IMPACT for Administrators

Contributed by teachers at
Westwood Elementary
Ashe County

Ms. Bell is a teacher at Innovation Elementary.  Her day begins with bus duty and welcoming students to school.  At 7:40 a.m. students begin to arrive in Ms. Bell’s class and work on individual work until her administrative duties are done for the morning.  Today is an important day for Ms. Bell’s grade-level team.  They will meet for half a day to work on collaborative units for the next nine weeks.  The collaborative meeting will take place in the conference room and will involve all of Ms. Bell’s team as well as the media coordinator and technology facilitator.  Ms. Bell gathers her materials for the meeting.  She wants to make sure that she includes everything she needs to help make this a successful collaboration.  She checks the Collaboration Toolkit pre-session checklist to make sure that she has her lesson plans, pacing guide, calendar, and student assessments. 

The team leader starts the collaborative planning session at 9 a.m.  They identify their goals for the meeting and their goals for the first nine weeks.  They identify the lessons that worked well last year and the lessons that need improvement.  They work with the media coordinator and technology facilitator to schedule instructional activities that include their areas of expertise.  Their main unit this nine weeks will be a study of rocks in North Carolina. 

They begin the process by using the Intel Teach to the Future Unit Plan.  They identify the essential question and then the unit questions.  After developing the questions, they develop lessons that will work within the unit and that focus on helping students answer the identified essential questions.  The technology facilitator will conduct a mineral “Wanted” poster activity.  Students will go to the computer lab, and the technology facilitator, with the assistance of the teacher, will guide students to several rock Web sites where students will gather information for their “Wanted” poster.  The posters will be created and graded using the poster rubric created by the team and technology facilitator.  The media coordinator will work with small groups of students to create Rockin’ Poetry.  Small groups of students will go to the media center throughout the week.  The media coordinator will share different types of poetry and help students to create their own Rockin’ Poetry.  The lesson will be graded using the Poetry Rubric created by the team and media coordinator.  As the meeting concludes, they verify times, schedules, resources, and responsibilities for all the team players involved in the units created in the collaborative planning session.

Ms. Bell’s class is filled with students who have different learning styles and different capabilities.  She appreciates the collaborative planning sessions, because she knows that she has taken advantage of all the resources that are available in her school. She knows her ideas are good, but she also knows the units are strengthened and improved through the collaboration of her team, the media coordinator, the technology facilitator, and other special area teachers. 

As Ms. Bell goes to join her students for the remainder of the day, one of her students approaches her and asks, “What kind of cool stuff are we going to learn about now?”  At this point, Ms. Bell realizes that her participation in the collaborative process directly affects her students and their learning.  The more excited she is about what she is teaching, the more excited her students are about learning. 

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