1. Team Formation
Group norms are formed in the first meeting, whether you intend them to be or not, and once formed can be incredibly difficult to address in later stages of team development. This workshop will help you define your role as a leader, facilitate effective team meetings and provide you the tools necessary to ensure your team is clear about its purpose and buys into the processes that will govern the team.
Essential Question: What do I need to know and be able to do to lead a collaborative team?
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will explore the why, what, and how of collaboration
- Participants will learn how teams develop in stages and activities appropriate for each stage
- Participants will learn how to manage effective meetings, ensure equity and foster interdependence.
- Participants will use tools and strategies to establish group norms.
- Participants will learn how to build consensus on the team purpose.
2. Collaborative Communication (DiSC) and Meeting Management
To be influential and capable of motivating disparate team members, team leaders must understand how to adapt their leadership style to accommodate the beliefs and behavioral patterns of team members. Participants will use their DiSC results to learn to adapt communication for different team members and use communication strategies to mitigate barriers to communication.
2-3 months into the school year group norms begin to get tested and members will begin to question their role on the team. The team leaders role at this stage should be more focused on reinforcing the purpose of the team, the role that each member plays and how to foster greater interdependency between each team member. Effective meeting management at this stage of the team’s development is crucial.
Essential Questions: How can I adapt my communication and leadership style to improve my influence and effectiveness as a team leader? How can I mitigate conflict in meetings to ensure we are focused on our team purpose?
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will explore and understand how to accommodate different beliefs about leadership.
- Participants will gain an understanding and appreciation of different work styles.
- Participants will learn how to manage 5 difficult team member behaviors.
- Participants will demonstrate assertive communication skills.
- Participants will demonstrate effective questioning skills to understand the needs of others, as well as help others to see things from a different perspective.
- Participants will assess their meeting management practices and identify strategies to improve them.
3. Goal Setting
At this time in the school year team leaders should have a good understanding of the capacity their team has to engage in transformative interdependent work. Capacity will be determined by their understanding of the needs of their students and capability to attend to the transactional responsibilities of their roles, such as lesson planning and assessment. All departments in a school will have a different capacity. The capacity of a department to work interdependently towards achieving a transformative goal will largely be contingent on their capability of attending to the transactional aspects of their work.
In this module participants will learn to assess their team’s capacity for working interdependently. Participants will learn how to establish an effective team goal, in the form of an inquiry, that addresses the needs of each team member, the team and the school. This goal will be framed with a transformative outcome and defined by the key results that will demonstrate attainment of that goal.
Essential Question: How do I align individual, team and school objectives into a transformative team goal, that my department has the capacity to achieve, that will improve student learning?
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will assess their team capacity to work interdependently to achieve a transformative goal.
- Participants will be introduced to Sandboxing to insulate the team from outside influences that can undermine goal attainment.
- Participants will learn to facilitate effective goal setting processes that are inquiry based.
- Participants will understand that pursuing goals is an iterative process that requires periodic tuning.
4. Navigating Difficult Conversations
As team leaders or colleagues, we often come up against situations where difficult topics must be addressed. What do we know about the best strategies for those moments? What questions should we be asking ourselves before we speak? And, how can we be humane and yet growth producing?
This module draws upon research done by Peter Senge and Chris Argyris (Ladder of Inference), as well as Dr. Gervais Bush, to help participants understand why some topics have become ‘difficult’ and open their awareness to how untested assumptions can undermine collaborative communication.
Essential Question: How do I challenge the assumptions of ours in such a way that I can preserve our relationship and broaden professional dialog?
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will demonstrate consultative communication skills;
- Participants will understand how assumptions develop and when gone untested undermine interdependence; and
- Participants will demonstrate the ability test assumptions and facilitate professional dialog that broadens perspective.