“It’s our polite nudge in the ribs to help you and your team stay organised and on task.”
This week’s subject is: Professional collaboration.
Element 4.2.1: Management, educators and staff work with mutual respect and collaboratively, and challenge and learn from each other, recognising each other’s strengths and skills.
Does your team engage in and maintain a range of documented evidence of professional collaboration, including an embedded culture of reflective practice to foster the continual improvement of the service program and practice?
Professional inquiry is often evident in both formal and informal ways, whether through informal discussions, program planning, professional development, critical reflection, team building or team meetings. Ensure that a record is maintained that documents professional discussions that foster improving quality outcomes for children and families.
Services should ensure they maintain thorough documentation to show a culture of reflective practice which includes details of quality practices being implemented that support continuous improvement. Specifically, educators document their critical reflections, whether they’re done individually or collaboratively. Their reflections include the who, how and why analysis of what’s being reflected on and outline the planned steps for implementation to improve the practice. Educators continue to critically reflect on and evaluate their practices to ensure continual improvement across all aspects of service delivery.
Ensure your Service has a consistent routine for team meetings, ensuring they occur regularly, are meaningful and outcomes focused. Staff meetings provide the opportunity to focus on specific topics of discussion and collaboration for continual improvement in a structured context that’s results orientated and clearly documented.
Tips to maximise staff meetings:
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- To maximise the opportunity for meaningful professional collaboration at staff meetings, ensure the meetings are structured with a pre-developed and pre-distributed agenda with set timeframes allocated to each agenda item
- Ensure the meeting chairperson monitors the time to keep the meeting discussion topics on track
- When sharing information with the team about knowledge gained from professional development, ensure the team reflects on the new knowledge to plan for improvement of quality outcomes. Ensure this is documented in the meeting minutes and distributed to educators and staff following each meeting
- Meetings must be well documented with accurate, relevant and detailed information
- Ensure meeting minutes are distributed to all educators and staff and have them acknowledge (in writing) that they’ve reviewed and understood the meeting minutes
- Meeting minutes often contain sensitive information, ensure confidentiality is maintained when distributing the minutes or any confidential documentation
- Allocate a team member to review the minutes with any team members that weren’t present at the meeting
- Ensure all staff have the opportunity to share their knowledge and provide input during meetings
Resources:
Belonging, Being and Becoming for Educators
We Hear You: Developing a Professional Learning Community, Collaboration and Commitment: Building a Culture of Professional Learning
Uncovering the layers of reflective practice: Introduction
Part 1: Self-reflection – The key to growth
Part 2: Reflection on teaching and learning
Part 3: Reflection to inform continuous improvement
Within System7 go to Quality Area 4/ Modules 4, 5, 6 & 7 to submit self-assessment notes and if required, open a QIP issue if you identify any areas of improvement.
The Childcare Centre Desktop has a range of resources to assist services with documenting professional collaboration. These include Staff Meeting Guide, templates for meeting agenda, meeting minutes and critical reflection, Professional Development Policy, Code of Conduct Policy and much more.
Resources, NQS Element, Regulation and System7 links:
Childcare Centre Desktop – Childcare Centre Desktop
National Quality Standard – QA 4/ 4.2.1- Professional collaboration
National Regulations – 168, 169
System7 Module – QA 4/ Modules 4, 5, 6 & 7
If you have any questions send us a note via the Contact page here!
