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Collaborative Team Meetings with Kurtis Hewson, ep. 224

Front view of a group of teachers standing and smiling. These words are at the bottom, "Collaborative Team Meetings with Kurtis Hewson".

Teacher collaboration doesn’t happen by accident! We need to build structures and processes to support it! That’s why I invited Kurtis Hewson from Jigsaw Learning to join me on the podcast to discuss collaborative team meetings!

In this episode, Kurtis provides an introduction to collaborative team meetings. We talk about building a collaborative culture that supports teachers working together and reduces isolation. He explains what distributive coaching is and why the most critical resource we have is the expertise of every individual in the building. We explore the structures and roles that make collaborative team meetings effective. Plus, he provides a detailed look at the process of collaborative team meetings.

This episode is part of our series about developing a coaching action plan. In this series, I’m sharing tools to help you create an action plan that works at the whole school level, for differentiated teacher team meetings, and for individual coaching.

What Do Collaborative Team Meetings Look Like?

Kurtis says when he facilitates a collaborative team meeting, nothing is left to chance within the conversation as far as the structure goes. He asks teachers to prepare by using a pre-meeting organizer that they fill out. He also provides an agenda and note-taking document, so teachers know the plan.

At the start of the meeting, the group reviews the norms. These are what we believe and how we expect each other to act in these conversations. He recommends picking one norm per meeting to focus on and having things to look for – like how many times we hear “what if” as we try to think about solutions.

After establishing norms, the meeting continues with student celebrations. Teachers celebrate one of their students around the current focus of work. The facilitator then asks them, “What did you do that led to that success?”. Kurtis explains that this is the most important question because others in the room have the opportunity to listen and get ideas.

He says his approach to team meetings is different from how he conducted them in the past. Before teachers would bring one student’s issues and everyone would give solutions. This approach can lead teachers to get overwhelmed and defensive.

Now, the teachers bring a student’s name and a key issue they’re experiencing with them. He then asks clarifying questions to understand the challenge.

Once the issue is clear Kurtis asks the other teachers in the room if they see this with any of their students. Next, he asks, “What could we do?”. Not what will we do, but what could we do? This encourages teachers to share strategies they’ve successfully used in their classrooms.

After brainstorming, Kurtis asks each teacher, “What’s one thing you’ll try and when will you try it?”. He explains that this approach is highly solutions focused and exceptionally action oriented. No one is telling the teacher what they should do. They’re still in control and have autonomy. It’s also a powerful opening for the coach to ask, “Do you need any help implementing that?”.

Kurtis says the process creates vulnerability. Not only is it acceptable to say “I’m struggling”, but it’s expected. He believes that’s how we get to the true culture of collaboration.

When it’s a cultural norm for people to say, “I’m not sure what to do, and I need some help,” they feel more comfortable seeking support and guidance. The goal is to make people feel safe enough to say they need assistance and they’re looking to build their expertise.

He strongly believes that when you bring structure, focus, and clarity to collaborative meetings, it takes the quality of conversations during informal times to a different place. It’s no longer about venting. Instead, it’s about collaborative problem solving.

I really like this approach because it gets teachers invested in sharing their own ideas and learning from others. It also lowers their defenses a bit and develops collaboration. I think the commitment piece at the end is a fantastic way to help build a bridge from the meeting to the classroom.

Distributive Coaching

The instructional coach plays a critical role in collaborative team meetings. While the coach is powerful, so is everyone else on the team!

Distributive coaching is the belief that everyone has valuable insights and experiences to share with colleagues. Kurtis emphasizes that approaching the work this way builds tremendous trust in the coach. Teachers can openly express that they like certain ideas but need help implementing them, giving the coach an opportunity to step in and support them.

In this approach, the coach isn’t the sole source of expertise and knowledge. Instead, they encourage the exchange of ideas among teacher teams. Kurtis explains that the goal is for the team to reach a place where the collective experience of the room is greater than any single person.

This shift moves away from a deficit mindset and allows the coach to support teachers in meaningful ways. Coaches aren’t visiting classrooms because they’ve identified something “wrong”. They’re there because the team has identified a challenge related to student learning. It’s a subtle but important shift. By distributing expertise, the coach’s impact expands, benefiting the entire learning community.

Roles During Collaborative Team Meetings

Meetings are critical if you’re collaborating, but unproductive meetings are not a good use of our time. We need to ensure our meetings are well structured and everyone is responsible for its success.

Assigning meeting roles is important for ensuring productivity and maintaining focus. Roles also foster collaboration and allow all voices in the room to be heard.


Here are the key roles discussed in the episode:

  • Facilitator – Guides the meeting, encourages participation, and keeps discussions on track. This is not always the formal leader. As teams get better with this process they can take on this role.

  • Recorder/Note Taker – Captures key points and decisions.

  • Timekeeper – Ensures the meeting stays within set time limits.



Some schools also introduce additional roles to enhance accountability:

  • Interrupter – Politely intervenes when discussions go off track. They ask, “What are we going to do about it?” to refocus the conversation.

