"Critical Friend" Kevin

Imagine for a moment that each day, before working with others, you had an opportunity to explore social media profiles for those people you were to work with. For the sake of this exercise, focus on the profiles you have seen where people are using social media as it was intended, to further personal and professional relationships. Often, these profiles feature “Favorite Quote” sections where individuals can share quotes that are personally profound. The first quote you come across is this one, by football legend Vince Lombardi: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Do you think you could personally and professionally connect with a person whose profile features this quote? The next person’s profile features this quote from the Talmud, a central text of Judaism: “It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take it up.” Can you connect with this person? You then look at a third person’s profile, and she has a quote by former First Lady Eleanor Roos...

The "Feedback Nightmares Activity" is one of the approximately 30 agenda items that compose a five-day Critical Friends Group Training, and almost undoubtedly, it is an agenda item that always earns a similarly nervous response from trainees when they see it on paper.  Nobody likes a nightmare, and unfortunately many of us have had nightmares that directly involve feedback. Frankly, we would rather not sift through that amidst an otherwise uplifting and pleasant training! However, this activity is meant to help us cast aside those nightmares, setting us up for a bright, new future where feedback can be received gracefully, so our practice can improve without having to experience embarrassment or pain. To run this activity, I always share with my group a story of a real-life feedback experience that changed my career. I share how I spent hours preparing for a planned observation from one of my first administrators and created a lesson that I thought was both fun for student...

When I got my start in school administration, I was an assistant principal in a Catholic high school where our principal had a great idea. Each day at approximately a half hour before the first bell would ring, she would get on the intercom and invite any faculty and staff in the building to pray, if they desired...and most of them did. We would gather in a circle outside our library and the principal would invite people, voluntarily, to share what they wished to pray for. Some days, no one participated in this part; on these days, the principal would just launch into a prayer with which we were familiar. However, on most days, we would have gobs of participation. People would share good news about children and grandchildren, they would pray for students who needed extra help, and they would share challenging stories that had caused them stress heading into the day. As you can imagine, it was easy to grow close to these people. When people open up and let you know what is really goin...

The National School Reform Faculty's "Student Inquiry Rounds" may be just one protocol, but it has many different looks, depending on the way it is being used by a teacher. This protocol invites the "presenter" to bring copies of a piece of student work to a collaborative team. With this protocol, the presenter is asked to say nothing about the work, but simply to distribute it for examination by the group. Individuals in the group then share what can be "seen" by looking at the work, what questions they have, and what interpretations they can make. Only after time is devoted to each of these pieces does the presenter return to answer some of these questions and to reveal his or her purpose in bringing the work to the group. To finish the protocol, the group then discusses potential "next steps" the teacher may take. It may seem frustrating that the true purpose of looking at the student work may not be revealed until the group is deep i...

Unfortunately, participants in a regular five-day Critical Friends Group training don't get to experience every protocol in the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF) collection. That collection includes 322 protocols, activities, or modifications that all can be used differently to help your team achieve its goals. One of these protocols is called "Diversity Rounds," and until I had a special request from a group to use it this summer, I had never tried it before. Now that I've tried it, I try to work it into every training! Diversity Rounds requires the facilitator to identify a category where diversity exists. It then allows participants to decide how to best "subdivide" that category into two to four subcategories. The first two steps of the procedure are printed as follows: With the group I was working with, we first used "Birth Order" as a category and after a small hesitation, someone in the room took charge. She suggested the group b...

When working with new groups on the use of collaborative protocols, I almost always ask them to complete the following prompt at some point in the training: I used to think ___________, but now I think ___________. This easy sentence stem can produce a wide variety of encouraging responses, allowing me to see the growth the group has experienced in the first part of our training. But while there is always variety, there is one response that is most common in groups that are composed of many people who are new to protocols. They say something similar to this response, which I received at a recent training: I used to think protocols were time consuming and ineffective , but now I think protocols are an efficient way to honor voices and a critical component of true collaboration . The truth is...protocols do take time! However, expertly designed protocols focus the group on key pieces of conversation and eliminate the kind of conversation that takes away from the work. The constr...

Using NSRF Critical Friends Protocols has made an incredible difference in the schools where I have worked. Whether we have been working through challenging decisions, designing new lessons, or sharing visions for our organization's future, I have been surprised again and again at the implications the protocols have had for our culture and for the students involved. A protocol used during a team meeting can produce some amazing effective and efficient results. However, pulling the whole team together can sometimes be a challenge. This is why I recently began using protocols in meetings much smaller: meetings with one other person. I have discovered that protocols can be powerful in pairs, as well. Two protocols that I have found especially helpful are the "Data-Analysis" Protocol and the "Student Work Inquiry Rounds" Protocol. Both of these protocols encourage the person sharing the data or the student work to turn away from the group so that its individuals ...

Two of the most popular protocols featured in the NSRF Critical Friends Trainings are the Tuning Protocol and the Dilemma Protocols. They are both terrific processes to go through in a collaborative setting because they help teams find wisdom that may be alluding them. The Tuning Protocol allows a piece of work to be presented to a team so that it may be fine-tuned and enhanced, and those participating in the protocol almost always develop ideas to enhance the work that the creator of the work previously had missed. Similarly, the Dilemma Analysis and Dilemma Consultancy Protocols help participants to find solutions that the presenter of the dilemma may have previously missed. Each of these protocols is featured in a five-day Critical Friends New Coaches' Training. While each of these protocols is very helpful, choosing the "right" one - the one that will benefit the presenter or team the most - can be a dilemma in itself! At a recent training, our group explored these ...

