[rourke]

Originally Posted by Freddy Schurr

It is a difficult challenge. Do not get me wrong, we actually have looked into doing a “Niagara Triplet” kind of thing here in South Jersey, however it is a difficult challenge to try and get everyone on board.

Freddy raises a valid concern with respect to beginning a collaborative growth strategy similar to what was done with The Triplets. In a previous post, Karthik promised to make this the subject of a post-season paper. In the meantime I will outline what I believe are some prerequisite requirements based on our experiences. More to follow in the post-season.

Prerequisites for a NiagaraFIRST style collaboration:

• Mentor consensus on the growth strategy.
• An established, experienced, and capable base team.
• Mentor diversity and single-point leaders – with mentors having different “lead” responsibilities for elements of the collaboration, as well a lead mentor that represents each school team’s interests.
• A new team(s) whose teacher (and any new mentors) prefers to learn from an experienced team.
• Acceptance that all teams will share resources and facilities. There must be a vision for how these resources or facilities can be shared so that everyone can be involved.
• A common organizational framework for each team to facilitate communication and to keep the collaboration aligned.
• Education and training materials for all aspects of the project delivered in the pre-season.
• A web based bulletin board and forum for communication and information exchange.
• A disciplined project management, scheduling, and review process for each team.
• A weekly forum where all mentors gather to discuss progress, lessons learned, and improvement opportunities.