  • Norm Analyst – Observes how well the group adheres to established norms and provides feedback at the end of the meeting.

Collaborative Team Meetings

I really enjoyed my conversation with Kurtis. He is super knowledgeable about collaborative team meetings. I know you’ll find this episode helpful as you think about how you can build these structures into your school and how you can support teachers in your teacher team meetings.

Topics and Questions Discussed in Episode 224 – Collaborative Team Meetings with Kurtis Hewson

  • An introduction to collaborative team meetings as part of the collaborative response framework

  • What is distributive coaching, and why is it important

  • Building a collaborative culture that supports teachers working together and reduces isolation

  • The roles and structures that help make collaborative team meetings effective

  • An in-depth look at the collaborative team meeting process, including celebrating student successes, identifying key issues, and committing to action


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Collaborative Team Meetings with Kurtis Hewson, ep. 224, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran 00:00
Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked now, I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode. Hey coach and welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B. This is episode 224, and today we are talking with my guest, Kurtis Hewson about collaborative team meetings. This is part of our developing a coaching Action Plan mini series, because I wanted to give you some tools to work with your school as a whole big picture stuff, and kind of help you create a plan that would attack everything that is needed at the whole group level, differentiated team meeting and individual coaching if you need help with that, head to buzzing with miss b.com/action plan and get the free Action Plan guide. It’s a little mini series, email video series that comes through your inbox, and it also gives you a really nice handout that you can use to plan out your action plan. Or you can get the whole action plan toolkit in my TPT store, just search for Chrissy Beltran and then look for Action Plan toolkit. We’re going to welcome Kurtis to the podcast to get started with our topic today. So let’s welcome Kurtis to the podcast. Welcome.

Kurtis Hewson 01:23
Hi there. Chrissy, great to be with you. Thank you so much for the invite. Well, I’m

Chrissy Beltran 01:28
so glad that you’re here today. I’d love for people to get to know you a little better. So it’s a quick way to introduce yourself, if you could tell it’s a couple of things. Who do you help? And how do you spend most of your time and energy at work?

Kurtis Hewson 01:39
Well, I help anyone who is there to help kids, primarily that is with school leaders and system leaders to be able to create systems, to create robust systems of collaboration within their schools, so that then those working closest to students have mechanisms To be able to collaborate effectively, to work together. I firmly believe that the most critical resource that we have in education are the individuals working closest to the child, ie the teachers, the paraprofessionals. And I think our role as leaders is to create opportunities for sharing, collaboration, support and reduction of isolation is isolationism for those individuals. So that’s what I do now, is come in, help support. Help set up robust systems of collaboration. We refer to it as collaborative response, and then to be there to help as schools put this process or this framework into place to be able to respond to as many needs as students, while also building the collective capacity of the staff. At the same time, I love

Chrissy Beltran 02:53
that dual focus. My next question is a question that I’ve been asking this season. I’m on a mission to share hobbies with coaches. I feel like we spend so much time with our schools, we don’t always do things for ourselves. So what is a hobby that you love to do?

Kurtis Hewson 03:07
Well, it’s going to feed a further stereotype. But I am Canadian, and so anything hockey related is fantastic. I play, I watch, enjoy our favorite teams, both my wife and I. That’s one in the summer golf and lots of time outside. And then most critically is time with family and those that are closest to me. Just I love being with those that I love i i don’t know if that’s considered the same type of hobby as as stamp collecting, but it’s where where my time goes when I’m not committed to work.

Chrissy Beltran 03:40
I think you count. I think if, if that isn’t a hobby, then a lot of us don’t have a hobby. Yeah, right. So okay, so what I would love to get started with is the ideas of collaborative, team meetings, distribute, coaching. Can you talk a little bit about these ideas and just give us an introduction?

