Success Story Speed Dating

Here’s a photo of delegates at our PEI Home and School Federation Annual Meeting yesterday engaged in what we called “Success Story Speed Dating.”

The idea was that rather than focusing on “I wish they would do X” discussion, we would instead focus on “we did Y and it really worked well discussion: sharing stories of successful initiatives of local home and school associations that could be cross-pollinated to others.

We pre-selected 10 topics and our members picked 5 each, spending 10 minutes on each “round” until they stood up and moved on to the next one. The topics were:

1. Increasing Transportation Safety
2. Breakfast and Lunch Programs
3. Influencing Education Policy
4. Building Better Playgrounds
5. Parent Leadership Grants
6. Making our Schools Greener
7. Fundraising
8. Building Engagement in Home and School
9. Engaging Volunteers
10. Working with Our Principal

This was going to be something that either worked well or flopped colossally, and signs are that it was the former, which was great. We’re going to summarize up the success stories shared and distribute them back to our members to use in their plans for this spring and forward.

I sat in on the “Building Better Playgrounds” session and it was fantastic: lots of talk about using natural areas around the school, about adventure playgrounds, about risk vs. reward.