So we’re ending up our first year, and we’re in this interesting time where we still have a ton to do to finish up the year, but we also are starting to look forward to planning our second year. So one thing we’re trying to do when we have staff time together is reflect on the year with an eye toward doing things better next year.

I keep finding myself — and our teachers — balancing that line between looking back with a ton of pride with what we did and recognizing that we have to be better next year if we want to keep improving.

So one of the things that we need to do better is doing more collaborative reflection about our individual planning process. In our last meeting, we talked about how we used Understanding by Design, and we talked about how we could do it better. What we came up with was giving more time to cross-talk, sharing unit plans, and seeing how a group of teachers across multiple subjects all interpret the tool different.

Now, that seems easy to say we’ll do. But it does require a few things… first and foremost, is that it requires folks to have their unit plans up to date and ready to share. Many teachers "sketch" their unit plans — I certainly was guilty of that from time to time — but when that kind of sharing becomes part of the process more than just once or twice a semester (which is about how often we did it this year), then every unit plan has to be detailed so that it’s worth the time to go over with colleagues.

Moreover, it requires me to really work more to develop tools to enable good cross-talk among teachers. And it requires me to make sure that meetings run efficiently, because this kind of work takes time, and all the things that took up our time this year aren’t going away. And it also requires me to be more organized because too often this year I allowed our agendas at meetings to be dictated by what was on our mind the most at any given moment, and that method of agenda-planning by definition keeps thinks like thoughtful, reflective practice from appearing on an agenda too often.

And again, with all of this, I’m proud of how productive our staff meetings were this year. (And for the record, one of the ideas that came out of our last meeting was that they should be called workshops, because that’s what they felt like to us.) But they can be better and more productive next year. And, year two of a school, the idea of constant improvement should still be top of mind.