With certain exceptions, announcements will be made through e-mail

Admin team meetings will focus primarily on ensuring that school faculties and teams are ensuring

  • a guaranteed and viable curriculum (WHAT gets taught)
  • continuously-improving instruction—as measured by common assessments (HOW WELL curriculum is taught)

Tangible, measurable “small wins” will be reported on and celebrated at each administrative team meeting, e.g.

  • Increased # of school teams which have completed written team protocols or norms
  • Increased # of school teams which have completed (high-quality) standards maps for one or more courses
  • Increased # of school teams which have completed common assessments for each grading period for specific courses (Algebra; US History P.E. etc)
  • Measurable success on any team-built standards-based lesson or unit (e.g. “88% of students demonstrated mastery”)
  • Measurable instructional improvement as a result of a walk-through, e.g. “Evidence of higher-order instruction in 12 of 15 classrooms this month [up from 4 classrooms last month]”

The bulk of discussion at administrative team meetings will be devoted to finding ways to increase the number and frequency of “small wins” like those described above.

For every item on our meeting agendas, goals and challenges will be clearly defined in terms of outcomes or solutions sought--so that all discussion is constructive, goal-oriented and time-efficient.

Times will be established for each agenda item and someone will act as a time-keeper at every meeting

Brainstorming guidelines will be used routinely

If the discussion begins to drift or shift from a focus on the above tasks, all members are responsible for bringing the group back to the task at hand A team leader will be selected for each semester. This person will make sure that we

  • observe the above norms and
  • have the team briefly review the team protocols at the beginning and end of every team meeting—to evaluate how well the team observed the protocols (or to make revisions to the protocols)