinion and everybody was discussing it and I could see this particular issue was going to take us a long time to resolve and it had to be resolved. So what I said is how I'll be what I do is I post up it sounds like there are three options one option is we take it out of the curriculum another option is move to the end of the year third option is keep it where it is and what you do is all day you get to vote with post-it notes you write down what you think and you stick it on a post-it note underneath whichever choice you like and then other people can read your opinion if you want you can move your opinion around based on what other people write and as the day progressed people put their post-it notes up they read what people said and by the end of the day there was a vote of about 20 to 2 I can't remember the whole amount but the vast majority of people had decided they wanted to move it to the end of the year and so that's what they did now if you didn't have that structured choice you wouldn't have been able to move forward so people had freedom people decided what they wanted to do but I gave them a structure that allowed them to move forward that's the idea affinity diagrams are situations where a group writes ideas down on post-it notes and they stick them up on the wall and they just sort them into different categories according to what they have to do so if you have to do some planning or some kind of organizing that's a good idea for doing that and then dynamic planning is a process I developed with my friends from Canada Post actually and the idea is you sit around a table you've got to play on a task or a process I guess you clear the table off and every little task that has to be completed you write it on a little post-it note and then you put the post-it notes on the table and so the post-it note is eventually littered with all these tasks and then you organize the post-it notes from the first activities that have to be done the second tasks that have to be done sort of in chronological order and then you say well when will we finish the first ones and have we missed any tasks and have we got any duplicates so you have a process map of the whole activity and then right on the index card you write down when it's going to be done and who's responsible for making sure it happens and then the last part of it is that someone takes all those cards often it's me if I'm the facilitator and creates a spreadsheet that says here are all the tasks this is where they're going to happen here's who's responsible for making them do what's called a Gantt chart is the way the whole thing kind of evolves and that's the whole way it works now like I said you have other materials you can use to create this thing which you're always trying to do when you facilitate is have freedom within form you have a structure that allows for plenty of authentic inputs but at the same time a structure that leads to productive outcome now Jan could you tell me a bit more about your distinction between process oriented and task oriented could you think of an example of what would be task oriented and what would be process oriented well I'll give you the example that I'm involved in in our PLP we have an action research project and so a lot of people are chomping at the bit to get going to plan it to create the parameters around it but before we can do any of that we have to become familiar with and involved with the PLP environment so there's a Wiki and there's a Ning and there's some social networking pieces so basically our first and it's still really to me it's a task I mean I guess in the bigger picture it's a task but maybe not strictly is building relationships between and among other cohort groups getting to know people helping people work within the environment and so on so it's more like that before we jump into our actual action research turn your mic off Jim so you might need to turn it back on it's the community building part that goes before you actually do the work of the team is that kind of what you mean by process oriented okay Jan saying yes exactly now Greg your question was we'll be an example of process oriented tasks that we would do as coaches I'm going to talk about curriculum development there's something that I'm going to do but Jan is talking about the process of building community so both those things and both of those will be addressed when I kind of give you a picture of what the whole thing is but did you want to add anything or elaborate on your question Greg he said he said he's good okay good alright I'd like to describe sort of a picture of how we put all this together and these are materials from what we call the intensive learning team and the intensive learning team involves a step by step process that we've worked at but the main idea is to do curriculum mapping and what we found is usually happens when you develop a curriculum in a district is that a few people get together who teach that course they get paid over the summer to develop the curriculum and they love the curriculum but for everybody else it just seems like one more thing that came from downtown and they're not very into it because they didn't create it so we believe that they should all be involved in the whole process that is every teacher who wants to should be a part of the development of the curriculum and this takes about four to five days release time or over the summer to make it happen now the first thing we do is we interview all the teachers for the intensive learning team that means we have coaches or the facilitator who sits down has a one-to-one conversation with anybody who might want to be a part of the team we found if you don't do the interviews people come in with low expectations for the professional learning so you have to come together and have a real conversation with them about a few things we talk about the needs of their kids and the curriculum as it stands right now and we talk about what kind of team they'd like to be on what they'd like the team to look like and we clarify that they really have a voice that it's a democratic process and that they don't have to come if they don't want to that they have a choice to participate this team is going to develop the curriculum for the district so if they want to be a part of it they can be a part of it but they're not compelled to come if they don't want to