Central Office Support for Collaborative Inquiry

If you have been part of this journey since Summer 2014, one of the barriers identified for implementing collaborative inquiry was the lack of leadership modeling.  I refer to this barrier as “walking the walk.”  People raised concerned about leadership, particularly from central office supporting the implementation of collaborative inquiry practices.
 
Since we have the collaborative inquiry community of practice among 5 middle schools and asked them to develop an implementation plan for implementing collaborative inquiry, the need to have this discuss at central office arose.  The meeting to discuss central office’s role in supporting collaborative inquiry was held on Thursday, May 19th from 11 AM to 2 PM. 
 
Overall, it was a very productive meeting where we used collaborative inquiry practices by using the Teacher Data Use Survey data from the community of practice schools as a springboard for how to best support schools.  We had a lively conversation and some great ideas were generated. 

To learn more about the meeting, including the agenda, PowerPoint, minutes, and pictures of charts, please go to http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/collaborative-inquiry-working-group.html.

I also videotaped the session because several schools requested to see videos with collaborative inquiry  being modeled.  Once I have the videos ready, I will post them to our toolkit and notify you via a blog post.

Please note that I am always here as a support for this work and several central office staff have received training as well.  I’m happy to meet with you and your team to discuss the best way your school and/or department can foster a culture of collaborative inquiry.  Ultimately, my vision is for the expertise throughout MNPS and school community be leveraged for supporting student success.
 
Contact me, Margie Johnson, at [email protected].
 
Hope you all have a wonderful summer. 

---