Kurtis Hewson 03:56
Yeah? Can I back it up just a little bit to give just a quick reference here, so I’m going to talk about a collaborative team meeting, but understand that this is one part of what we refer to as a collaborative response framework. And we often say to schools, the work’s not a program. It’s not something you get trained on. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking in your school about how do we collaboratively respond? And that may seem well, isn’t that obvious? Isn’t that what we don’t or what we do all the time? And I would argue it’s not. I don’t think schools, in many ways, collaborate to the best of our abilities, and I think there’s a lot of expertise that goes untapped within schools. So collaboratively responding is what we’re trying to achieve, and the collaborative team meeting is key to that. So in in our framework, we talk about four layers of team, and this formulates one of our core foundational components, which is collaborative structures and processes. I believe every school needs. Strong collaborative structures and processes. The second foundational component is data and evidence. Do you have information that’s informing those conversations? And then the third is continuum of supports. Have we clearly articulated what we will do when students struggle? So going into that first component of the collaborative structures and processes, four layers of team. I’ll take you back to our school in the mid 2000s we had grade level teams. They operated very much in in alignment with PLC type work, where teams were examining data, they were establishing a goal, they were working towards, that they were trying things in the classroom, coming back. What have we notice what’s our next step? Those were working. Then we also had what we would later come to refer to as our third layer of team, the school support team. So myself, as principal, assistant principal, a learning support teacher and a Family School Wellness liaison, kind of consider, you know, your specialist or your special ed side of things. Every week, the four of us would meet and determine who are the students that are being referred, who are the ones that need support beyond the classroom. What do we do? Do we go back and help support the teachers further? Do we accelerate it to a referral? And then there were often times in the school where we’d say, Okay, we need to talk about this one kid, and let’s get all the right players around the table. This came our fourth layer, and what we were finding is sometimes the PLC work, which we now call collaborative planning, because we see schools subscribing to professional learning communities, we also see other collaborative structures that are meant to serve the same purpose, but that collaborative planning is intended to be, what are we doing to look at our instructional practices and make adjustments to impact all learners? Our grade level teams sometimes were engaged in work that wasn’t necessarily responsive to what we were seeing in the class. So a real simple example, you’d have a grade one team working on really robust writing consistencies across classrooms and using common writing prompts, and then getting student work and creating exemplars for that and creating it so that students could start to measure their own work against that. But when you were in the classrooms, you go, Oh, my goodness, the primary thing that we’re experiencing right now is the lack of executive functioning. The work that teachers are doing is good work, but it’s not necessarily what’s getting in their way from day to day. And then when you looked at our data, you go, actually, our kids are not that bad or writers to begin with. And then our other layers of team were getting overloaded. We felt like there were so many times where it was a reality of our system, but it felt like a teacher would say, I’ve done everything. Here you go, and it would feel like a handoff to us, and again, it’s a reality of the system we had, not of the great people that were doing all that they could for kids, but we were getting overwhelmed, and the work that was happening there was in no way collaborative. Lots of times again, it was. What we are finding is even in a small school, the answer might lie two doors away, but we didn’t have mechanisms to help elicit that effectively. So that’s a very long way of getting to the collaborative team meeting. The collaborative team meeting became the second layer, and it’s what we’ve seen as foundational to exploring students and lead to this distributive coaching concept that I’ll I’ll get to it here in a little bit. The collaborative team meeting, highly structured. It requires facilitation, at least initially. In time, we can see school or teams that are self sufficient once they learn the process, highly structured. We have things like norms in place. Meeting roles. People come ready with the students that there’s a pre meeting organizer that they have filled in that there’s nothing left to chance within this conversation as far as the structure goes. But then it starts like this, Chrissy, we will go, and once we’ve had a quick chance to review norms, pick one that we’ll focus in on today, I’m going, you’re going to say to me so Kurtis, who’s a student you’ve brought to celebrate, and I and we often set that there’s an overarching focus. So if our school has said we’re really trying to move the needle on literacy, well, literacy might be our overall focus. Or if lots of schools during COVID said student well being that’s our primary focus. Okay, so come with a student in mind of our overarching focus. You ask me for a celebration, and I say, I have Tyrone, and I’ve really been impressed with the growth I’ve seen in his letter recognition. He had great difficulty with Oh, at least 15 of the 26 letters just recognizing which they were, let alone sounds he’s now he’s up to. 24 and 26 on most days. It’s incredible growth. Now, what you do as the facilitator? Say, that’s awesome. What did you do that led to that success? And the others in the room have the opportunity for to listen when I start to share. Here’s some strategies I’ve tried. Here’s what I’ve learned. I I put down that, you know, the use of visual anchors within the room has been great, but I started to put different pictures based on student interest level. So I’ve actually got pictures. Tyrone is a skateboarder. He loves skateboarding, so I’ve got little skateboarding things on there. And T was a letter he was struggling with before. I’ve got trucks, skateboard trucks only. He knows what that those societal wheels means, but it works really well. Now someone in that room is going to go, for me, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s something I use. Someone in that room is going to go, that’s genius. I love that idea. Then, once we’ve had that, that little bit of celebration time, that’s 510 minutes, depending on the amount of time that you have, then we launch into a really specific process. And people get really excited when they see this. And it was honed through a lot of years of of evolution, because it used to be I’ve brought this kid, here’s my issue, here’s my concerns, and we’d all problem solve, but it would be around one kid, and I’d be at the table, and everyone in the room would be saying, Kurtis, you should, you should, you should. And I can sometimes get overwhelmed, yeah, with that, or defensive or, Oh, I’ve already tried that. No, that wouldn’t work for this kid. Here’s what this looks like. We say, alright, Kurtis, who’s a student that you’ve brought name only, and what’s a key issue that you’re experiencing? And so let’s again, assume that our overarching focus is numeracy this time. And I say I have Michelle, and my key issue is processing multi step problems stop now a facilitator might ask, describe to us, what you mean by that? What does that look like? Do you think it’s a language comprehension issue, or is it logical thinking? And I say no, she’s the language is not the problem here. It’s understanding step one, step two, step b. So we say, all right. Key issue is

