Collaborative team meetings take place every 9-10 days in our schools. In these meetings, teachers from one grade level, literacy coaches, and our principal meet together to discuss individual students, the curriculum, and goals.

I want to share video from one team meeting early in the year. In September, three 4th grade teachers, a literacy coach, the principal and I sat down together in a collaborative team meeting to pore over the assessments of students from the previous year, comparing these notes to our ongoing fall assessments of individual students.

We don't follow a specific protocol in these meetings. You'll see how we move naturally from focusing on individual students, to a free-ranging discussion of analyzing the gaps between our notes and previous assessments, teaching strategies we're trying, and new instructional tools we've developed.

Because we meet often, participants are comfortable sharing their expertise as well as their needs. In this first half of the meeting, everyone introduces themselves, and then we move into discussions of students who are puzzling to us. Sometimes the confusion arises from a marked difference between spring and fall assessments; sometimes we are unsure of next steps for the child because they are an English language learner and we need further information or background.

We also discuss the different ways participants analyze and use the assessments to help students set goals in this portion of the meeting.

We use the CAFE menu in our literacy program. CAFE is an acronyn for

Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary. You can download a copy of the menu at this link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/The_Literacy_Cafe_Menu.pdf

For more information on CAFE, click on this link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/232.cfm

The video is divided into two sections, to speed up loading time: