Collaboration Spotlight: Haynes Middle Design Center

In the last post, I mentioned spotlighting Haynes’ Tuesday Talks.  Their Tuesday Talks are the grade level team meetings set aside to have meaningful conversation about issues.  I want to share about their use of collaborative inquiry for the last three Tuesday Talks.
 
Remember, we have adopted Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman’s Collaborative Learning Cycle as our collaborative inquiry process (see image).  When looking at using data, one of the hardest things I have found is to take the additional time to go through the Activating and Engaging, Exploring and Observing phases before the last phase of Organizing and Integrating, which means creating theories of causation.
 
 
On the Tuesday Talk for April 12, the instructional specialist for Haynes, Kisha Spencer, facilitated the meeting.  This meeting’s focus was on helping teachers begin to identify a worthy problem of practice.  No data was used during this phase.  Instead, teachers participated in brainstorming issues they are facing.  Two strategies used during this session to facilitate the process were Banned Words, Sort Cards, and Spend-A-Buck.  Sort Cards is a great strategy for brainstorming information, and Spend-A-Buck helps the group reach consensus.  Using these strategies, Haynes Middle grade level teams reached a consensus to investigate the issue of student behavior and discipline further.
 
On the April 26th Tuesday Talk, Margie Johnson facilitated the Exploring and Discovering phase of the collaborative inquiry cycle as teachers looked at behavior data.  The Behavior Dashboard reports from the MNPS Data Warehouse were used during this session while teachers generated observations they were making about the data using Think & Write/Pair & Share and Theories of Causation strategies.  The top theory of causation was that students needed social emotional learning support, particularly around self-regulatory skills.
 
A deeper dive into this theory of causation was facilitated by Kisha Spencer on May 5th to answer the essential question, “How do you support students’ social emotional learning, particularly self-regulatory skills, in your classroom?”  The strategies used during the meeting were Looking Back/Looking Ahead and Idea, Category, Web. 
 
The plan is to then continue the conversations this summer with a Behavior Advisory Committee with diverse stakeholder members.  Needless to say, exciting things are happening at Haynes Middle, and I look forward to seeing the expertise from Haynes applied to this meaningful student issue. 

You can access ALL their meeting agendas, PowerPoints, and handouts at this link: . 
 
Do you and/or your team have a spotlight story to share?  If so, please email Margie Johnson at Margie.johnson@mnps.org.  I look forward to hearing about the AWESOME work being done by you and your school.
 
 
 

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April 12th Meeting

April 26th Meeting