A Year End Process for Staff Synthesis of Learning
May 14, 2024
By Kippy Smith and Erica Crane
It’s the time of year when teams take stock of their overall progress. We ask: What’s the result of all our hard work? Mostly, we look to what we’re already measuring for answers – quantitative performance and point-in-time measures. We acknowledge the results don’t capture the full story.
And yet, this is often the only way we monitor and communicate team-wide progress: by analyzing our existing performance measures. Even if we don’t mean for it to, this routine reinforces a narrow definition of success that values performance and metrics, and pushes learning and lived experience to the margins. We need both to keep moving toward our bold goals.
Even if we have ongoing qualitative evidence of success we could be examining, it can often be hard to organize, captured across a variety of formats, and not systematically embedded in our data reflection and analysis practices. Silos can hold genius we’re missing. We also may still emphasize only the qualitative “successes” instead of also including the “lessons learned” as wins in and of themselves.
What if we started our end-of-year routine by intentionally redefining progress monitoring as an act of collective staff learning?
We might…
Expand evidence of progress to include things we learned, as well as things we did or accomplished.
Capture what we’ve learned, observed, and experienced, and review it alongside our performance measures.
Design the progress monitoring process to resemble a learning process.
Talk about “what we’re learning” a lot during team discussions (not just how we’re doing).
Rename Progress Summaries as Learning Reports.
Tap into our people’s heads and hearts in order to develop excellent plans, priorities, and solutions for the future.
We’re sharing a resource we usually reserve for our clients to support their end of year reflection practices. Here you can find an agenda and tools. Feel free to use them as-is or modify them to fit your context. This resource is one way you might incorporate collective staff learning into your progress monitoring and synthesis routines at the end of the year. Even if you’re not using the Small Wins Dashboard, you can consider your learning journey this school year (and even emphasize small wins with your team).
We understand that this work is a continuous process, and each method of synthesis represents a step in an ongoing journey of learning. We’re rooting for you!