If you participate in the five-day NSRF Critical Friends Group Training, you will be pushed to speak your mind within the first hour. The "Microlabs Protocol" is one of the first activities in which trainees participate, and this is very much on purpose; this protocol allows time for participants to think deeply about a critical topic and then a structured amount of time to convey their feelings. When participants are asked to do this early in a training, we hope it sets the tone for active engagement throughout the training.  Importantly, Microlabs is built around the idea that the wisdom in the room is more powerful than any one person's way of thinking. When used in a five-day training, participants often focus on collaboration during this protocol; they communicate what has worked for them in the past, and what has not. While this conversation is powerful regardless of any next steps, the training facilitator can drive off of this conversation to provide the par...

A powerful collaborative team can have some initial fun writing Agreements . Teams that embrace collaboration and strive to push one another to add value to impactful conversation typically like the Agreement writing process. Recently, I had a group that embraced one National School Reform Faculty suggestion to have one agreement be "2B4ME." While this may look like a clever personalized license plate, it was this group's fun way to remind themselves to let at least two people speak after they have spoken before speaking again. Groups that can be clever in writing Agreements like this one are having a little fun! That said, no matter how much fun the Agreement writing process is in the first place, finding a way to keep those Agreements on the forefront of everyone's mind - without being repetitive in doing so - can be a challenge...so I hope you will try the following ideas: 1. Challenge Participants to Share their Agreement Successes and Challenges If the facil...

Having always been a person who "plays nicely," it did not bother the "me of 2005" when my principal first asked us to create norms for our collaborative teams. Back then, collaboration was still new and different in my district, and if norms were a part of it, so be it. However, once we were in our groups, negativity ensued. ...and it wasn't the only negativity I would ever experience around collaborative agreements. The key argument against them seems to be "We are adults; we don't need these to keep us on track!" This argument has been raised by at least one person in each school of which I have been fortunate enough to work. That said, if we step back and take a look at what powerful norms or agreements can look like, we - as adults - may have a different perspective. The National School Reform Faculty pitches a variety of powerful "Agreements" as part of its Critical Friends Group trainings. A handful that I find most pow...

This year, our District Leadership Team is studying the work of Bill Daggett and his "System for Effective Instruction" book. Last month, I had the privilege of partnering with two others to present his fifth chapter, which focuses on relationships...and I use the word "privilege" because out of the many great things in this book, I find Daggett's words in this chapter to be among his most powerful. Daggett proposes a "relationship framework," which could be considered a "rubric" for relationship success. For instance, he has a relationship framework for staff that begins with a level of "isolation" where staff members perform their work in "significant isolation from other staff" and ranges to the highest levels of "sustained" and "mutually beneficial" where staff members incorporate new staff members "seamlessly" and are "consistently mindful of school goals." He also has relatio...

This year, our principal came up with a fun way for the administrative team to appreciate teachers. She purchased three different types of "pins" that principals can distribute to faculty or staff. We have pins to give teachers who make notable contributions to our PLC teams and we have pins for adults who go above and beyond for our students. In addition, we have an "apple" pin to give to teachers following a good lesson. We didn't make an official announcement about these pins. We just started distributing them, here and there, in November. As a result, faculty and staff have been pleasantly surprised when we have had something to share, aside from some positive words.  Earlier this month, I put an inordinate amount of time into a presentation. It was the type of presentation that did not require extensive preparation. In short, we had decided that students weren't taking our district writing prompt seriously. The sophomores who had to participate did ...

I became at father and a teacher almost simultaneously. In the same school year that I completed my student teaching (1999-2000), I began dating a woman who had a two year-old daughter. And while I didn't do a whole lot of parenting that year, the next year (as a first year teacher), I proposed to that woman and my parental role increased as we got closer to our wedding day. At the time, I didn't realize how much I didn't know about parenting or teaching, but it was not because I didn't have great examples to draw from. My parents were amazing and I had some incredible teachers, but the influences of each of these sets of people may need to be a future blog post. Today, I need to write about movies . Last month, my now teenage daughter had a hip surgery that left her relatively immobile. "Entertaining her," it turns out, was the excuse I needed to play more Monopoly and Risk in the past month than I have played in the other 19 years of her life. I also striv...

I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop this week that I hope saves teachers dozens of hours this semester, and it's based on this quote by grading guru Ken O'Connor: "Don't leave students out of the grading process. Involve students; they can - and should - play key roles in assessment and grading that promote achievement." The workshop was designed to share a series of practical strategies that could be used to have students assess themselves and one another, taking some of the pressure off the teacher to be the sole provider of feedback in the classroom. For instance, one strategy asks students to assess their confidence while taking an assessment and then their preparation after seeing the scores of an assessment: Another strategy helped students to set "SMART Goals" for the assistance they will seek between assessments: Evaluating one's preparation before, during, and after an assessment was also encouraged: While...