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SERVE > Topic Areas > Assessment > Accountability for Instructional Quality > Professional Development > Training Facilitators for CFG

 
 

Training Facilitators for Critical Friends Groups

The notion of forming and maintaining small learning communities within schools seems simple. You form teacher groups of 6–10, add some facilitators armed with a couple of protocols, and off you go. As anyone who has tried to initiate Critical Friends Groups will tell you, however, creating an effective, sustained program is a great deal more complicated than that. The protocols, their implementation, and application, along with the particular focus for the work (e.g., "quality assignments, assessments, units") must be approached carefully and purposefully if genuine teacher learning is to come about during and between the meetings.

  

Facilitator training is a first step in the process. If a school or district wants to begin to implement Critical Friends Groups, they will need trained facilitators to lead such groups. SERVE's interest in training facilitators has been in marrying the focus of "quality work" with appropriate protocols. That is, the Critical Friends Groups are not seen as the end purpose in and of themselves but as a way of helping teachers get feedback on the quality of work (learning experiences) they design for students. To that end, SERVE has developed a two-stage facilitator training process.

In Level I of Facilitating Teacher Groups in Improving the Quality of Assignments, participants learn how to use Critical Friends Groups (CFG) to look at the quality of work teachers give students to do. During the two-day workshop, time is spent

  • reviewing what critical friends groups are and how they function;
  • examining what protocols are and why we use them;
  • experiencing a protocol as a participant;
  • reflecting on the quality of a teacher assignment by using a quality rubric; and,
  • preparing for the start-up of a Critical Friends Group.

In Level II of Facilitating Teacher Groups in Improving the Quality of Assignments, participants review what they learned in CFG Level I Training and share experiences in trying to implement a group in their schools and districts. In this two-day workshop,

  • they learn more about the research supporting this professional development model;
  • have in-depth practice sessions with another protocol;
  • examine ways to modify protocols to meet their needs;
  • practice scoring assignments using a quality rubric; and,
  • think again about implementation of CFG groups in schools.

Tools for use with Critical Friends Groups:

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