in our experience that's the whole process then when we bring people together for the first meeting we report back what we heard in the interviews and we create little stories like vignettes and I've got one example to show you of what it looks like so here's one and this is made up of all the words of different people in the interviews it's their words but this is an example so at the very start of the workshop after we sort of explain the plan I'd read something like this a product I can use we need to manage our time well I don't want to waste time I want to leave with a product I can use I think we all need to be on the same page I hope we sum up every decision and clarify everything so we all have input and then we can clearly know what's expected and what all must do I don't want to be talked at I want it to work I don't want to do cutesy activities where we line up according to our birthday they don't add to the content I want to learn how to use the UNO organization more effectively I don't want to be lectured about how the UNO organizer is so great and the UNO organizer is a graphic organizer for planning the curriculum if we develop very good UNO organizers and self-test questions so that all seventh graders in the county are using high quality materials I'll feel like it was time well spent I'm looking forward to reordering the curriculum and removing sections that are repetitive but we need to know from Georgia what the non-negotiables are and Georgia is the associate superintendent for that I don't want to sit there for five days I want to concentrate on what's best for the children now that I know I need these standards what are some ways to get them into the kids I want to hear some best practices from other teachers I want to know what the kids need to know what MSA where it is in the curriculum and how to supplement what is missing we'll be a better team if we all contribute people need to know that some of us are new teachers and I hope people take into consideration that if we're quiet that we're new and taking it all in all of us need to have input we need to have a voice so on the very first day what happens is I bring the group together they've all been interviewed by the coaches the coaches have all taken notes and sent me the notes I read the vignettes to the participants and then they talk about what they think and I just ask is this accurate this is an accurate picture of what you think is there something that should be changed did we miss something so they discuss it in their groups we discuss it in a large group and I accomplish a couple of things it sets the stage for the kind of team the team wants to be and secondly what it does is it makes sure that people know they've been heard and that their voice carries weight people read their own words in these vignettes as we work it through so we spend I don't know approximately about an hour discussing the kind of team we have there's usually a vignette about what kind of team we want to be one about the rewards of teaching one about the roadblocks people are encountering often it's time and pressure and heterogeneous groupings of kids sometimes lack of parental support then after we've done that with this process I call an intensive learning team the next thing we do is we create values and the floor and his colleagues they talk a lot about the importance of values and I really agree with what they say I think it's really important that it has to be authentic it has to be a meaningful thing so what we do is we have them after we've talked about the vignettes work in their groups again facilitated by a participant at the table who's a coach or a facilitator and they draft what they think their value should be I ask them what kind of team do you want to be and they talk about it and then every session we get together we look at our values and we continually revise them until they are truly in articulation this is the kind of team I want to be one group I worked with came up with this one and they came up with the big categories of respect efficiency, productivity, support validation, positive thinking, consistency and commitment and their tagline sort of was helping children learn, apply, enjoy and succeed in mathematics this one wasn't something that I cooked up for this team it's all their words and it's all stuff that they created and they revised it after we got into about the fourth one everybody said this is what we want this is the kind of team we want to be and so we were able to desktop publish it and give it to them as a document that describes what they want to do well once these sort of laid the ground work and I think Jan this is some of the process you're talking about but it seems like an awful lot of work to interview every participant before they come to give them a choice and then to make sure everybody's heard what's been said and then develop values to make it happen but in my experience if you don't lay the ground work to create the kind of community you want to have it's going to be hard to really be productive you have to put the ground work in and that makes everything else move a lot smoother the other thing about choices some people will say I don't think we should do that I think we should just tell teachers to have to be there in my experience and that's a choice almost all the time they won't participate and if they don't participate if they choose not to come chances are they wouldn't be productive members of the team anyway so but like I said having done this many many times it's probably less than 5% probably like 2% who choose not to come in most cases everybody who's invited is kind of excited about trying it out once you lay the ground work for the community and people know the kind of community they're going to have and they've had a voice and they've had a choice the group is remarkably more productive than most groups you put together to work on things and so we move on to the actual process of what we do in these teams and I'll just describe that very briefly and then see what questions you have about this next thing we do is we do what I call a brain dump so people pick a unit they want to work on and again we use the open space technology where we have all the units displayed about the room and people grab a chart paper for the unit they want to work on and they get out posted notes and they