Purpose — To define the elements of a larger topic or task, or to deepen a conversation around a question or topic that has many answers or perspectives. This protocol can also be found in updated form for NSRF coach members.
Purpose — To establish basic attributes of good learning communities through real participant experiences. The attributes become goals/guidelines for checking on progress as a new learning community develops.
Purpose — This activity can be used as a way to help a group focus on the importance of perspective and attitude. It also serves as a reminder to participants of the need to build relationships if we are going to create meaningful change.
Purpose — To construct meaning around a piece of text before participants read the whole text. To engage a group actively and thoughtfully, away from their seats.
Purpose — To provide a structure for analyzing the process participants have to use to make changes in their practice and for linking that process to Inquiry.
Purpose -- Icebreaker as a way for people to build a bridge from where they are or have been (mentally, physically, etc.) to where they will be going and what they will be doing.
Purpose — To gain a deeper understanding of how you do your best work. With this understanding and heightened awareness, you can more consciously provide what you need to do your best work more often.
Purpose — To analyze different aspects of a problem or issue; to come to consensus on difficult questions. The questions or statements can address different facets of the issue or different levels of critical thinking that build on each other. Ideally, people go beyond familiar or predictable responses.
Purpose — To create a safe space to become better at listening and talking in depth. Constructivist listening dyads help us as we work through feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that sometimes produce anger, passivity, undermine confidence, cause interference in relationships with students or colleagues.
Purpose — Provocative yet non-threatening way to get to know the people one works with: their perspectives, their belief, their opinions on hard issues, how they think about themselves and others, what they think about teaching and learning. It is also useful to see where people stand on difficult issues that need decisions and hear them out with respect and interest.
Purpose — Activity from Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach; he uses his metaphor to “…return me in imagination to the inner landscape of identity and integrity where my deepest guidance is to be found.”
Purpose — Groups of experienced coaches may use this activity to learn the essential elements of well-crafted protocol and to practice modifying or creating new protocols to ensure that those elements are included in the finished product.
Purpose — To help Critical Friends Group® communities set agendas for their year of work together. Groups often run this protocol at the first or second meeting of the school year, or at the last meeting of the previous year. Its objectives are to create one or more of the following: • An overall picture of what the group hopes to accomplish. • An opportunity to collaboratively identify individual goals. • A shared sense of ownership/responsibility for future Critical Friends Group meetings.
Purpose — To provide a formal process for critical friendship using a variation of Costa and Killick’s model in “Through the Lens of a Critical Friend” and based on the theory and language used by David Tripp in Critical Incidents in Teaching: Developing Professional Judgment.
Purpose — Discussions around data can make people feel on the spot or exposed, either for themselves, their students, or their profession. The use of structured dialogue format provides an effective technique for managing the discussion and maintaining its focus. This protocol allows participants to look at data with new eyes, and ends with possible implications, next steps, and strategies.
Purpose — To help participants experience the problems and frustrations of change that is imposed upon them. To identify why those frustrations exist and to create strategies that will help sustain new initiatives. To build recognition (especially in leaders) of some consequences of repeated demands for change.
Purpose — To help an individual or team to think more expansively about particular, concrete dilemma, using structured format of questions and responses. This protocol is particularly useful when dealing with complex problems that involve many aspects and/or stakeholders.
Purpose — When you’re faced with dilemma (a particular, concrete problem that seems to require choice between equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive options), the Consultancy Protocol provides structured process to help see new possibilities. The presenter of the dilemma must have the power to effect some kind of change in relationship to the dilemma for this protocol to be effective.
Purpose — Before you present your dilemma to the group, take some time to think purposefully about it in the context of one of our protocols. By completing this worksheet, you will more clearly define and articulate your dilemma before bringing it to your CFG coach for preconference, and then to your group for the protocol with which you are struggling.
Purpose — To become more aware of the “Venn Diagram” of our identities, to work with others to define our various identities, and to think more deeply about what diversity means.
Purpose — To break the ice in a meaningful way, get to know our colleagues better and avoid some of the awkwardness that may be part of introducing oneself. Uses post-it notes and a timer.
Purpose — To break the ice in meaningful way, get to know our colleagues better, and avoid some of the awkwardness that may be part of introducing oneself. Uses a collection of pennies.
Purpose — A multi-step protocol to review an assessment including rounds for describing evidence, completing the assessment, interpreting how students might see this assessment, and considering implications for our practice.