Kurtis Hewson 12:29
thinking through steps when solving multi step problems, or lot sequential thinking when solving multi step problems. And then we say, Chrissy, do you have a student just a name that also, you also see that, and you say, Yeah, add Tanisha to that list. And another person says, Yeah, I’ve got this. Another one says these two. When someone says, my whole class is struggling with that, then we still say, well, name one or two that you’re interested in. And then we open up to say, what could we do? And that language is really important. It’s not what will we do, it’s what could we do. And now, Chrissy, you jump in with one of the things I do in my classroom is I have students underline with a highlighter, yellow, step one, orange, step two, and green step three. And someone else says, Oh, I do something like that, but I actually do it right up on my whiteboard so that students can see that. Someone goes, you know, I wonder if, what if we were to take a problem and, like, physically cut it apart so that the students could see step one, step two, step three. And then someone else says, I, what I get my students to do is think through the steps, and then they turn to a partner to share. And then I purposely pick out students who I know are struggling, to ask them to describe back the steps. This is all great ideas, differentiated strategies that we can try. Once we’ve had a chance to brainstorm, we come back and say, All right, Kurtis, for the student, for Michelle, what’s one thing? And I go, you know, I really like Chrissy. Idea of actually, physically cutting up the problem. I I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s a great put me down. And we go, awesome. When do you think you could do that by I said, I’m, I’m going to try it next week. I’ll need the weekend just to get a few things ready. So pop me down for next week. Awesome. We assign action and then we go to Chrissy, Chrissy, who’s a student you that you identified, and what’s one thing you’re going to try? So the idea within this is it’s highly solutions focused and exceptionally action oriented for it, and no one in the room is saying, Kurtis, you should do this. I’m still in control, and it leads to some coaching mechanisms that I’ll talk about here for you. But from your perspective, where I know you’re looking at coaching from an overall PD sense, team meetings, and then individual in the team meetings, the beauty. Of this is it then leads to both. It could be. I love Chris’s idea, but I need some help with that. Well, now you’ve just got an excellent opportunity to say, I’ll come join you in your room, and I’ll model it for you, if you like, or when the rest of the room goes. That’s an interesting idea. Chrissy, how do you do that? Where you go? This is a great opportunity for us all to learn a particular strategy. It feeds both both of those opportunities. For you, sorry, I’ve shared a lot, but I hope it’s given a description of that particular meeting layer we found by adding that it we often say you’re you add one, you reduce your number of meetings by adding one more, because you’re just building capacity all the time. I really

Chrissy Beltran 15:44
like that change that you made. I think that was a really good point. And having other people say, you know, I have everybody. These are not uncommon issues. The majority of things that we see, we’re going to see them in multiple classrooms, in the same grade or in thin content area. So I like that you have had people say, Oh, I do have a student who’s struggling that. Because then everybody is invested. Not only in providing something, but in getting something from everybody else, absolutely. That develops that collaboration, and it lowers the defenses a little bit. Because, you know, it’s not just Peggy going, Oh, my kid, can’t do this and I’m struggling in this area. Everybody else says, Oh, we’re also struggling in that too. You’re not the absolutely

Kurtis Hewson 16:18
and and through that, I don’t have the potential embarrassment, or even the thinking in my head of I’m the only one that’s struggling with this, because we often say in the collaborative team meeting, everyone is an expert and everyone is a learner. And I don’t care what your role is or how many years background you have. Nobody has this profession perfected to a point that there’s not something new that I can learn that interesting thing is, I’m in my 28th year. I do hundreds of these meetings, facilitating, modeling it for people, everyone I walk out with a new website, a new resource, a new way of thinking. I hear something new every time that I’ve never heard before, there’s so

Chrissy Beltran 17:03
much, there’s so much, and that’s, I think part of the problem that teachers have is sifting through all that information. But this is like stuff that actual people on your own campus right down the hallway are doing, so it’s 100% likely to work. You know, it’s been tested.

