Day #22 Heidi Hogan, Grade 4 Teacher

It’s always a privilege to work with the students at the JT Hood School. However, it’s also a privilege to be able to spend an entire day with the JT Hood teachers collaborating, sharing, learning, and enjoying each other’s company.  Today was a great day.    Our goals for the day were to allow all educators to become more familiar with the advantages of accessing “live” data in the Education Data Warehouse, and to analyze data through a common protocol that allows us to follow the data driven dialogue model.  Before we delved into the data, Mr. McKay made sure that he promoted the 7 Norms of Collaboration, and he reinforced our school-wide goal of having a positive school climate built on trust and collegiality.  We all read an article that’s overarching theme affirmed that if a school has a positive climate, student success, be it academically, socially and/or behaviorally would follow.  During the day we broke into several different “jig saw” groups, and were able to collaborate with and learn from teachers across all grade levels and areas of expertise.  Once we began looking at the data after lunch, every teacher felt comfortable sharing ideas, debating points of view, and working as a team with a myriad of colleagues that we seldom have time to collaborate with. In a grade “responsible” for MCAS data, it was valuable to hear the thoughts and opinions from my colleagues in the primary (K-2) grades. It was a wonderful way to end the week, with colleagues coming together in a positive, supportive day of learning and growing.  Congratulations to Mrs. Heffernan and Mrs. Pacheco who won the 7 Norms of Collaboration prizes.  While everyone is a “winner” when they use the Norms of Collaboration, Mrs. Heffernan and Mrs. Pacheco went above and beyond by being positive, collaborative and collegial throughout the entire day.