December 13th 2022

Team Lead Observation Summary by Lauren Dorsey

Observations during team meetings  

·                     Annie is organized and helps keep the team on track with authentic and relevant planning.  

·                     She listens to team members’ ideas and asks questions to help take learning engagements deeper to
ensure they are authentic, meaningful and relevant. (How does that connect to our central idea or lines of
inquiry?)   

·                     She directs team members’ attention to best practices. For example, in the last meeting she was leading
the team in designing a summative assessment task for their communications unit. Once the team had some ideas,
she continuously brought the attention back to the success criteria and how it connected to students’
understanding of the central idea.  

·                     When the team was designing reflection questions about the Communication unit, Annie challenged the
team to think about Communication sub skills that were explicitly outlined in the unit (speaking, listening,
interpreting) to design questions that have students reflect deeper about how they have developed their
communication skills over the unit and what they would still like to work on.  

·                     In our meeting on November 22nd, the team brought examples of a formative assessment students
completed. Students had to create a mind map showing different ways of communicating and identifying whether
they were verbal or non-verbal. Annie shared a method with the team for having students co-construct the success
criteria. While other team members did not have their students do that, it facilitated a great discussion about how
students can help co-construct their own success criteria and provided the whole team with a strategy to
incorporate in future assessments.
 
Wonders 

·                     What do you like most about being team lead?  

·                     What is your biggest challenge as team lead?  

 
 
Reflecting Together  

·                     Annie shared that managing the little things can be a challenge, but she is finding it much easier to
delegate in her second year of being team lead. She feels it is important to involve all members of the team and
build trust to ensure everyone can contribute. 

·                     When reflecting on the best part, Annie said she would have to think about it a little more. She
emphasized that apart from the little things she needs to communicate or ensure her team has done, she feels
everyone contributes to make the team successful so there’s not really something big that stands out.  

·                     Annie highlighted her main reason for teaching, and that is being with the students each day