Buddy Up

We have team leads for every grade level team and department in the elementary school. We meet as a group every two weeks, and today was a team lead meeting day. One of the topics on the agenda was planning how we will welcome incoming new faculty for the 2014-15 school year. Since team leads play a significant role in supporting new faculty members through a buddy system, we wanted their perspective. We asked them to answer the question: [blockquote]As a buddy, what are the ways that you would support a new faculty member?[/blockquote]

The team leads used Post-it® notes to capture their answers, writing one thought per note. After taking a couple of minutes to jot down their ideas, they brought their notes to the whiteboard and – without speaking – began sticking them to the board, placing like-ideas near each other. We encouraged them to arrange and re-arrange the notes as much as they wanted and anywhere they wanted to try to bring some organization to the process. They also had the freedom to move ANY notes, not just their own. Before long the group arrived at organic groupings of notes with a few connector notes informally linking the groups. Once complete, one person summarized the work by walking us through the groupings. It was amazing how – in a relatively short time – the group had created a roadmap for welcoming new faculty.

Responses ranged from ideas about communicating to enjoying Dubai to sharing information about curriculum. We’ll use these ideas as we develop a resource for new faculty members. (In my mind I’m calling it the ASD ES New Faculty Guidebook, but I’m pretty sure it will actually end up being a web-based resource.) Once we have the structure for the resource framed out, the plan is to use crowd-sourcing by calling upon our current faculty and staff for help in filling in the details.

This activity was successful in several ways. It enabled us to gather feedback from the group that we can use to inform our work. (We collected the Post-it® notes at the end of the meeting.) It allowed everyone in the group with the opportunity to give feedback and the opportunity to share that feedback with the entire group. After all, each person had to read all of the notes to figure out where to put their own notes. In addition, by not speaking during the activity, we were all focused on making sense of our collective work. This is definitely an activity we’ll use again. I’m interested to see if any of the teachers try a similar activity with their students.