School and Community Planning Workshop II

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Workshop Overview

On March 13 and 14, 2008 InnovationLabs convened the second school and community workshop focused on the Coleridge, Laurel, Newcastle and Wynot school districts working together to be 'more than the sum of the parts.' The purpose of this workshop was to provide the participants with an update on the changes that have taken place since the last workshop and to plan the next steps in specific areas of focus.

The Workshop began in the evening of March 13 with an session for the community and teachers. 185 people participated in this evening's activities. The evening began with a tradeshow highlighting the changes that have been made in the four communities since the workshop last February. The schools are working closely together to coordinate activities that save them money and provide additional programs that might not have been offered had the schools continued to operate independently. After a short introduction and presentation by Dr. Hoesing, the group engaged in an activity where the participants explored the implications on the communities of a number of scenarios that might come to pass in the near future.

In the morning of March 14, 100 educators from the four communities returned to plan next steps. After a short check-in the group was asked to develop a vision for where we might be in several years and to develop timelines for next steps in specific focus areas including:

This was followed by a second round of work where a few groups synthesized work from the previous round the rest of the groups focused on next steps in the following focus areas:

Prior to the workshop each community was asked to participate in one of three surveys: one for students, one for teachers, and one for parents and patrons. In this round of work each survey had a small group look at the initial results to learn about potential improvement opportunities.

In the final round of work, there were several groups specifically focused on developing solutions to improvement opportunities while another group worked to synthesize the timeline.

students

These students helped to make this workshop a success! Thank you!!

Real Time Record

This web site is a record of the event in Laurel as it happened - captured in real time and presented here in this web site. The documentation of the session includes the assignments each group was asked to work on and the results they produced. There are photos of the white walls developed by the participants and where we were able to capture them there are short video presentations explaining the work the group did (a few of the cameras malfunctioned and we lost a couple of the videos). The large group conversations were documented in text and images as well. The documenation was captured throughout the course of each day of the session and is chronological (in the order that things happened). The text is not a transcription of the large group conversations. Rather, it represents the documentor's synthesis of what was being discussed.

This record is intended to be a reminder to the participants of the conversations that took place during the retreat, to serve as a stimulus for further conversation and to serve as an artifact of the group's work.

For anyone who was not present at the event reading this, you may lose some of the energy and creativity the participants expressed - and some of the ideas may not translate completely without that context. If you have any questions about the content or anything that is represented here please speak to someone that participated in the process or contact Dan Hoesing at Laurel-Concord Schools.

Images

Photographs of participants and their work are included throughout the Real Time Record. To view a larger version of a marker board or poster, click on the thumbnail image. The larger image will open in a new window.