Grade Level Team Meetings: Plan for Effective Ongoing Leadership, Representation, and Collaboration
Key Concepts
The principal and reading coach (or designated coach) should provide leadership and serve as active participants in grade/department level meetings.
Leadership personnel, including principals, should be actively involved in developing a coherent school-wide reading plan. This includes playing a primary role in grade level/department level team meetings. Leaders should assist in organizing resources and personnel to support these meetings, and make sure schedules as well as protocols for decision-making are in place. Most importantly, leaders should actively participate in meetings on a regular basis.
Ensure that meetings regularly include teachers and staff who support instruction for that grade level.
One of the most important considerations in creating a strong grade level/department level team is to make sure that staff members attend team meetings as often as possible. Include specialists who provide intervention for these students. Teams that intentionally orchestrate such collective involvement will increase the impact of their work together. There should be a clear plan to keep team members who miss meetings “in the loop” about what was discussed, including student results and changes in intervention strategies.
Work collaboratively to meet the needs of all students.
Grade level teams should operate within a “culture of collaboration,” using a systematic process that enables them to do the hard work of digging deeply for the right strategies to accelerate students’ progress. The result will be solid gains in student achievement and fully accomplishing team goals.
Professional Development Presentation
- Part 1 (10:33)
Your grade level teams have now established effective procedures for making team decisions, learned to use data as the basis for decision-making, and they focus on the four key elements when setting actions and making adjustments to instruction. In this last presentation concerning grade level team meetings, the critical pieces of strong leadership, representation from reading instructional staff, and collaboration are discussed. Recommendations for effectively guiding and managing meetings, keeping the focus on instruction, and how to build schoolwide commitment are enhanced through practice activities and suggested readings.
Apply the Concepts
Practice Activities
1. Working with Resistance
Review the problem scenario presented on the attached practice activity. Then answer the following question:
As a coach/grade level team leader/department level team leader who works closely with your team and leads in partnership with your principal, how would you address the behavior of this teacher during grade level team meetings?
- Identify possible causes of this behavior. Assess possible strategies for working with this teacher. Determine your next steps.
2. Ongoing Leadership - A Problem of Classroom Performance
Review the problem scenario presented on the attached practice activity and answer the question:
As a principal whose leadership is critical to grade level team performance, how would you address the dilemma of classroom performance not matching the results of the team meetings?
- Refer to all of the information presented concerning ongoing leadership of grade level teams. Identify your options and determine next steps.
3. Team Assessment: How well does your grade level operate as a team?
This self-assessment tool designed by the Nevada Department of Education in 2006 gives grade level teams a means of determining how well they function as a team. The tool is adapted from Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. By completing a brief self-assessment, team members can evaluate effectiveness in the areas of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and attention to results.
Resources
1. Team Assessment: How well does your grade level operate as a team?
2. Fullan, M. (2008) The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Chapter 2. Connect Peers with Purpose (pages 39-54).
Links
1. Increasing Achievement by Focusing Grade-Level Teams on Improving Classroom Learning: A Prospective, Quasi-Experimental Study of Title I Schools
This research article examined the effects on achievement of grade-level teams focused on improving learning. Several findings are useful to this discussion. When school-based training was provided for principals and teacher leaders on stabilizing team settings and using explicit protocols for grade-level meetings, scores improved at a faster rate than for comparable schools and greater achievement growth was shown over a three-year period. They also found that the keys to effective teacher teams are stable school-based settings, distributed leadership, and explicit protocols, and that long-term sustainability of teacher teams depends on coherent and aligned district policies and practices.
Full Citation: Saunders, W., Goldenberg, C., Gallimore, R. (2009). Increasing Achievement by Focusing Grade-Level Level Teams on Improving Classroom Learning: A Prospective, Quasi-Experimental Study of Title I Schools, American Educational Research Journal, 46(4), 1006-1033.
