What We've Learned

A large part of our process and culture is self reflection. We want to allow for teachers to reflect on their own learning and utilize feedback in their classrooms. If we expect our teachers to do this, we also expect our PBL trainers, admin, and school, as a whole to do the same. Each year after our five day residency training, midyear, and at the conclusion of the school year we ask our new teachers to give us constructive feedback. We take this feedback to heart and do what we are able to improve our onboarding procedures. This is the feedback we have gathered over the last few years:

2018-2019 School Year:

• • • During Residency:

      • Split group when technology is involved (some needed more than just ECHO training)

      • Seen examples of completed projects in ECHO and how they should be organized.

      • More time to just work in ECHO

    • Mid year: group would like to see training on

      • Using rubrics

      • Accessing more projects

      • Observe a teacher for an entire project

    • Continuous:

      • Check Ins with first year PBL teachers, every 4-6 weeks and develop PD based on needs.

    • End of Year:

      • Opportunity to attend residency as a 2nd year PBL'er

2019-2020 School Year:

• • • During Residency:

      • Time to explore ECHO

      • Make more specific to SPED that they can use in the classroom

      • Focus more on assignments, agendas, other requirements, then ease into projects

      • Explanation of the vocabulary (Benchmarks, Entry event, Entry document, Driving Questions)

      • Projects for SPED experts to look and modify those projects into their classroom or how to include SPED students into the project, make it SPED friendly

      • Addressing top complaints from students and parents to help with PBL buy in

    • Mid year:

      • Refresher

      • Advanced ECHO training

      • ECHO troubleshooting

      • Help Desk

      • ECHO 201

After reviewing years of feedback, we have decided to tweak and modify several ways we present the process of PBL. Some of the changes we have made to simplify ECHO and implementation are standardized agendas, assignment naming protocol, focusing on how collaboration and social contracts should look at each grade level. We have an open invitation to any teacher (no restriction of years) to go through residency again and those who have done so have found it to be a valuable experience.

When keeping our culture at the forefront in our school, we want to harness the camaraderie that teacher groups develop during residency. When going through a change, it is easier to have others to lean on and that support is what these groups provide. However, there was nothing quite like the camaraderie developed within the first year implementers. We want to look more into how to provide this type of bond for each year of groups of teachers that are going through residency without making groups feeling isolated from others. We want to support that bond and allow those to meet and use protocols to keep that relationship strong as well as mixing year groups to be able to collaborate. We are hoping this will build even more cohesion between our teams.