Collaboration Spotlights: JE Moss Elementary, Goodlettsville Middle, CTE Cohort, and Joelton Middle

Beginning the School Year with Collaborative Inquiry

According to John Hattie (2015), “the largest barrier to student learning is within-school variability” (p. 1).  He recommends that what works best in education is empowering schools to leverage the collaborative expertise of the educators within a building.  If often tell teams that I work with that if we had the answer, then we would have implemented it already.  However, education faces complex issues today.
 
Therefore, MNPS’ Collaborative Inquiry process, developed by the MNPS Community of Practice (Haynes Middle, Margaret Allen Middle, Two Rivers Middle, West End Middle, and Wright Middle), is about empowering MNPS educators to use data and educator expertise for addressing a variety of complex issues in order to ensure all MNPS students are successful. 
 
I am excited to share that three schools started the 2017-2018 school year off by engaging in collaborative inquiry to have deep conversations about a variety of topics. 

• In JE Moss Elementary’s session, they reviewed last year’s vision and mission statements.  Then, they reviewed multiple sources of data to establish SMART goals for literacy and numeracy for 2017-2018.  To read about their collaborative inquiry meeting, click http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/je-moss-elementary-leadership-team-meeting--2017.html
• Ms. Beatriz Salgado is new to Goodlettsville Middle, so she wanted to leverage educator expertise in developing new vision and mission statements for the 2017-2018 school year.  The leadership team convened on Monday, July 24th.  To read about their use of the collaborative inquiry process, click http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/goodlettsville-middle-vision-and-mission.html
• A cohort of CTE teachers learned how the MNPS Data Warehouse can help them support student success.   The collaborative inquiry process was modeled while teaching them about the most common data warehouse reports.  To see their work, click http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/cte-cohort--july-26-2017.html
• Mr. Todd Irving, also being new to Joelton Middle, wanted to leverage educator expertise to develop new vision and mission statements for the 2017-2018 school year.  On Friday, July 28th, Joelton Middle’s leadership team convened and used the collaborative inquiry process to develop vision and mission statements.  To read about their collaborative inquiry journey, click http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/joelton-middle-vision-and-mission.html

 
If you have a collaborative inquiry story to share and/or need support with the collaborative inquiry process, please feel free to contact…
 
References:
Hattie, J. (2015).  What works best in education: The politics of collaborative expertise.  London, UK: Pearson.