Goals and Objectives
To build a cohesive, supportive, and successful school community with parents, teachers, staff and students. To create a collaboration with a staff built on communication, consistent vision, and commonalities with methods. A new principal’s excellent leadership vision and skills created an opportunity to orchestrate the potential of the staff into a working model.

Challenges
A veteran staff that had visions of how they could contribute as individuals with less focus on working together. A focus was to build a stronger collaborative community to share their many talents more effectively, and create commonalities between classrooms, specialists, and grade levels.

Action
Pedagogical Strategies
At the regular site visits we focused on several strategies to stimulate deeper understanding and create a common usage of specific strategies K-5. The pedagogical strategies included Thinking Maps, structured inquiry, and collaborative thinking exercises.

Techniques
The workshops included:

• A format of briefing the lesson, demonstration lesson, debriefing the lesson
• Regular exercises that facilitated short term collaboration and long term community building for the participants
• How we use varied groupings of students effectively
• Modeling with students including the metacognition of a process, thinking methods, and how we use our tools

Outcomes
Results
The successes were a result of excellent planning and superb scheduling of the site visits. The factors included:

• Coordination of eight substitutes to effectively have three groups for two hours each at the six site visits
• Having a similar format for each of the three groups to stimulate common discussions leading to building a collaborative effort K-5
• Changing how the groups were organized to maximize the collaboration
• Meeting with the whole group at select times
• Active reflection and input from everyone

Continuing Results
The staff continues to develop their common language with additional trainings to support their growth including school wide Junior Great Books workshops.

New Ideas
The principal and myself effectively planned a whole school involvement with an initiative that officially had one third of the staff signed up. Two years later all except one had become officially involved with the initiative.

Client Information
National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
www.nuatc.org
Seattle Public Schools
www.seattleschools.org

Flow Map of how we collaborate.

Download Case Study
Download the Bryant Elementary School - Seattle Public Schools Case Study as an Acrobat PDF file.

More Case Studies
Case Studies available online, and as a downloadable Acrobat PDF files include:

• Youth Development Collaborative for staff from over 15 community-based, youth-serving organizations in the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia
• National Urban Alliance leadership visioning session with the key management team
• Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School whole school change and common understandings of curriculum in a public arts school serving a large metropolitan area
• Designs for Thinking Tools exploration DVD to assist understanding and implementation of Thinking Maps
• Bryant Elementary School, Seattle Public Schools whole school change focused on creating collaboration with a staff built on communication, consistent vision, and commonalities with methods
• Cal Arts to improve overall in-class experience for teachers and students during presentations and critiques.
  
• Development of Case Studies with Thinking Foundation to provide examples of funded participatory research that shares exemplary examples of innovative and successful schools. Go to the Thinking Foundation website Case Studies section.
• Description of Case Studies format

website details
updated 17 March 2007