As an educator for over 15 years, with the last 4 years serving as an elementary principal, navigating the journey of finding solutions to school-wide problems was at the forefront each and every year.  Leading a Title I school, one of our most difficult challenges was increasing our parent communication.  How do we more effectively reach our parents?  How do we create that much needed partnership for our student's educational journey?

The most effective brainstorming structure tool we used was the fishbone diagram.  This worked out well as it was a component that needed to be uploaded to the state every year to support our Title I federal funding.  So...back to the our most difficult challenge...increasing parent communication/involvement.  The short video "The Jefferson Memorial and the 5 Whys" was our go to video to help us process the problem in a simpler way.

Off we went!  We started with that as our "head of the fishbone."  Then we started to work through the problem.  That lead us to identify the categories.  Platforms, accessibility, training, stakeholders... were a few of the categories we started with.  Then we had to identify causes under the categories.  Why are platforms a problem? We discovered our school had too many platforms to communicate with our parents (Remind, ClassDojo, district email, etc...). No wonder they were always confused.  There was no consistency across the campus. 

As we continued to work our way through our problem, this helped guide us to our desired solution.  We needed to work towards researching different platforms that would meet the needs of our all our categories.  Now it was time to research.  Continuing to break down our whys and using our fishbone as the center point of our research lead us to launching Bloomz school wide.