Thursday 16 November 2017

Implementing CRM week 7

This week saw our first Collaborative Team Meeting (CTM). We have engaged in some pretty in depth conversations around the model up to this point using the embedded CRM time to work through the book, develop working norms and meeting templates, discuss essential agreements, review core agreements and develop a continuum of supports. We have also administered a universal screen in math and spent some time exploring the jigsaw website. Teachers have also started using the time to work collaboratively on projects that support our improved literacy goal. We have not yet created a visual display board, but felt we have spent enough time on the “theory” and needed to  start having CTMs.
Our Inclusion support teacher, our instructional coach and I met previously to go over the routine of the meeting and make sure we were prepared. We gave teachers a copy of the
student record sheet and asked them to have a few students identified to bring
to the table. Although we discussed the roles (e.g. interrupter, recorder, facilitator), we did not assign them, but we plan to at our next meeting. I openly shared some of the facilitator guide
questions/prompts by writing them on a white board along with our norms so that everyone could see potential questions a facilitator might ask should the meeting start to go astray. My goal is to build capacity within  the CRM groups so that the facilitator does not have to intervene very often.
The meetings went well and were different in several ways. In one group, when asked about a student and if there were other students that could benefit from the interventions, the teacher identified several. This quickly became a conversation around Occupational Therapy support
and I found myself running down the hallway to pull our OT into the conversation, to which she readily agreed. She then became an important part of the discussion. At a teacher’s suggestion we also invited one of our school's Educational Assistants who specializes in literacy support. She was able to contribute to the conversation as we talked about how to support students with literacy (our CRM and school focus). A lesson learned from this was to look at the students being brought forth in advance and try to ensure that the right people were around the table. It was very beneficial for me as I learned about the students, different strategies that I  previously knew nothing about and was able to offer support for one of the students mentioned. Another teacher brought a student forward and it was very beneficial that she led with data she had collected. She had a literacy and math assessment done and was able to articulate where the student was struggling. This quickly led to action planning.  We did not get through a lot of students in our 80 minutes together (more in the group that ended up grouping several students), but we expect that will improve as we become more familiar with the process. The next morning I emailed the “action items” to each group and plan to follow up next week before they start their collaboration work. Overall we were satisfied with the process, but acknowledge we have refinement to do and are looking forward to our next CTM in four weeks. I believe that the “ready, fire, aim” philosophy held true. We could have spent another month trying to get prepared for our first CTM, but you really do just need to do it so that you have something to build on.

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