The Blog Process: Innovate 624 Norms In Action
How does a team of seven inspire a mindset of innovation? We identify our values, make a goal and let our norms guide the process.
The White Bear Lake Area Schools Technology Department has an Innovation Team with a simple yet lofty mission: to inspire a mindset of innovation. Composed of five Innovation Coaches, the district Technology Support Manager and the Director of Technology and Innovation, this team is tasked with coaching staff and students through a multitude of topics. Sometimes it’s the Design Thinking process. Other days it’s classroom redesign. Digital citizenship is a big topic, too.
For a number of years, we hosted a White Bear Tech Tips blog that focused on digital tools for classroom teachers. This year, however, we challenged ourselves to think beyond websites and software to transforming skill- and mindsets through our writing. We blog on topics including makerspaces, accessibility, metacognition and much more.
Our team feels that the process of maintaining Innovate 624 is a perfect example of how we live out our norms. At our Innovation Coaches retreat, we agreed on a mission to inspire a mindset of innovation. We will achieve this by adhering to our team norms:
- Model innovation
- Intentionally collaborate
- Share leadership
- Make decisions by consensus
Laying the Foundation: Before We Begin Writing
Before we begin the writing process, our team made some important decisions.
Goals for the blog
Sure, we want a lot of clicks, but blogs are difficult to grow organically. We have access to a few analytics tools through Medium, Twitter and Facebook, but we have to balance our work between an external audience and the district we serve. Our goal for this blog is truly to inspire a mindset of innovation. There may come a day when we choose to boost our blog through paid means, but for now we are trying to remain relevant to our readers and provide consistently high quality work.
A blog schedule
With a seven person team, it’s easy to share the load. Knowing that we are all individually responsible for an article every seven weeks gives us the all-important incubation time to let article ideas simmer in our heads. We planned our posting schedule at the beginning of the school year and have made small adjustments here and there when things like international trips came up.
Consistency
We always send out our blog internally on Tuesday morning at 7:00 for high schools, 7:30 for middle schools and 8:00 for elementary schools and the district offices. This results in our blog being likely to arrive when teachers are checking emails first thing in the morning. We have provided instructions on snoozing emails for later in the day in case a teacher’s morning routine doesn’t include checking email. Boomerang for Gmail has helped make this easier than ever.
The Writing Process: A Team Effort
Though we rotate, we regularly check in on what the content of our blog will be as well as provide warm and cool feedback for one another. We also follow a few stylistic guidelines.
Article Topics
During our weekly meetings, we discuss what possible themes we could explore with our posts. Because we all have different interests and areas of expertise, the topics are quite varied. We also participate in regular brainstorming sessions where we answer questions like:
- What will our teachers need to know in five years and how can we prepare them for it?
- What do our tech “power users” need to know?
- What has happened within our district that we need to highlight?
- What is elementary or secondary specific? What applies to all grade levels?
Occasionally, we find that there is overlap between team members. We will plan these posts in advance so that we can build momentum on a particular topic.
Stylistic Guidelines
When we have a topic, we measure the title effectiveness on the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. We don’t necessarily want to write click-bait, but we do want to draw our readers in. We aim for five to six minute read times with three to four pictures included, depending on the topic. We try to always include a personal anecdote to hook the reader right away, laying out the emotional impact of the work we do as an innovation team. We end with a call to action that is often something like, “let us know how you accomplish [blog topic] in your district on Twitter or Facebook!”
Warm and Cool Feedback
We are all experts, but we all have blind spots. When we bring a blog post to our team meeting on a Monday, we are confident that most of our team members have read it in advance and provided feedback. These could be edits for clarity and readability to changing the order or structure of the article. Chiming in with ideas for tools, products and organizations that we could link in the body of our article is a regular occurrence. We are all editors of our Medium publication and we can either make changes directly or suggest edits. We have learned to trust one another and respond to the feedback we’ve been given.
Liking and Sharing: The Social Media Dance
We are a small team that hasn’t undergone extensive marketing training. We do, however, maintain a plan for maximizing the reach of our posts to attract readers and establish ourselves as a leader in public school innovation.
Scheduling Posts
Once we’ve emailed our article to the staff in our district, we schedule a series of social media posts on Facebook and Twitter. We include a link to our article, an image without too much text, hashtags like #innovate624 and mentions of influencers and companies we reference in our writing. We all agree to like and share the posts within our networks because we all have a robust teacher community in our lives. We are always exploring the best time to post these and use analytics tools in Facebook and Twitter to best predict when our readers will be active.
Callbacks
We try to reference back to previous posts when topics overlap. This is especially easy for a team like ours because of the feedback culture we’ve created. We can remind the author that we wrote something similar earlier in the year and suggest a link to it. This builds a richer experience for our readers and establishes credibility for our team as experts on a variety of topics.
Continually Improve
Our team takes an iterative approach to our writing process by amplifying what works and scrapping what doesn’t. The innovative mindset built by trying new things has shaped our culture and seeped into our other work. We look at the analytics provided by Facebook and Twitter for our social media reach, but we examine the Medium stats to see what we can do to improve our read rate — not just our click rate. We have been “curated” by Medium a few times so we are looking for ways to recreate the formula for what set those posts apart and incorporating those lessons into future writing.
The White Bear Lake Area Schools Innovation Team is trying to inspire a mindset of innovation. We are doing this for our district staff, but we use Innovate 624 as a platform to share what helps our community with the world. Do you provide a resource like this for your district? Which education blogs do you follow and why? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter — and don’t forget to use #innovate624 in our conversation!
