Written agendas and minutes guide and serve as a record for team meetings. These meetings serve to facilitate the completion of sequentially related tasks and ultimately to achieve the desired goals of the project or projects over time. Participation in such team meeting activities will allow individual team members to close the project improvement loop. During team meetings members determine if their project is contributing to the accomplishment of their stated goal and the District's focus on teaching, learning, and student achievement. Measuring progress toward goal achievement requires the collection of relevant baseline and benchmark data.
Data collection serves as the best mechanism to measure the achievement of defined goals.
Using baseline data during the team meetings allows for an opportunity to make comparisons with periodically collected benchmark data and determine if the project implementation procedures are producing the anticipated positive desired effect in teaching, learning, and improved student achievement. Making mid-course adjustments in the project design is necessary if the desired results fail to occur or fall short of benchmark expectations. On occasion the implementation process will temporarily produce unintended consequences that adversely effect the desired result and benchmark feedback. Team members often want to take immediate action to either abandon the project or over-compensate after receiving unanticipated and unwanted results. Acting early upon unintended consequences is usually a result of fear of failure.