The focus for this lesson is your REACH group project. The project is described in the Leadership strand and skills you need to complete it are described in the other two strands.
The objectives for this project include:
Collaboratively develop an annotated bibliography of high-quality readings related to teacher leadership for yourself, your classmates, and the broader community. The project is structured around Meredith’s REACH Model of teacher leadership including risk-taking, effectiveness, accountability, collegiality, and honor.
This description of the final product is a starting vision for the project. As the project evolves, a new vision is likely to emerge. The intent is to develop a class-wide resource to endure beyond the course and serve as a reference for the future.
This project will be collaboratively developed using a wiki. You will learn about the advantages of a wiki in the Technology strand of this lesson. The final product will contain:
Note: This activity is based on home-expert-home implementation of Aronson’s jigsaw cooperative learning technique. You can get more details if you're interested.
Each person in the class is a member of two groups. The first is the Home group, comprised of five people with one person assigned to each area of the REACH model. Your instructor will make every effort to assign you to the topic most relevant to your specific interest. The purpose of these Home groups is to provide feedback to the experts as they develop the individual pages of the wiki.
Each person in the class is also a member of an Expert group that will focus on a specific component of the REACH model, i.e., one expert group focuses on risk-taking, another on effectiveness, etc.
Your professor is a member of all groups to monitor efforts and contributions of all parties. Unless necessary, the professor will not participate in the functioning of the group.
Home groups will "meet" to discuss what attributes and features they would like to see in the final product. Later, the Expert groups will convene to consider the input of the Home groups and form a work plan.
Each group of Experts will work together to construct a page of the wiki focusing on their specific component of the REACH model. Each page will include:
Expert group members must coordinate a method to track their search terms and databases used, identify criteria against which to evaluate identified resources (you'll learn more about that later in this lesson), and determine a way to decide which resources will be annotated. They also must provide annotations for the resources they determine to be most important.
To facilitate communication about entries, all contributions to the wiki will be signed by the contributor. Note that wiki technology allows the instructor to monitor revisions and contributors.
At the mid-point of the project, experts will return to their Home groups to share the progress of their respective expert group and solicit feedback from the Home group. The goal is to use the feedback from the Home groups to make the resource they are developing more useful to their target audience. Essentially, all Home group members provide feedback on all topic pages to improve the end product.
Experts will synthesize the feedback from the Home groups, echoing it back to the Home group members to ensure they adequately understood the feedback they received. Once approved by the Home groups, the experts will then report back to their group of experts who will determine which requests can reasonably be incorporated and which can not. As much as possible, all communication should occur in the group areas and on the wiki comments.
Experts will complete their respective pages and present them to members of their Home groups.
All members of the class are expected to participate in their respective groups and to communicate with them regularly. Peer evaluations and instructor observations will determine your grade.
This project is due at the end of the semester.
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