Last week 19 school teams came to Melbourne during the last week of school holidays to attend a 5 day Harvard Data Wise Institute. There were long 8 hours days of intensive learning where participants shared their ‘why’ stories with each other and learnt to focus on equity in schools through the 8 steps of Data Wise.
As teaching fellows we supported teachers and school teams throughout the institute. One such support was to act as a process observer whilst teams learned not only the improvement process but to work or live in certain ways e.g. one way was to follow a set of agreed norms. One norm was to hear all voices.
So during a 60-75 minute meeting period I rotated around 3 school groups and observed the team ‘living’ that norm. I observed for close to 15 minutes and then shared their data towards the end of the time.
The team discussed the data and posed the following question: did we follow the norm?
As a process observer I also collected the types of contributions participants made and the team described the possible implications: we are trying to solve “cultural” or adaptive challenges and the wonderings and questions could indicate we are focused on “inquiring” and were curious about others thoughts (clarifying questions).
Had I as the process observer had a little more time I might have actually captured their actual questions or thoughts. Maybe next time.
They might consider getting another process observation done in about 6 weeks on the same norm to enable some comparisons. This is but one coaching strategy (feedback) we used throughout the week to support teams.
Interested? If so, send me a comment and I can connect you.
