New series: Ask an Admin! #Q1: What is your go to strategy for team building? #askanadmin

I am SO excited about what I am blogging through the month of July! I have connected with some of my favorite administrators on the planet and they’ve all agreed to help me tackle questions we’ve been asked, or hear all the time. These questions will help ya get your mind right, give you differing perspectives, and hopefully, show you how very, very different a “right” answer can be! Ross Cooper wrote a great blog on how you’re not doing it wrong, you’re just doing it “different”, and that’s what this series is all about. I know many aspiring administrators and I want them to see that there are about as many different answers to questions as there are campuses. Your answers depend on you, your experiences, and your people. There is no “right” answer at times, there’s just YOUR answer. If nothing else, hopefully this will connect you again, to some of my favorite people, their blogs, and the chance to make them a part of your PLN world as well.

#askanadmin: Q1. What is your go to strategy for team building?

A1:

Katie: Peter Senge points out that the only vision that people ever commit to is their own. Without conversations about the vision and what it means, it’s impossible to build a shared vision across a community. One of my favorite strategies is called Significant Learning. This strategy not only builds community but helps foster purposeful conversations about past experiences, beliefs, and allows a team to co-create a vision for what is possible in our classrooms.

Here’s how it goes:

1. 1. Reflect on a  significant learning experience where you learned something new that has stuck with you and made an impact. This doesn’t have to be in school.  Think riding a bike, learning to snowboard, driving a car. Anything.Take a minute or two and independently jot down some thoughts about a significant learning experience. Think not only about what you learned but how you learned.

• What was the context?  
• Who was involved?  
• How did you feel?

2. In small groups of 3-5, each person takes 3 minutes to share their experience.
3. After each person has shared, the group comes up with some common themes from each of the learning experiences.
4. Share the themes out as a whole group and capture them on a shared document.  (Note: This can serve as a great tool for conversations about teaching and learning.)
5. As a group, reflect about the following prompts:
   • How often are these types of experiences the core of our learning in classrooms?  
   • What might be areas of strength that you are seeing? Areas for growth?   
   • How might you collectively close to gap to create the significant learning experiences?

No matter how often I do this activity, or how diverse the crowd, the themes that surface in  significant learning experiences remain pretty consistent.

Typically, these experience involve a variety of opportunities to explore models, receive feedback, and reflection. There is often productive struggle and risk that requires guidance and mentorship to grow.

I love watching people engaged in these conversations because they can’t help from smiling as they conjure up memories of these experiences that impacted them. The power in this strategy is that is provides space for the team connect and create a shared understanding of what significant learning means to you as a community.Reflecting on our own learning experiences and how we traditionally learn in schools can help create the conditions that support powerful learning in our classrooms to move forward.

A2:

(Of course I chose to follow that fabulousness…sheesh, :))

One of my goals at my campus is to consistently & constantly remind everyone that we are all on the same team. Top to bottom, right to left…I want us to all know that what we do MATTER, together, collectively,  and plays a role in our campus success. All of the team building I have done the past two years has been centered around the unifying hashtag of #wearewhitt. The summer before my first year started I crowd-sourced our campus and community to develop the hashtag, one that could be used to share our learning, what is happening in our classrooms, and across all forms of social media. It’s on our bumper stickers and on our yard signs…because it’s together WE make a difference.

That being said, as a final activity to our professional development each year, we do a candle pass. When their rooms are ready, and their minds are full of all that we’re going to accomplish the next school year, we gather as a campus family in a big circle. I’ll play a song that ties in to our district theme and we will light each other candles one by one, around the circle. I speak a lot of “that moment” where we are gathered in the room, as one #wearewhitt family, and that we will never all be together in this way again. Every year will bring change, but at that moment, we are all one. We each bring a talent, a gift…the experiences that are going to impact all of our Wolves. There is such power in the beginning of the year, such a fresh, newness…this is a calming way to bring us together. It may be the sorority girl in me, but seeing all my faces, gathered together, with no stress & no problems…just excitement for their beginning, it fills my heart. When I think about starting our year, I can’t imagine not coming together and lighting each other’s candles…knowing that