As the school year winds down, leaders across the educational landscape find themselves in a unique, often challenging, position. It's like standing with one foot in the current year, diligently wrapping up tasks and celebrating achievements, while the other foot is already stepping into the next, meticulously planning for a successful fall re-engagement. This "foot in two worlds" feeling is common, but it also presents an opportune time to intentionally prepare your Collaborative Response for the year ahead.
Celebrate Your Impact: Reflecting on Progress and Learning from "Favorite Failures"
One of the most crucial steps as you approach year-end is to pause and celebrate the progress you've made. Many schools dedicate professional learning or wrap-up days to this vital reflective practice. It's a chance to truly identify what you've done this year that has had an impact.
We encourage you to engage your staff in this reflective activity. Consider using an organizer to capture both your celebrations and the challenges you're still facing. The challenges, of course, will provide valuable insights into what to target in the coming year.
A particularly insightful inclusion in this reflection is what we call "Favorite Failures." This might sound counterintuitive, but it reinforces a culture of learning and growth. It's about acknowledging that not everything goes as planned, and that's okay. The most important part is to reflect on why something didn't go well and what you learned from it. As the saying goes, "Experience is not the best teacher; acting on experience is." By embracing missteps as learning opportunities, you foster a culture where trying new things is encouraged, and mistakes become powerful lessons.
Leveraging Data for Powerful Insights
As you reflect, accessing your data is essential. For your collaborative planning efforts, take the goals you've established and examine the progress made. Do you have evidence of impact regarding the areas you aimed to improve? Your collaborative planning teams can share their learnings and anticipated areas of focus for the next year, all informed by their data.
We've often highlighted the power of visualizing student success through data. Consider color-coding your data to track student progress. Imagine the impact of showcasing photos of students who have moved from "yellow" (struggling) to "green" (proficient), or even those who've made two levels of growth, like moving from "red" to "green" or "yellow" to "blue" (exceeding expectations). Seeing faces attached to data points creates a powerful emotional connection, building collective efficacy and allowing your team to visibly recognize the impact of their efforts and the specific strategies that led to those successes.
Refining Your Collaborative Team Meetings for Next Year
Specifically for your collaborative team meetings (CTMs), it's highly beneficial to gather feedback from your teams. This is a unique structure within Collaborative Response, and understanding what's working well and what needs refinement will inform your setup for the next year.
Here is a collaborative team meeting exit slip that may assist with gathering some insight into the CTM structure as well as our collaborative team meeting leader checklist and reflection tool.
We have various reflection tools available to support this, including a valuable "Planning for the Fall" organizer. This organizer prompts reflection questions such as:
- Will we need to review our norms? If so, how?
- How will we structure teams for the upcoming year?
- When will we schedule our different screeners to gather evidence?
These foundational elements require forethought to ensure you can re-engage, prepare and take effective next steps in your Collaborative Response work. Remember, Collaborative Response is a continuous journey – you're never truly "done," there's always a next step or a tweak to optimize how your school or system collaboratively responds to student needs.
Beyond the operational details, this is also a crucial time to align your Collaborative Response efforts with your overarching school improvement plan. Your collaborative structures and processes are not separate; they are the mechanism that operationalizes your school improvement priorities. Explicitly articulating this alignment ensures that your daily collaborative work directly contributes to your larger strategic goals.
Preparing for Continued Learning and Smooth Transitions
Don't forget the importance of transitioning. This applies to both staff (new roles, new grade levels) and students (moving to new grades, or welcoming an incoming group). How can you use the information you have now to intentionally design structures that will support everyone in their new contexts? Thoughtful transition planning is about setting everyone up for success in the next school year.
We'd love to hear your insights! Do you have questions about these strategies, or perhaps some effective wrap-up or transition approaches you've utilized? Please reach out to share your ideas and questions.
Email or if you have questions or something you wish to share related to the topic of preparing for fall.
