Putnam is finally making some true progress. We had our second "formal" meeting on Monday, the 26th. We are finding it extraordinarily difficult to have group meetings because one of us is in the other end of the county some 40 miles away and the rest although we are located at the same school- it is one undergoing reconstruction so the meetings are endless. We have agreed to meet bimonthly as a large group and to utilize email and "drive-bys " for the other meetings. I think this will work ok. We spent the the first large group meetings working on our wonderings. We now have those finalized. Everyone is now working on beginning to tweak them as they put them into action. We are excited.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!

One aspect of my first local meeting (Developing Your
Wondering) or my second local meeting (Designing Your Inquiry) that went well
was . . . the excitement that is spreading through our district. Our group number stands at seventeen
inquirers. We are using our sub day to
hold our second meeting to complete everyone's inquiry brief. We will meet in
Cedar Keys for an all day session including a waterfront restaurant luncheon,
hopefully with several principals and district administrators on board. I am planning to utilize some "techie stuff",
such as a document camera and lcd projector to shoot wall-size images of our
briefs as we design them. My plan is to
share past briefs as examples, provide guidance in the design of individual
plans, then use some small-group discussions to decide on data collection
methods (I will provide an extensive list to include the additions Nanc told us
about in the second edition text).

If
anyone would like to join us, we are meeting at Cedar Keys High School from 8:30 - 3:00 on
Wednesday, November 28^th (RSVP).

This is like gathering around a chest full of treasure maps and dreaming
of the booty to be discovered!

What went so well with second meeting is I had a few new faces show up which tells me word of mouth is positive here about inquiry.One of the attendees is committed to going through the process and simply couldn't make it to Gainesville for the kickoff.I am excited by the group I am working with and I used Jack's practice of placing a big piece of paper up and outlining Wondering, Procedure, Timeline etc so each member could take this with them along with sticky note responses from other group members about their inquiry.This went very well,just seemed to run out of time!