For the past few years at NCVPS, we’ve held bi-annual leadership retreats in a blended format. We’ve used our Blackboard, Wimba, Moodle, and Google Sites to pull off the delivery of key processes and feedback loops, and this week’s blog serves as a guide for blended leaders and learners mapping out their next strategic planning session based on the lessons we’ve learned.
This past week, our leadership retreat agenda kicked off with a welcome and a Socratic Seminar on Tom Vanderark's, Ten Shifts That Will Change Everything. Feedback from the seminar was catalogued on a free Google discussion board, and the Socratic format set the tone for how these key shifts would influence our future planning at NCVPS for the 2010-2011 school year.
After a classic face to face break, our staff took an assessment on Moodle to guess each person’s favorite candy. The winner gained a Starbucks gift card, and we were off to Session 2 – a Lino walk through edits on our mission, vision, and values. Subsequently, we will explore edits and suggestions from this session this week during our regular Friday e-learning community work on Wimba. During these follow-up sessions, we will dive deeper on singular issues from the retreat in order to put the recommendations that resulted from our work in Raleigh this week into action.
Prior to lunch, we engaged the retreat members with a primer as to what would take place when we returned. We have been developing a new score card approach to track strategic planning, and we gained feedback on it via Twitter at the hash tag #ncvpsretreat. In addition to staff in the room, other NCVPS stakeholders not present at the face-to-face retreat also contributed feedback via the Twitter hashtag. These participants included professional learning network members of key NCVPS staff members and the greater membership of NCVPS at large. The facilitator looked at the results over lunch in real time to prepare for the clarifications and activities that were to follow.
A face-to-face lunch provided valuable networking and “family matters” core value time, as our virtual staff spans North Carolina and loves when we all have a chance to get together face-to-face.
Upon return from lunch, each division chief presented his or her templates for strategic planning, vision, and feedback. Participants used the tabs on the Google retreat site intended to encourage comments and feedback. Moreover, each division chief will now take this feedback out to external members who did not attend the retreat so they can see the planning progress, goals, and outcomes and provide feedback toward them. All of this information lives on an open source Google Site, exemplifying a key value of the NCVPS team: transparency.
However, there were also closed source opportunities for the retreat. For example, we used an internal text the mob mobile activity to gain feedback regarding our advisory board process. This feedback, along with zoomerang surveys on leadership on day two, allows senior leadership to assess data internally before applying the results and approaches across the organization. The evening of day one we all assembled at a local restaurant to decompress, catch up on each other’s family, and laugh at the stories from our organization.
Day two included a face-to-face awards ceremony and our new competency bundle for all staff via our World is Open book study in which multiple staff members will be involved this year to help coach and build capacity in our various divisions around closed and open source blended leadership issues.
Finally, we reflected during our final lunch at the retreat regarding this year and the work ahead. The afternoon included team time to work on the next steps to our retreat. The good news is that if anyone forgets any deliverable, they are archived on our site and among key links on my site for all to relearn on the blended leadership road ahead.
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