Gallery Walk
The links below will take you to the transcripts of the strategies generated by table groups at the Stakeholder's meeting and tallies of the voting done during the Gallery Walk:
- Capacity of General Education
- Capacity of Special Education
- Building-Wide Interventions
- Important Missing Data
Download the merged and sorted list of Gallery Walk Recommendations.
This PowerPoint (from Gallery Walk to Walking the Talk) describes the steps taken in analyzing input from the Gallery Walk to identify and organize themes and topics for Stakeholders' Meeting, Day 3. The resulting documents (below) were produced for use by groups at the Feb 19th Stakeholders' Meeting (note that the documents preserve information regarding initial categories and prioritizing at the Gallery Walk):
A supplemental Powerpoint, produced at the meeting in response to a question from one of the groups, shows the topic priorities by stakeholder group.
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Dear Stakeholders:
As of today, a total of 90 Stakeholders are registered for the Feb 19th meeting (see the tally of topic selections below). As you can see, there is a wide variability - some topics are much more popular than others.
Given this distribution, we are considering the option of having multiple work groups for the popular topics, and setting the least popular topics aside for now. By doing this, everyone gets their first choice, and you do not have to settle for 2nd or 3rd choice. Additionally, we get more minds wrapped around the priority issues.
We expect make a final determination about groupings by the end of this week (we plan to send the group lists and agenda early next week). So, if you have any thoughts/advice on the grouping question, we'd love to hear from you.
Gary
Dear PPS SpEd Stakeholders:
The Core Leadership Team (Joanne Mabbott, Jennifer Jackson, Pat Steinburg, Kenneth Jones, & yours truly) met last Friday to continue planning/preparations for the Feb 19, Stakeholders' meeting.
We now have a list of action team topics for the Stakeholders' meeting and will (very soon) be sending you an online survey to determine your preferences:
A. Collaboration
B. Continuum
C. Interventions
D. Communication system
For those of you who are following the process, let me review for you the steps that brought us to last Friday's meeting, the work we did at the Core Leadership (I will review the steps, again, at the Feb 19th Stakeholders' Meeting):
Gallery Walk process - Dec 10, 2009 - Jan 14, 2010
1. recommendations from the Gallery Walk were compiled in four documents (one for each of the original categories: Special Ed, General Ed, School-Wide, and Missing Data).
2. the recommendations were compiled into one spreadsheet in order to sort the recommendations by the number of stars (short-term priorities) and dots (long-term priorities).
3. individual members of the team assigned keywords to the recommendations - generating a list of 11 keywords.
4. an initial sort was done on all recommendations with the keyword "collaboration" since that was one of the initial themes identified at the close of the Gallery Walk.
5. an analysis and synthesis of the collaboration recommendations led to an identification of three sub-themes.
a. Time for collaboration.
b. Joint professional development/training.
c. Team teaching.
6. the synthesis and conclusions related to collaboration was shared with the Stakeholders.
That's where we were as of last Friday. At that meeting we took the following steps:
7. set a cut-off of two stars, ran a second analysis of recommendations with keyword = collaboration, and found the sub-themes to be valid with the shorter sort.
8. saved recommendations with fewer than 2 stars to a "parking lot" file (posted on the Gallery Walk page).
9. reconciled/merged the keywords to distill four broad topics: collaboration, continuum, intervention, and communication.
10. sorted the recommendations with 2 or more stars by the four keywords.
11. analyzed and synthesized the four lists in order to identify 11 sub-themes to be addressed by action team at the Feb 19 Stakeholders' meeting.
So, that's what we accomplished last Friday, the final steps in preparing for the Feb 19th Stakeholders' meeting are:
12. Very shortly, I will post the four lists with action team topics so you can see how we came up with the list of action team topics.
13. I will also be sending an online survey to determine a) whether you plan to attend the Feb 19th Stakeholder's meeting, and b) to invite you to identify your priority action topic(s).
14. Last, but certainly not least, we will cluster the recommendations around each of the action topics to inform the action team conversations at the Feb 19th meeting.
Gary
Dear PPS SpEd Stakeholders:
The Core Leadership Team is in the process of assigning keywords to the Gallery Walk items to enable us to put the data in digestible chunks. Thus, we will be able to discuss the main ideas that came out of the first Stakeholders’ meeting and begin fleshing out the data in a form that will facilitate action planning at the next Stakeholders’ meeting.
The keyword list is still somewhat in flux. Looks like we’re going to end up with four to six keywords. However, it was clear from the get-go that “collaboration” was one of keywords (even before the Gallery Walk session concluded). So, that’s where we begin with this initial analysis.
The collaboration recommendations were sorted by the original groupings (special ed., general ed., school-wide), then by stars and dots. This netted a manageable number of items that we could readily get our minds around. From this point, it was relatively easy to collapse and combine the recommendations. And, from there we boiled the data down to three priorities:
Let you walk me through our thinking and invite you to let us know whether or not you reach the same conclusions…
Let’s begin by looking at the recommendations for more effective building-wide collaboration, it's pretty easy to imagine a problem statement that looks something like:
Note: this one statement represents a total of 28 stars, or 90% of the stars in recommendations that relate to collaboration at the building level. And, if one considers that the third item (designing a functional system) better serves as an overall goal rather than a specific, actionable recommendation, it all boils down to collaboration time and joint training.
Not only that, virtually everything under General Ed/Collaboration (see below) relates to collaborative time and joint training (I've marked time references in yellow and collaborative training in green). If you collapse/combine the first and fourth recommendations you get a total of 26 stars; and combining the second, third, & fifth nets a total of 20 stars. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy to restate this whole section as two recommendations.
But wait, there's more! The same themes run through the recommendations for special education, with one exception. Notice that "collaborative team teaching" was posted under building-wide recommendations, but got 0 votes; while it was the top vote-getter under special education....
So, there you have it… That’s how we reached the conclusion that the recommendations you prioritized (with stars and dots) under the category of greater collaboration at the building level points to a need to focus on three strategies:
So, now it's your turn....
You may follow the link at the bottom of this message if you wish to share your thoughts/comments with the whole group (you will be prompted to log in), or you may hit reply and send them to me (I will compile all such comments are report back).
Gary Obermeyer, Network Facilitator