Laura


 * Laura's Performance Improvement Intervention Project**

**Effective Teacher Collaboration ** **Mesa Public Schools **


 * Problem Summary **

Education in Arizona is going through major changes with the release of new Common Core Standards. Teachers in our district are required to learn the new standards and a new way of teaching in order to address these standards. Best practices show that one way to measure student progress and growth, along with guide instruction, is through the use of formative assessments. Being required adopt new Common Core Standards and use common formative assessments in the classroom puts a great burden on teachers. This project, the Effective Teacher Collaboration Plan, proposes to find a way to help teachers collaborate; sharing in an effective manner materials and ideas related to Common Core Standards and common formative assessments.


 * Background of Organization **

Mesa Public Schools was established in 1946. The school district is located in Mesa, Arizona. The school district serves approximately 69,000 students, ranging from preschool to high school. Currently, there are 56 elementary schools, 11 junior high schools, six high schools, and 11 alternative schools. The website for the school district is located at www.mpsaz.org . Information about specific schools, including state report card, are located through the Arizona Department of Education website .


 * Stakeholders and Decision-Makers **

The people who will be affected by my plan are the teachers, the students, professional development personnel, educational technology trainers, information systems support personnel, and other district personnel. The people who are able to make the decisions to implement the plan are the members of Mesa Public Schools Charting Excellence Development Team :


 * Chairperson: Dr. Michael B. Cowan, Superintendent
 * Governing Board Members: Mr. Michael Hughes, Mr. David Lane, Mr. Mike Nichols, Mr. Steven Peterson, Mrs. Michelle Udall, Dr. Ben Whiting
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Parents, Students and Community Members
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">District and School Staff


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Performance Gap: Cause Analysis **


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Actual Current Performance. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Teachers across the Mesa Public School district are spending considerable amount of time trying to understand the new Common Core Standards as well as creating common formative assessments to go along with the new standards. The design of the new standards is to focus on fewer performance objectives, but to go deeper into the content. Ideally, the students will be utilizing higher order thinking skills as they are expected to evaluate, analyze and create. In the past, the focus has been more on remembering, understanding and applying.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Desired Performance. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The desired performance is to maximize teachers’ time so that they are working more efficiently and collaboratively in unwrapping the standards and creating quality common formative assessments to help guide instruction.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Performance Gap. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The performance gap is going from working individually to working collaboratively in order to reach the same goals, but doing so in an asynchronous manner so that teachers across the district can work together despite being distanced from each other and managing conflicting schedules.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Cause Analysis. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> The Mesa Unified School District is one of the largest school districts in the state of Arizona. Due to the large size, teachers and schools are spread out. Teachers are also accustomed to working on their own or within their grade levels at their schools. The standards have remained relatively the same for a long time in Arizona and teachers have become accustomed to teaching in set ways. The new standards require teachers to teach in different ways. All of these different factors have contributed to the challenges brought upon teachers with the introduction of the Common Core Standards.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Organizational History and Background **


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Goals. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Mesa Public Schools’ Charting Excellence committee compiled a list of priorities and goals with the input of community members. Under the first priority of learning and achievement, the goal is to “maximize the efficient and effective use of time, resources, and staff to ensure academic excellence” (Mesa Public Schools website, July 20, 2011). The Effective Teacher Collaboration Plan addresses this specific goal as it is designed to support effective teacher collaboration.

<span style="font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">**History.** Originally, Mesa consisted of six elementary school districts and one high school district. In 1946, the elementary and high school districts unified and became the Mesa Public School District. Currently, there are approximately 67,220 students with 3,954 teachers who work for the school district. During the 2008-2009 school year, the school district implemented a new planning process entitled Charting Excellence. The Charting Excellence development team consisted of students, parents, staff, and community leaders. The Charting Excellence development team delineated six district priorities and goals that went with each of the priorities. The district priorities and goals are used to guide the future of Mesa Public Schools.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Mission and Vision. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Mesa Public Schools’ mission statement is “to develop a highly educated and productive community, one student at a time.” The vision of Mesa Public Schools is “Unprecedented Excellence in Education.” Mesa Public Schools also believes that: “Each child is important. Learning is our focus. Collaboration and innovation are indispensable. Sound fiscal stewardship is essential. Diversity increases our opportunities. Success is expected and celebrated” (Mesa Public Schools website, July 20, 2011).