just write down all the stuff that they need to have on their units and I quote Bob Dylan here he's got this great phrase he says I need a dump truck model to unload my head what I tell the groups is they need to unload their head about their units and get everything out there that they could with respect to the unit so they can develop a productive unit and once they've laid out all the information we put it into this tool called the Unorganizer but you could focus on just two parts the questions and the map but what happens is the participants work on developing an organizer kind of like the one you see in the picture where they lay out the sequence of what's going to be taught and we'll see if I can highlight this right here so they start here that's the first that's something we're going to talk about every part of the class but the first part of the unit is here the next part is here the next part is here the next part is here so as the unit progresses the kids know we're going to cover this material first this one this one this one and then you have kind of a layout of how the unit is going to proceed then the teachers in their teams also develop an expanded map that lays out all the key concepts the kids need to learn in that unit so each group in our experience usually we have about five groups but each group is tackling one unit and developing the expanded map and they're developing all the questions for the unit so here's how you're guiding questions for that particular unit and those guiding questions then are kind of like the objectives for the whole unit now once one group has created their unit map and they're guiding questions what we do is we rotate the maps around from group to group so let's say we did units one two three four and five unit one hands it to unit two and they rotate and then unit two has a chance to modify put posted notes on it make suggestions and then the unit goes to the group that was working on unit three and they keep rotating until everybody has to say what the unit looks like then I take them and I desktop publish them we post them ideally the next day so that everybody can see them and still make modifications until they develop the unit well actually create a unit we tackle each of the guiding questions and we use assessment for learning so what we do is we walk through this process of unpacking the questions with very specific proficiencies and then we create informal assessments for every guiding question in the unit so at the time the thing is over what happens is within five days every participant in the team has had a very active say in how the whole curriculum is developed they've identified every question and often when they do the formal assessment where they tear apart the questions they say we need to change these questions and they walk away with a really clear idea of exactly what they're going to teach and it's not something that's been done to them everybody's been the participant in the whole process so that's an example of what we do with respect to this whole business of intensive learning team but there are those six big ideas one of them is that it's grounded in a system that's designed to have an impact on professional development so you have a target, you have administrative support, you have a clear focus in all your professional learning supports it. Secondly it's grounded in the partnership principles where adults treat other adults like adults and give them a real choice and thirdly you do that by first off working with the participants with a calm perspective a mind like water and fourthly you design the situation in such a way that you're going to reduce friction and so you do lots of planning and do everything possible to reduce friction fifthly you use dialogue structures that allow for freedom within form like dynamic planning technology and then the last thing I did is I sort of talked you through one way we do it. I'm wondering what questions you have before I sort of bring this to a close about the whole process or about anything particular or if you have any particular scenarios you'd like to bring up. Well if you have no questions I'm kind of at the end but I'd be happy to talk a little bit more if you'd like to raise any issues about how this works in any kind of way but the big ideas are I treat adults like adults I create a structure where there's freedom with productivity in the midst of the structure and I do everything in my power to reduce friction so they can focus on the activity but every activity I do is one where participants have a large element of choice in what they're going to do I'm trying to create I'm trying to create a process where there's an enormous amount of choice but very little time is wasted. No questions from Black Gold. No questions from Black Gold. I get the feeling over there again. Okay. Okay. I was just wondering if there were any questions that were specific to their own context that they would like to raise. You know while we have your expertise available things that have come up with their learning teams or things that they wonder about or would like to implement or have questions about implementing while we have you here but if not I want to thank you again Jim for your time and this series of three have been a great learning opportunity with the two webinars and the face to face and all the different forms of interaction that we've been able to engage in during this series it's just been so appreciated to be the valuable lessons that you bring to us and your expertise and I'm really looking forward to reading your new book. So thanks Jim. Hey, it's a pleasure and I'll just put my email up if you want to email me with any questions about this. Please do. There's lots of tools we've created to go with this so actually it's just Jim Knight. Jim, Jim Knight. I have a Mac computer. Jim Knight, that takes care of it. So feel free to contact me with questions and I think all these forms when your coaches are at the 2.0 level like many of your coaches are they're probably going to be really like on-site staff developers so they're going to have to do workshops, they're going to have to lead teams they're going to have to have a wide range of skills to handle all those kinds of scenarios rather than just working one to one with teachers. Anyway, thanks for participating everybody. Thanks everyone.