Many schools who participate in the Instructional Partners Network develop a one-page instructional target through a powerful collaborative process proposed by Jim Knight. In this recent post in the IPN virtual community (at Ning), Courtney Horton highlighted the steps she and her colleagues took to revisit and revise their target three years after it was first created. We thought we’d share her report, and wonderful pictures, here! – Cathy Gassenheimer
by Courtney Horton
Instructional Partner
Liberty Middle School
Madison City (AL)
Last May, my principal and I decided it was time for a target re-visit. We had used our schoolwide instructional target for 3 years, and realized neither one of us were at the school when it was created. Not to mention, we have added quite a bit of new staff.
I wanted to share with you our process. We didn’t really know if there was a “correct” way to re-visit the target, so we did what worked for us! Hope this helps anyone who is thinking about this next step.
1. We had our faculty create an affinity map of what good teaching and learning looks like during a faculty meeting. We of course discussed our results. We explained that this was the beginning of our target re-visit process.
2. We gathered a group of students, and asked them the same questions. (Of course CANDY was involved!) 🙂
3. Mr. Brown also asked parents the same questions at one of our parent advisory board meetings. Then, we called our teachers together during embedded PD, and had them gallery walk all the results.
We then had teachers look over our current target, and add any changes/suggestions/emphasis/deletions. We also had them highlight areas they would like to focus upon for the next school year.
4. Over the summer, I complied all of our suggestions into a new target. We presented the revised target during our back to school retreat/PD day on July 31st. We explained all the changes and how they were based on teacher/student/parent suggestions.
5. There you have it! Our new, improved, and revised target! I had a couple made on foam board to hang around our school.
Courtney Horton is the Instructional Partner at Liberty Middle School in Madison, Alabama. She previously taught 7th grade language arts at Discovery Middle School (2005-2012) in Madison City where she served on the principal’s leadership team. She is also an ABPC Powerful Conversations Network facilitator for northern Alabama.
