Oh my God, i have forgotten to blog! Ok back on track, we had a team meeting this past Friday where we put all the pieces on the table;  this was right on track with key insights as a result of the Washington DC conference.  We  discussed ideas and tasks to move us closer toward our innovative evalutaion model and what needs to happen in 2012--our planning year.  Dr gant stated he wanted us to work as a team to make this happen.  Some key deliverables were a visit with the Lansing GEAR UP team; there should be  a one pager to go out stating who, why, purpose of visit etc.  Other tasks include reading article by Anthony Carnevale and reviewing Wendy Stack's dissertation on the value of parent involvement in  program outcomes and evaluation.  Additional deliverables--for me ecological map for each grantee, Chris--continue to work on her geomap. Dr gant stated that the team should also set up times to meet.  Chris, Kelli and I are planning to meet this Friday.

Chris and i met yesterday;  we first needed to debrief from our Friday session.  We reviewed highlights from our Friday meeting and i used the highlights to create a logic model--just something to give us a visual of what needs to happen in 90 days.  Chris and i sat and talked about the geomap and noted some interesting patterns emerging from her excel chart-geomap.  For example, schools with high % reduced lunch tend to also be high priority schools --akin to not meeting adequate yearly progress.  The latter was also a part of our discussion of MDE top to bottom education database.  Chris remarked that we had hoped for more data to assist with evaluation. Finally, we also looked at dr gant's point of media proxy as it realtes to GEAR UP's visibility.

 A good session as always.  We confirmed our 9:30 Friday meeting to include Kelli.