Kurtis Hewson 17:19
The beauty of this, and I think it’ll be really interesting for your audience, is we had a situation where we had a instructional coach within our building, and she could easily get into some classrooms, and it was harder in others, or even when principal said, Thou shalt, there was still a resistance that would come In by having her in these meetings, when she would offer an idea for somebody to say, I’m not sure about that, I could come in and take a look for you. And then it started to bring down people’s defenses, because she’s not seen as the instructional coach at a higher level. She’s just one more teacher who has some great expertise to be able to address and this led to this idea of distributive coaching. Is now a good time to jump into that. Chrissy, yes, perfect. Okay, so the idea of this is, of course, the instructional coach is critical in this work, and I loved An episode I heard from your podcast with Todd Whitaker, when he talks about, I want that person to be a hero within the school, for people to see them as a hero. I thought that was excellent. The idea is, in these team meetings, the instructional coach is powerful, but so is everybody else. And so the idea of distributive coaching is everybody has something they could contribute or share or teach another colleague, and this is where we see huge trust start getting built in our instructional coach. When Teacher A says, I really like teacher B’s idea, but I need some help. And the instructional coach can then jump in to say, You know what, why don’t I grab your Kids tomorrow for just 20 minutes so you can go over to this person’s classroom to view or I could go there help this. So it’s not that the instructional coach has to be seen as the holder of the universal master teachers toolbox, but they’re facilitating the sharing because we want to get to a place that the room is always more experienced than any one individual. But by doing that, then it still allows structural coach the opportunity to say, Yeah, I can cover off for this person to try this. I can also come in and help you show this, and it’s now there’s a little less threat that comes along with that, because I’m not coming there because there’s a deficit in your teaching, I’m coming there because we’ve identified an issue in relation to student learning. Just that subtle little shift becomes. So incredible here for us, and as a teacher who’s a little bit not quite on board with the coach coming in to help me, but think of what happens when the coach says, Wow, that’s powerful. What you’ve just said, Why don’t I cover you for a bit so you can show this other person you’re building up huge respect for one another and reliance on one another, which can only help just drive the the power of the coach further. And the other thing that I think is important is an instructional coach saying in a meeting. You know, here’s a strategy that I’ve learned can work really effectively, and they’ve said it in a room of six people. Well, that becomes much more powerful than if I went into each of those six classrooms individually, not just from a time disbursement perspective, but also it’s almost that train, the trainer kind of idea of if I can show this one person or share it out with others, and then the next time when I’m not in that room, that person can say, you know, Chrissy came in, worked with me a couple months ago on this. Let me show you how, how it works for you. You’re just distributing your expertise so much further.

Chrissy Beltran 21:19
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point that you can, kind of, people can kind of be, like commercials, you know, to say, I mean, yeah, this actually worked. I did try this out, and it worked. I also really liked that that this is a while back, but you mentioned, kind of, like the commitment piece at the end of of your meeting, where you’re basically saying, make a commitment. What are you committing to? You know, what is that going to look like? And I think that’s a really good way to people struggle to bridge the things that we talk about in one room back into their classrooms. Yeah, have to help them build a bridge. And I think that’s a really good way to build a bridge. Say, you know, when do you expect to be able to try this out? And then you’re going to let us know how

Kurtis Hewson 21:59
it went, so you’re well. And there’s also an opening there that’s really powerful, that when I say I’m going to try this particular strategy for the coach to jump and say, Do you need any help with that? Can I help you with that in any way? And now it’s in my wheelhouse to say, No, I think I’m okay. I’ll let you know if I have a struggle or Yeah, I would love that if you were there

Chrissy Beltran 22:21
to be able to help more modes of providing that support, like you mentioned, they can go visit a colleague, they can model, they can help them look up something. They can provide a resource. You know, they’re the book that I’m actually working on having published right now is about leveraging your coaching opportunities into coaching work. And sometimes we miss those opportunities because we go, okay, great. Well, now you know what you’re going to do. Awesome. Yeah, let me know if you need any help. But let me know if you need any help. Doesn’t ever get anybody to ask you for That’s right. 100% like present, you have to listen and say, Okay, I hear this opportunity, and I’m going to offer this, this support in the moment. I’m not going to wait for them to tell me I’m going to do work, and

Kurtis Hewson 23:01
this meeting that I’m describing affords that completely. Yeah, I

Chrissy Beltran 23:05
hear that. That’s great. So then I what I’m hearing is so many different ways, but I would love for you to elaborate on building a collaborative culture that supports teachers and working together, because you’re already doing so much just in having everybody be sort of leveling the playing field, because everybody’s contributing that student who is struggling in the same thing. But what are some of the things that you do to build that culture so you don’t have as many teachers who are like, no, none of my kids struggle with that or, well, I just did what the curriculum said, and then they just kind of don’t really want to continue sharing authentically about what they’re doing. What kinds of things do you do there? Oh,

