Sometimes You Just Need to Go All Gerry Brooks

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

I need a break, how about you?

It’s February.  As much as routines are in place and students are usually flying academically this time of year, it can also be an extra stressful time with second-trimester report cards around the corner, summative evaluation meetings, and students pushing limits with unusual behaviors.

Knowing this, my instructional leadership team and I decided to dedicate our staff meeting this week to the connection part of our #unlimitedgrowthandconnection goal of the year at Jefferson.  Using an app called, Goosechase (Thanks Cult of Pedagogy! 6 Ed Tech Tools You Should Try in 2020), we created a scavenger hunt game for our staff to play in teams of three around our school.  The prize?  A duty-free hour lunch on me at a restaurant and day of their choosing.  

Titled, The Big Game of Awesome, the scavenger hunt involved teachers taking either a picture or video of them completing a wide variety of challenges worth anywhere from 400 to 2000 points.  The app includes a leaderboard that teams can check on as they compete upping the fun of the game.   As teams complete challenges, their pictures and videos are added to a feed as well.  

We decided to plan a variety of challenges for the staff that would include an opportunity to laugh, connect with one another and learn from each other.  Below is a slideshow of the challenges (called missions in the app) we created:

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As I started talking at the staff meeting on Thursday, a twinge of nervousness and self-doubt hit my mind and I thought, Are people going to be mad?  Will they think we are wasting their time?  Would they have preferred time to just work?  Thankfully that feeling ended up being completely quelled as I watched the teams race out of the library to start the missions.

My two favorite challenges ended up being Sing a Song of Jefferson and Go All Gerry Brooks.  The song mission showed people’s creativity and it warmed my heart to see our teams making up songs about our school’s mission.  The Gerry Brooks mission gave people permission to be irreverent and brought a levity to some of the things we take so seriously.  When teams came back to the library at the end I played most of them for the staff causing everyone to break out in uproarious laughter. This one, making fun of the actual challenge itself I’ve watched about 10 times since and it makes me laugh every time. 

This experience reminded me we don’t always have to be so serious in education.  The game gave our staff an opportunity to get into one another’s classrooms, learn from one another, build each other up, laugh and grow our community as a whole.  The feedback received was incredibly positive and all of this took less than an hour.  It was just what we all needed.

On a final note, next time you’re considering a structure for a PL or staff meeting or lesson with students, I highly recommend the GooseChase app.  It’s free and super easy to set up.  🙂  If you want to play the same game we created, you can search for The Big Game of Awesome in the app.  (And I swear they didn’t pay me to say any of this)  

 

 

 

 

Goals Groupies: Synergizing the Passions of Staff

Last year, I read this post by John Spencer about the importance of being in a “Mastermind Group” with other educators.   It’s basically a group of teachers that meet regularly to explore and share ideas and also give one another feedback.  Because the members get to know each other well they can push one another in ways that would not be possible with other groups.

This idea has always stuck with me as something that would be great to implement with staff.  So when we started exploring options for our monthly staff meetings as an instructional leadership team, I brought this up as a possibility for a way to structure our time.  After talking through a variety of options, including a focus on the 6C’s or differentiated choices aligned to our School Improvement Plan, we ultimately decided on having staff finding a group of people who had written similar personal goals for the year.

The purpose behind this was twofold:

1.  It gave people time to delve more deeply into something they were already personally invested in.
2. It made our goal writing process more meaningful because staff would have dedicated time to continually work on them.  This is in contrast to past practice, where many educators (myself included) would wait until it was time to have a follow-up conference on their goals later in the year.  

At our first meeting in September, we had staff members do a “speed date” activity where they moved around the room talking about their goals for the year with different people.  Their goal was to find others who had similar interests or their “Goals Groupies.”  When they found a “match,” they would write that person’s name down on an index card.  At the end of the meeting, they met up with the people on their card and came up with an official focus for their group.  

Although I had met with staff members on their goals for the year prior to this meeting, it was fun to see how groupies ended up evolving and what they ultimately chose to focus on.  We had 5th-grade teachers working with first-grade and even kindergarten teachers.  There were groups of specials teachers mixed with grade-level teachers.  The goals chosen were just as diverse and included:  SEL, critical thinking, parent communication, inquiry-based and real-world projects, reading fluency and accuracy, and facilitated IEP and collaboration.  

This past Thursday was our second meeting.  Our Goals Groupies were given time to explore their work more fully setting specific outcomes for their impact on students, creating a plan of action and agreeing on what they would bring to share at the next meeting.  We gave them this template with guiding questions to help them to further think through their ideas.  As I walked around the room, I listened to rich conversations and genuine enthusiasm for the work they were doing.  It was a Thursday after school, but everyone was just as energized as if we were starting a fresh day.  

This process has only reinforced my belief that when we empower staff to take the lead, we embolden change that impacts students far greater than any mandated initiative ever will.  When staff is given dedicated time to collaborate with colleagues who have a common passion, we capitalize on our strengths as a school as well as build capacity in multiple grade levels. The goals the groups have chosen to work on have far surpassed my wildest dreams of what we could work on this year as a staff.   I am beyond excited to see the impact on students as the year unfolds.