For the first time in my professional career, I have weekly embedded time to collaborate with colleagues on students who need support. The ongoing dialogue has allowed for deep discussions about our students and the practices we use to deal with their challenges. It is enlightening to know that my colleagues are experiencing the same struggles and are willing to share their struggles and stories. Through these discussions, a culture of compassion has developed. We understand our students better. We understand our colleagues better. We understand our own teaching better. The trust required for this dialogue did take time to develop. It's easy to build a wall around egos and not admit when we don't have the answers for all our students. Being vulnerable and open during our meetings can only be reached if it is the norm for the process. Once sharing happens and students are discussed openly, the walls naturally start to crumble allowing for real talk about students. It is in these moments we can develop real ... Read more

Kurtis Hewson provided support for myself (principal) and one of my teachers in creating timetables and embedding collaboration time into the schedule. My school is very small and as such manpower resources are limited. I was intrigued by the creative process that Kurtis suggested of beginning the timetabling with the collaboration time and intervention blocks and working backward from that. Kurtis was open-minded and responsive to the unique needs of our setting and was solution-focused! My colleague and I were thrilled with the end results!! We have a workable timetable with embedded intervention blocks and collaboration time! This was truly an example of focused teamwork towards a common goal! Kurtis also spent a great deal of time with us looking at different models as to how collaborative time can be addressed, team norm and goal setting, and timelines. I could not be more appreciative of the time Kurtis spent with my colleague and I! We are looking forward to a wonderful start to next year!

I loved coming away from the final webinar in the series with a plan in hand for what to do next in our process towards using a collaborative response to address student needs. I love having access to so many different documents to help us in our journey, and seeing what other schools have created on theirs.

By embracing and engaging in the Collaborative Model, we are continually increasing our ability to plan for and teach students in an individualized manner. In my administrative career, this model has easily been the most impactful structure that my schools have implemented.

Our school is very lucky to have Lorna Hewson coach us in our journey in building a Collaborative Response Model. Our entire staff met with Lorna at the beginning of the year and then our small CRM committee has met with her twice outside the school at the school division office. All of these meetings have served our school well and have been very useful, but nothing has been more productive then the coaching sessions we receive from Lorna when she comes to our school and meets with teachers and admin either one on one or in a small group. This is when the collaborative response model becomes very personal and gains momentum in our school. Lorna is very skilled in meeting our staff right where they are at, and then knowing what our next steps should be. Her coaching sessions keeps our forward momentum rolling, keeps us focused on the key understandings, and holds us accountable to our plans we put in place. I have found her coaching sessions to be the most productive sessions I have experienced due to her ... Read more

We have been working on a 4C’s approach to school transformation, these being Creativity, Critical Reflection, Communication and Collaboration. We have also been using a generative dialogue approach to enhance agency across the school. Collaborative response approach fits in well in our transformational journey. As a result we have articulated our non-negotiables/expectations across every classroom and this has led to us redeveloping our learning and wellbeing framework so that it compliments and reflects our 4 tiers of CR supports. We were interested in positively impacting the silent masses, those students who are under the radar and hence their lack of growth was not effectively addressed. The CR approach, especially with its tiers of supports, is allowing us to focus on those tier 1 & 2 classroom supports/practices to achieve this. It is early days but we are talking about students we have never focused on before and strategizing for their growth. This is exciting. Being a High School we are experime... Read more

Our school staff had the privilege to work with Kurtis Hewson over three virtual sessions to explore the collaborative response structures and processes. Kurtis did a wonderful job drawing on the theory, research, and evidence-based best practices that helps create the components of the collaborative response framework. The three sessions were broken up over two professional development days and after each session our school staff became more inspired and invested in implementing the collaborative response model. Kurtis has an engaging way of presenting the material that connects to the realities of our school. He was able to promote high level conversation that helped our staff reflect on our current practices and start to look at where we want to go in the future to best support all students. The timeline of the sessions and the sequencing of the learning experiences enabled all participants to build capacity and maximize our time to collaborate with one another. As a school, we finished the learning ser... Read more