Assessing and Planning Skills

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I enjoyed Chapter 12 that covered Assessing and Planning Skills. When I was reading about Gantt charts I found them interesting – but at the time I was much more interested in the Pareto and Impact Analysis Charts. Perhaps my background in sales and marketing led to my attraction to those two types of charts over the Gantt chart. The Pareto chart immediately gave me solid numerical data and listed a breakdown of contributing factors. The example showed a school's climbing dropout rate. It gave a straight forward big picture view of the dropout rates for this school. The breakdown of contributing factors also gave the campus and school community clear targets for improvement such as more education and interventions in regards to drug and alcohol abuse and teen pregnancies. This chart to me quickly gave information and a suggested target plan. In sales and marketing this type of chart would have dictated targets for my advertising budget.

I was also drawn to the Impact Analysis Chart. I think once again this goes back to my business background. In my last management role I managed 32 people. We were the marketing, recruiting, and sales team. It was a great team. However, any time we faced a big change we could potentially lose one to two weeks money due to the difficulties that some folks faced with serious change. I would have loved to have had a tool like this to decide the best way to approach the changes and how best to support those through it. It would have been a great tool to share with them to show how much care, concern, and consideration was taken before in advance of upcoming changes. Clearly this also carries over to the school environment - which is not as fast paced and not as flexible when appro...

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...aborative teams with great thought for compatibility and work styles. The supervisors are expected to complete this at the end of the year so the teachers know what their assignments are for the upcoming year. In return the teachers are expected to prepare collaboratively before the start of the school year. The collaborative teams are expected to attend collaborative trainings together as a team during the school year and hopefully will choose to seek some training during the summer time as well. If there are multiple collaborative teams within a particular grade level core academic subject, that entire group is expected to attend the collaborative training together. We decided to make the entire process collaborative to produce the best collaborative processes. I am very pleased with the tool we created. I look forward to what we will be exploring next.

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