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Three Intervention Strategies **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Three different intervention strategies have been calculated to aid the teachers in working collaboratively in an asynchronous manner. Each of the intervention strategies would involve the use of Wiggio. Wiggio is a free online collaborative suite of tools that will allow teachers to email, chat through instant messages, send out mass emails, voice and video chat, write on discussion boards, as well as share and store files. The first intervention strategy would provide training by a specialist for the educational technology mentors at each school site. The mentors would then be responsible for training and supporting the rest of the staff. The second intervention strategy would provide a number of headsets that could be used for voice chat. The third intervention strategy would provide a number of headsets and webcams that give teachers the ability to voice and video chat.


 * Low-end intervention. **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The use of the Wiggio online collaboration suite is free for the teachers. However, there would be a fee for the trainer. There is an estimated cost of $1,000 for a day of training that would consist of three two-hour training sessions. There are four different trainings available, and all would be included. The trainer would focus on teaching the educational technology mentors all of the different ways to use Wiggio to collaborate. The mentors would then be responsible for training the rest of the staff. Thus, the total cost of the low-end intervention is projected at $4,000.

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">**Middle-end intervention.**This middle-end intervention builds upon the features of the low-end intervention, but also includes the purchase of 1,000 headsets that the teachers would be able to use for synchronous voice-chatting with other teachers. This would allow teachers to collaborate asynchronously (through Wiggio) as well as synchronously (through voice). Due to the large number of teachers, the headsets would need to be shared. There would be approximately 1 headset available for every 4 teachers. At $22.99 each, with the purchase of 1,000, the total cost of the headsets would be $22,990. The training cost ($4,000) would be added to this, giving a projected total cost of $26,990.

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">**High-end intervention.**This high-end intervention would include all of the features of the first two interventions and would add in the additional element of webcams. The use of the webcam would allow teachers to video chat. The projected number of webcams to be purchased would be 1,000. As with the headsets, these too would be shared. The cost of the webcams is also $22.99. The purchase of 1,000 webcams would be $22,990. The total for this proposed intervention would be $49,980.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Justification for Intervention Strategy **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The intervention that I recommend is the high-end intervention that includes web-cams. One reason people tend to be hesitant in adopting Web-based communication is due to the fear that they will miss face-to-face contact. It is also easy to misinterpret the written word, but with the web-cams, teachers would have the ability to see body language, facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice (Olejnikova & De Perio Wittman, 2008). Webcams allow for a portion of the communication and collaboration to take place face-to-face and will add a richer dimension to the communication. Web-cams would support one of Mesa Public Schools primary goals which is to “ <span style="color: black; font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">maximize the efficient and effective use of time, resources, and staff to ensure academic excellence” (Mesa Public Schools website, July 20, 2011, para. 1).

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The low-end intervention does offer teachers the ability to collaborate using Wiggio. The teachers would be able to chat via text, as well as post in discussion boards, send emails, share documents and create folders to store items. However, unless teachers had their own access to headsets and/or webcams, they would be limited to communicating through text only. The biggest down fall of this is that teachers would not form the same personal connection with other teachers that can result from voice and web-cam features. This would be an effective low-budget way to get started; however, long-term it is not as promising of an option.

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The medium-end intervention would allow teachers to enjoy all the features of Wiggio, but also give them the ability to chat using headsets through the computer. This intervention strategy adds more richness to the communication with the ability to hear tone of voice and voice inflection through the chat feature. Humor and sarcasm are easier to infer through voice instead of relying solely on the written word, this allows for better understanding and less chance of misinterpretation of text.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">The Manager’s Many Roles **

<span style="font-family: 'times new roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Project management techniques: For the Effective Teacher Engagement Plan, the primary roles of the project manager would be that of leader and coach. As a leader, I would coordinate the entire project. I would arrange for the trainer to train the educational technology mentors from the different schools. I would also oversee the educational technology mentors as they go back to their sites and train the staff at their schools. Timelines would be established for training the educational technology mentors as well as plans for how they are going to train the teachers at their schools. As a coach, I would create a positive work environment for the teachers, help teachers develop a plan, inform teachers of performance expectations, observe performance, provide feedback and conduct an end-of-quarter review every eight-weeks.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Resource management techniques: The resources that will be utilized are the trainer to train the educational technology mentors, an educational technology mentor from each school, computers for the teachers to use, headsets and web-cams along with the Wiggio software. A plan will be developed for the teachers to identify the type of communication, collaboration, and participation that will be required. Progress will be monitored through teachers’ contributions on Wiggio.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Delivery system management techniques: Teachers will have a web cam conference with me using Wiggio to develop the plan. The primary technology used for management as well as for teacher collaboration will be through Wiggio. The individual teachers’ plans will be stored through Wiggio, conferencing will take place through Wiggio, and feedback will also be given using the Wiggio system.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Information management techniques: Teachers and I, as the manager, will be able to store, access and process information for the evaluation through Wiggio. Different folders and groups can be created to store files and other pertinent information.