Kurtis Hewson 23:42
my goodness, so much, Chrissy, but I’ll highlight some of the keys. And one of the things that helps that collaborative culture, and it’s that second foundational component that I spoke of, of data and evidence, that when we have solid data and evidence that’s available, when a person says, nah, my kids are doing great. I’m awesome. I found for myself as a leader. It was easy. Sorry, easy is the wrong word. It was supported when I said, Actually, our data says that we’re seeing these three kids struggling. So what are you seeing as a key concern within that now, it might take some teasing to get that out, but the the data can help surface and even through that meeting structure that I described, it’s not about anyone’s lack of teaching expertise, even though we’re building everyone’s expertise through it. It’s about this student is, is here, and here’s a struggle I have. So the process itself starts creating vulnerability, the that not only is it acceptable for me to say I’m struggling in this and I’m not quite sure where to go next, it’s expected, and we often say that. That’s how we get to that true culture of collaboration, when people are not only willing, but see it as a cultural norm to be able to say, I’m not sure what to do and I need some help. But it’s not that I’m handing it off. It’s not that I’m saying I don’t know what to do. So it’s your problem now, Chrissy, it’s it’s having that high degree of collective efficacy, of I know what I’m doing that can have an impact, and when I’m not seeing impact, I’m looking for other ways. So something is simple in that meeting that I describe, but now we see it that gets played out in every meeting is taking that short time for celebrations. And it’s not just a I’d like to celebrate all all of our junior high students, they’ve done so well adapting to the new Flex block that we’ve put in place. We want to get into specifics, to say, all right, who? And then the most important question, what did you do that led to that success? Doing that over and over again helps reinforce what Hattie has told us, or described as collective efficacy. Johnny Jenny Donahue talks about this as well, and we know what an important aspect it is, or how critically important it is, to impact student achievement and then being able to put clear structures in place. And I often joke when working with schools around things like norms. And when I was an A beginning leader, I thought norms must be for schools that where they don’t like each other very much, or they don’t know each other. Our schools not like that. We don’t need norms. And yeah, we didn’t need norms when the conversations were surface level, when we were just sharing and helping and and jumping in where we could but when we started to get into challenging conversations, and people started to ask me, what do you do in your classroom when this happens, we needed norms. We needed to put that in place. I also didn’t realize that having meetings where there were roles assigned became critically important. You know, have we clearly indicated the facilitator? And have we does everyone in the room know what that person’s job is, who’s taking our notes? And do we have those projected up so everyone can see? Do we have a timekeeper? And then we see schools that start infusing different roles. Because what that does is starts to ensure that when we come together to meet and and I’ll back this up anytime someone says, Man, I wish we could get rid of meetings. To me, that’s foolhardy. I think what they’re meaning is, I wish we could get rid rid of unproductive meetings. I can get behind that, but meetings are critical. If you’re collaborating, you have to, and so that whole idea of ensuring that that meeting is well structured and by the rules, everyone has responsibility for its success. It’s not left up to one person, and one time when I have to facilitate, the next time we meet and I’m not facilitating, I have a whole new appreciation for the person who’s trying to keep their colleagues in line. My phone’s now away, because it really was difficult last time when I was facilitating. All these things lead to that culture of collaboration. And I’m a big believer that if you create structure, focus and clarity in your formalized, collaborative times, the conversations in informal times goes to a different place. And I saw this school over school over school, the conversation in the staff room changes in the work room, it sounds different. Out in the parking lot, it sounds different. It’s no longer about venting. It’s about, I’m struggling with this. What do you think I could do? What? What’s something that, that you’ve tried, that’s worked it? There’s just a different feel in those schools.

Chrissy Beltran 28:57
Yeah, I like that. It’s like a collaborative problem solving, they’re sharing and the 100% Yeah, that’s

Kurtis Hewson 29:03
beautiful. And to me, I think that’s all about the systems that you put in place. I a do not think it’s about hiring, and I don’t think it’s about just hoping that, that it’ll happen. It’s it’s about creating conditions, expectations, habits that we put into place. I’m a big believer that our profession becomes better when it’s collaborative and seen as a collective endeavor, where I think too many schools across North America still reside in the I close my door and do my best.

Chrissy Beltran 29:44
Yes, that’s that little teacher saying it. I you know, whenever I was a teacher, and I share this on the podcast all the time, we had a lot of autonomy, a lot, and I loved it as a teacher, it was great. I enjoyed that. How. Avert. It was great for me individually. Not good for a school, right? Not good for kids who are moving up in different classrooms and getting wildly different experiences depending on what room they happen to be assigned to. It was it. So we see teachers who use that well, you know you do what’s best, close your door and do what’s best for kids. Well, that implies that you always know what’s best in every month, 100% Yeah, I

Kurtis Hewson 30:22
would also, I would argue too, that collaboration and autonomy are not two separate things. We can have both. Um, Michael Fullan talks about that the paradox of these two can co exist. And for someone who I’ll go back to your comment of it was great for me. I’ve I’ve found oftentimes when teachers get into these really focused Well, the schools we work with to establish collaborative response. No one’s saying that you have to follow this script in your classroom. No one’s taking away your autonomy. But we’re creating some consistency, some structures and the opportunities for you to not only have the chance to say, I’m not sure what to do, but it’s expected that you’re going to say that we have schools that say, I actually feel more free as a classroom teacher now, because I know this, that when I hit a wall, I’m not alone. I have layers of teams that I’m going to go to, and I all of a sudden have a colleague who’s on the other side of the school teaching something very different from me, but I was in a collaborative team meeting with them six months ago, and I know they, they have a great understanding around this particular child I’m working with right now. I’m making that connection and and this work just creates so many robust connections between people that we hear about the epidemic of teacher wellness, teacher burnout. For it, we see less instances of that when schools are engaged in this type of work, because I’m not alone, I always have a team that’s with me.

