At the end of the first year, the East team
decided that we needed a more consistent and longer period of time for teachers
to meet in Teacher Based Teams. We also needed a regular daily time to provide
intervention for our students. We made a list of other things that we wanted to
include when we worked on scheduling. Then we met and made a prioritized list
of what was most important to us.
Having an hour a week for Teacher Based Teams and having a daily time
for intervention were among our top priorities.
I asked any teacher who wanted to have a
voice in scheduling for the next year to show up to our scheduling meetings.
There was a crowd. We were not able to make some solid decisions until the
summer, because we were still waiting for Ohio Achievement Assessment results.
We also needed to identify students who would be in Title 1 and another special
reading program we run before we were able to make class lists and create the schedule.
I had thought the group of teachers willing
to work on the schedule during the summer would be much less, but it really
wasn’t. The teachers worked for hours to create a schedule that included the
priorities of teacher based teams and intervention. The decision was that we
would have our Teacher Based Teams on Tuesdays at 2:30 every week. Students
would be in an all school assembly at that time until dismissal. Teacher Based
Teams would run until 3:25, which is the end of the contract day.
I had to talk to the guidance counselor,
the music teacher, the speech pathologist, and the librarian to get them to
agree to man the all school assemblies every week. The sell to the guidance
counselor was that she could do two all school assemblies every month to deal
with topics that were of concern including bullying. In return, she would have
to visit classrooms less often to do guidance lessons and could focus more on
individual and group counseling sessions with the students. It was really a
win/win situation for everyone. Originally, the teachers agreed to do the other
two assemblies each month by creating a video for the students or with guest
speakers. I next went to the music teacher to let her in on our plan to have
her help monitor the assemblies. She said that she would like to be more
involved in creating assemblies and leading them. She took on one assembly a
month, leaving the teachers the responsibility of just one assembly a month. The
speech pathologist and librarian would help monitor the all school assemblies.
All of these teachers would also be in charge of dismissal for the whole
student body, because teachers would still be in meetings at that time.
On the non-TBT days, the teachers decided
to have intervention period for boys and girls. Common formative assessment results would be reviewed at
Teacher Based Teams, and intervention groupings would be created from those
results. We weren’t exactly sure in the summer how intervention period would
roll out, but we decided that we would figure that out in Teacher Based Teams
at the beginning of the year.
The collaborative efforts of the teachers during
the process of creating a schedule to make intervention and Teacher Based Teams
happen were amazing. Teachers focused on the priorities that the group agreed
upon and made things happen by thinking creatively. In the next blog, I will
share how the year got started and how teachers decided to organize
intervention time.
