As a school or district leader, effective communication and collaboration within teams and between teams and leadership is critical to impactful work. As leaders managing teams across one or multiple locations, staying connected with your educators and understanding the pulse of your schools can be challenging. This resource is designed to bridge that gap, offering a structured approach to enhance communication and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Using this dashboard template provided me as a district leader with key information to make the most of our face to face meetings, while also providing insights for targeted and individual support where needed.
Weekly Huddles provide a dedicated time for teams to come together, share updates, celebrate successes, and address challenges. These regular meetings ensure that everyone is on the same page, fostering a sense of unity and purpose. It's also an opportunity to engage in strategic long range planning and learn together. Rather than spend our face to face time giving individual run-downs, each team member shares reflections and updates on a collaborative Numbers document the morning before our afternoon meeting. (Need support with using collaboration in Numbers? Check out this support page.)
How to use this template:
This template is completely customizable. The guiding questions in each section gather key information while also communicating team goals and priorities, for example in addition to successes, challenges, and priorities, in our template we also consider how we might be collaborating and growing throughout the next week. These intentional questions are my way of ensuring that these components of our culture don't get lost in day to day operations and tasks. The beauty of a live, collaborative template is that you can edit and make adjustments to the template as needed.
Some considerations:
- When should teams complete this? How much time will you need to review it in order to plan for face to face meetings?
- What headers will provide insight for support while moving the work forward?
- Are there any team norms that need to be established before using a shared document?
Complementing the huddles, this dashboard template serves as a powerful tool for leaders. It allows you to identify trends, gather insights, and make informed decisions about how to use face to face meeting time. By visualizing successes and challenges, you can better support your teams and drive meaningful progress.
As leaders, we also know the importance of modeling. Using this template also models practices that educators can use with students. Perhaps students are working on a group project or are in a book club. Students could use a similar collaborative dashboard to communicate where they are in a process and where they might need additional support.
To sum up: better team collaboration and targeted leadership support leads to more impactful support for our teachers and students. How might you use this template?
August 14, 2024
Team huddles! Such a great concept to help teams stay organize, communicate clearly and move forward with a goal or task. This would certainly work well with student teams also as they participate in Challenge Based Learning or Project Based Learning. I like how Numbers makes this so easy to set up. Thanks for the Template Morgan!
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