Chrissy Beltran 32:12
Yes, I agree. I think that I was very comfortable like i There were people I could go to to ask for support and help. You know, we had created a team in my grade level, but there were no structures to help us do this. So it was all whatever we figured out to do. There was no there was no support. And I think that people get used to doing things completely on their own, and then whenever we try to start systems like this, they feel like we’re telling them, oh, you have to do it exactly in this way. And so I love the piece that you have in your process where teachers actually say, out of all these ideas, this is what I can do, or I heard all these ideas, and it made me think of this other thing exactly that you know, when maybe it’s not even something somebody specifically shared, but just having that dialog, you know, stimulated an idea, a different idea. Um,

Kurtis Hewson 32:58
Christy, the interesting thing with this is through the structures and processes, as you create psychological safety within that, we see teachers when first engaging in this process, where they’ll reach for low hanging fruit, they’ll say, Okay, I was planning to do this anyway as my next step. So put me down as that action. But what we see through this is people start to stretch. They start we start to hear sometimes we don’t hear it in the meeting. Sometimes we see it after the meeting, where someone goes and reaches out and said, you know that website you shared in that meeting. Can you show me what that looks like? I I know we’ve shown it before, and I didn’t want to sound foolish with my principal in the room, but what do you see? But then people reach the point of it’s not foolish to be able to say, I really am intrigued by that idea, but I need help. I need help to be able to implement that. And that’s to me, that’s what we want in this profession, is to have the safety to say I need help. And it’s not a that I expect anyone to throw me a life preserver. That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m I’m looking to build my expertise so I can attend to this child, because that’s what most of us got into this for, is I want to make a difference for kids, and if I have multiple ways to do that, hooray.

Chrissy Beltran 34:18
Yeah, I think the biggest disservice we do to teachers is they start teaching, and we stick them in a room by themselves with a bunch of kids, and they don’t see anybody else teach, and they don’t talk to anybody else, and nobody sees them teach. Maybe your principal comes in once a year or three times a year to do walk throughs or your formal evaluation, but that’s it. And so whatever you figure out is what you figure out, and you that usually comes from the framework of your own education, and what that was like, you know? And so that’s not always great, but we have serve what is it survivor, the survivor fallacy or something, where we think, Well, I made it through, so it must have worked. That’s fine, 100% Yeah.

Kurtis Hewson 34:54
Well, and I think this is where I get so excited for your audience. Is. Is, if I’m in a school without the systems and structures put in place to collaborate, it can be difficult and isolating work as an instructional coach, because I know you know from your experience that in a school there’s going to be teachers who can’t wait for you to come in. There’s going to be teachers that will need a little nudge or a push, and there will be others who know I’m good, even though you know that’s not the case, but Right? You put that same instructional coach into a school with highly aligned and clearly defined systems and structures and processes in place? Oh my goodness, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire. It can just have such tremendous impact. And it’s in those places that we see instructional coaches just I, I have so many different avenues and opportunities to impact instruction which helps kids, which is the whole reason I’m I’m in this to begin with.

Chrissy Beltran 36:00
So what I want to get into in the last couple of minutes here, I want to know about a little bit about the structures and a little bit about the roles, because I think these are things that help us keep them structured right, making sure that these meetings are purposeful, that people don’t walk away going, that could have been an email. You know, we want it to be purposeful, and people to know what they’re walking away with and the structure is supportive of that. So can you talk a little bit about the roles that are helpful for these collaborative team meetings? You mentioned a few of them, but how you kind of assign them, or how that works, and then also some structures that are really valuable,

Kurtis Hewson 36:34
you bet. And I’m going to also provide a resource, a free PDF for your listeners, it’s called five or transform your team meetings. It includes five considerations that are, I think, essential for every team meeting. I’ll make sure that link is in there or sent to you to be able to include in that we talk about, is there a clearly established agenda? Slash notes, taking document, and we give some strategies for what that puts when there’s a clear agenda that when people come together, they know exactly where we’re going, the times, everything within it really, really powerful. I already mentioned norms, having norms in place, and not just words on a page, or somebody in a monotone voice reads them out at the start, that’s we’re going to pick one that we will focus on today. So one of our norms is we will be solutions focused. So today, Chrissy, I’d love for you, in honor of that norm, on a post it note keep track of how many times you hear the words, what if we use, what if, when we’re trying to think out solutions, let us know how we did. We’re aiming for 10 within this conversation, so it’s it’s practicing these norms so that they’re not just words on a page. They’re actually this is what we believe, or this is how we expect each other to behave in these conversations. And I, again, I don’t mean that in a punitive way. I mean, just clear expectations for us. Without it, we’re working off assumptions.

Chrissy Beltran 38:06
Yes, clear expectations actually supports people from Duval into, you know, giving people the benefit of the doubt and support, and telling people whenever they’ve strayed, they have a kind and reasonable way to bring them back, because they can say, You know what, this is what we’re working on today. So let’s really try to refocus ourselves in this way, without expectations. It’s harder actually, to bring people back whenever they’re kind of, you know, moving in a different direction.

