Leadership Team met yesterday afternoon for the first meeting of the year. Todd and Debra were unable to attend. Below is a summary of our activities.

• We reviewed the decision making chart from the district.

• We established ground rules for our meetings. They include:
• Start and stop on "real time"
• Consider everyone’s input
• One person talks at a time
• Stay on task
• Be dedicated and willing to represent
• Be prepared
• Be open minded
• Focus on what is best for kids
• Have a sense of humor
• We reviewed the retreat activities and looked for big ideas. We generated three focus areas for the year. The focus areas and the big ideas that we grouped are listed below.
• Involve and train all stakeholders in the PDSA process to improve teaching and learning. (Goals 1,3,4)
  • Reflections—Students need to reflect on their work. Teachers need to reflect on their practice
  • Quality tools—Everyone needs to be trained and implement quality tools.
  • Continue writing PDSA using what we learned last year.
  • We will continue to use the PDSA process to improve teaching and learning.
  • We will continue to train all staff members in the use of quality tools for continued improvement.
• Provide high quality professional development to improve teaching and learning. (Goals 1,2,3,4,5)
• Teach parents how to work with their children at home.
• Staff development to engage all learners.
• Provide staff development to teach teachers how to teach and score writing.
• We will attempt to expand training opportunities for staff and students to gather and use data for the Quality Assurance process.
• Increase time and effort for supervisor training.
• Staff development opportunities, ½ day planning sessions and PDSA have provided training and time to improve teaching relationships.
• Writing score—Consistency in scoring writing across grade levels with all teachers involved.
• Strengthen communication among stakeholders to improve teaching and learning.
• Observation / Evaluation—Utilize goal setting & feedback to improve teacher performance.
• Improve communication with parents.
• Conferences—Utilize conferencing to improve student performance.
• Jefferson could strengthen relationships among stakeholders by increasing involvement with parents and younger staff members.
• We will attempt to improve communication to parents about the concepts and components of the Quality assurance process.
• We will continue the communication process among stakeholders through conferences, newsletters, and electronic communication to improve understanding of relationships.
• Jefferson could strengthen its relationship with the community by publicizing its accomplishments.

• We broke into 3 groups to begin the process of developing action plans for each focus area. I will share a form and each group will develop an action plan for the next meeting.
• We provided and explained the agenda item "parent time".
• We discussed staff development for the year. It was decided that we will use our staff development resources to provide planning time for teaching teams and grade level teams. The group working on the professional development focus will schedule the days and groups.
• We appointed Sheila to the District staff development committee.
• I shared the flex time issue with the group. If staff members will be present from 8:10 to 3:55, they need not send an email on Friday. Only if the work day varies from those hours and teachers will not be present during those times should they send a Friday email to me.
• We discussed who would communicate decisions to which staff members.
• We completed an evaluation of the meeting (Debbie will share the results at the next meeting).
• We set our next meeting date for Monday, October 21 at 4:30. If I am not teaching we will move the meeting to Tuesday, October 22. I will know by Friday (9/13).