By Jeffrey Galaise, SRI Board Member
Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. When I think about what this means to me and take a few steps back from my day-to-day work, the lens becomes clearer. “Transformational” collaboration doesn’t just happen magically. Every year, our school, The Facing History School in New York City, ‘rolls deep’ at Winter Meeting. Facing History is a special place to me. Many of you know us as the fun, loud, smiling, boisterous group. The sense of community that exists is a direct correlation to our work in teacher teams and the ability to have a voice in the decision making process of the school. This is transformational collaboration! This is SRI.
The teachers at our school work with a marginalized group of young people, with very different learning needs. This means that dialogue around student and teacher work needs continuous discussion and collaborative strategizing. Using protocols like ATLAS and Collaborative Assessment Conference is an absolutely critical part of how we get feedback and results. As teachers, we cannot exist in a bubble and we must be in it together. It really does take a village and our kid’s futures rely and depend upon it. They have been let down by our system too many times for us to make mistakes at this stage in the game.
This year, our staff decided to individualize professional development. We created “Problems of Practice” around specific issues we were having in our classes. We would not have been able to do this work without the use of protocols and the facilitation skills our teachers learned at this years Winter Meeting. They were able to collaborate together on different questions and problems because of the way our SRI protocols have been created. It allowed groups to choose different protocols for the problems presented. Without SRI, it would have just been problem oriented, but instead, the work was grounded in equitable solution and support.
The most interesting experience that I started to see happening in the classrooms, was that our teachers felt more comfortable having the students use protocols for their work because of the way the protocols are modelled for our staff. Our school wide instructional goal was to increase student to student discussions and the best way to do that to make sure all voices are heard, is through the use of protocols. For example, dilemmas about characters in novels (consultancy), peer editing (tuning), pulling out important evidence from a text (text- rendering), and the list goes on. Classrooms flipped instantly when we started pushing our students to act as facilitators and engage in dialogue around the content.
It is hard for me to think about what my practice would look like without the use of what I like to call “facilitation swag”, but I think we have all been in workshops, meetings, and presentations where people have talked at us from a powerpoint or lecture, or worse. In those moments, after my eyes begin to glaze over, I can’t help but think, how can I get out of here right now? Should I just sit in the bathroom until it’s over? How could this “sing” with the right protocol? How does this group of presenters not know about the work of SRI? How do I share what I know?
On a personal note, this has been a really big year for me. Recently, I got a new job, working with a school very similar to Facing History, and while that means leaving a place I call home, I know that because of SRI I will be able to stay connected. Interestingly, as a part of my interview process, I completed a performance task. In the performance task, I used a Tuning Protocol and Future Protocol as resources to help guide the work being done at the school and as a lens to discuss that data they provided me with. The feedback at the end of the interview was that the resources I provided were “implementable” right away and “pushed their thinking” around the work that they were doing. This is because of SRI! Of all of the skills I learned from my Facing History family, the most transferable across a wide variety of schools, are the processes of collaboration and the work of SRI, and for that, I am forever grateful.
I would be amiss if I didn’t publically thank SRI and the community for all I have learned and for this opportunity to serve on the Board. Kari, Heidi, Chris and the board members have been working diligently on some really exciting stuff, which you will hear more about as the year progresses. Thank you for all of you love and support!
Jeffrey Galaise, jgalaise@schoolreforminitiative.org