Kurtis Hewson 38:30
It absolutely is. I We also have a free how to create team norms guide that I’ll include to share out as well. I to me, if you have a team meeting or on a regular basis, you need norms established, the idea of roles. I we have on our website, Jigsaw learning.ca, a number of different resources around creating roles. I mentioned the three key ones I think every meeting has who’s the facilitator, and it might not always be the formalized, formal leader. When schools get really good in these processes, we can, we can come and say who’d like to facilitate today, because the facilitator is not just running us through the agenda. They’re listening deeply. They’re they’re hearing, they’re paraphrasing back what they think they’re hearing. They’re they’re making sure that others are getting drawn into the conversation. When I facilitate, I often have everyone’s name on a piece of paper beside me, and I’m ticking off when I’ve heard from them, and then I’m jumping in to say, Tony, haven’t heard your thoughts yet. What are you thinking around this I mentioned the note the recorder or the note taker, the timekeeper, I think, is critically important. Nothing does injustice more to feeling good about a meeting than having a 30 minute time limit that takes 75 Yeah. Yeah. Getting and we find once people put time parameters, it actually increases the productivity in their meeting. Because, okay, we have eight minutes. Let’s get at it. Let’s go. You break up

Chrissy Beltran 40:09
your agenda by minute. You do 100% Yeah, yeah,

Kurtis Hewson 40:12
to be able to say, and this is another key, and I mentioned it already, starting with celebrations, and even in the agenda document, it will say, celebration. What did we do that led to that success and having it right on the agenda that it says five minutes. Time Keepers start us for five minutes. You know, hold up a finger when we’re down to one, just so we know it’s almost time to move on. Starting with celebrations is massive, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time here for us. Coming back then to those roles, we often see schools that create roles to add to their meetings. So a role we often see is the interrupter, and it comes schools say, you know, whenever someone gets off off track, it’s the interrupter’s job to jump in and say, Okay, what are we going to do about it? Or I saw one school where they had just a bell that the interrupter had, and they would just ding when someone was off task and no one was offended, because we knew it’s that person’s job to do that. Another role that I loved was the norm analyst, and it’s that person’s job at the end of the meeting to reflect and report back out to everybody. How did we do on the one norm that we selected? We said that we would be all voices matter. It’s my job at the end to report back how I think we did on that or even what’s one instance where I saw that being put into place? These they seem small, and we often have school staff say it feels awkward and mechanical when we’re putting these in place to start in time. They’re just how we operate and and they lead to such incredible productivity. Again, I often when I hear a school say, we don’t need those. We collaborate great already. My response is, trust me, try them if you think you’re collaborating great now, just wait to what you’re going to be able to accomplish when this is put in place, it will take you to levels you had no idea you could get to as a team.

Chrissy Beltran 42:18
Yeah, that’s great. Thank you so much for sharing all of this information. I think it’s really interesting for people to look into to kind of take a look at their teams and say, what are we really accomplishing during this meeting? Do we need to maybe change our structure and find a way that will help us be more collaborative and more supportive of kids? So thank you so much for everything. Oh,

Kurtis Hewson 42:36
very welcome. Chrissy, how can people keep learning? For you, our website is the best place to go. It’s Jigsaw learning.ca right on the front page, there is a free overview of collaborative response that can give you more idea of of what I’ve kind of teased at through our episode. Here. We also have a text that came out from Corwin as well. There’s right on the front page, there’s a free download of the introduction. The beauty of that introductory chapter is a you get to preview the book before deciding if it’s something that would interest you. But there’s also a link in that free introductory chapter to a companion website that has all sorts of templates, videos, resources that you can access without having to get into the book. But I’d love for your listeners to check out the book. It’s had incredible impact for schools and just really honors and empowers, where I started this episode at of honors and empowers, what I think it’s the most critical resource that we have, and that’s the expertise in the building,

Chrissy Beltran 43:45
alright. Well, thank you so much for sharing about that. I’m sure people are going to look it up and and best of luck. Thank

43:52
you so much, Christie, it’s been an honor.

Chrissy Beltran 43:57
I know your brain is just bubbling with so many things after, after that conversation, I really love talking with Kurtis. He’s super knowledgeable in this area, and so I hope you guys check out the resources. I think it’ll be really helpful as you think about how you can build some of these structures into your school, and how you can support teachers in your differentiated team meetings in ways that really reach their students. Again, you can grab the free action plan guide. You can go to buzzing with Miss b.com/action plan. It’ll help you set up your three tiered approach towards your school support. And then next week, we’re talking to my friend Casey Watts about working with diverse PLC teams. This is one of the areas that coaches really struggle with. It’s getting our teachers to work together and collaborate whenever they come from super different backgrounds, very diverse, maybe approaches to their work, different ways of thinking about teaching, different personal backgrounds. So I’m excited to share that episode with you next week, and until then, happy coaching. Now that you’ve got so. Think about head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIB and check out the podcast. Show Notes. Happy coaching!

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