Strategies for Sustaining Improvement

My school adopted a PLC model a couple of years ago.  We have been trying to really honor the process with norms and in creating a more open dialogue between staff and administration.  My action research is on writing and I am pleased to see that my principal either has great innate leadership skills or has heard of force field theory.  We encouraged teachers to share their apprehensions before implementing the writing curriculum and have included training and retraining to aid in the transition. Throughout our staff development meetings we have included time for listing and addressing concerns.  At the beginning of the following meeting we have summarized our findings from the previous meeting before proceeding with the content of the next staff development.  It sure feels good to think one did it the right way.  Planning trumps luck every time. 

I really like the Delphi method.  Too often teachers are asked to answer a questionnaire and then that’s it.  There is no closure.  No one knows what happened to the information, why it was gathered.  This has happened too many times at my campus and is taking a concerted effort to rebuild trust in the system so that teachers are willing and hopefully someday eager to share their thoughts.   The Delphi method is a great way to include many voices in decision making without long and frequent meetings.  I want to go and try this with my staff right now.  This would be really good for identifying critical academic needs or for narrowing down possible approaches to school policies.

Nominal Group Technique sounds very similar to a PLC technique called Ordered Sharing.  I like that it allows everyone in the group a chance to voice their opinion without any one person taking over the conversation.  I like that it is in a group but also seems to protect some anonymity allowing for genuine opinions to be shared.  This would be good for having the staff discuss concerns and obstacles to using a writing curriculum and in suggesting ways to implement it into their classrooms.