Guide to Materials

The Creating Collaborative Action Teams materials include a Guide, a Toolkit, and handout and transparency masters. These "how to" materials will guide you through the entire process.

Although the Collaborative Action Team process has a suggested order, you need not always follow it. The materials are designed for flexibility, so you can follow the order that meets your needs.

The materials are meant to be used by local team members. Stage 1: Getting Started helps you plan more specifically how to facilitate and coordinate your team. As your team goes through the process, many different team members will help lead the team by coordinating work, facilitating meetings and discussions, and recording information. Although all team members should have access to these materials, the people who are coordinating, facilitating, and recording will be the ones who use them the most.

Guide

The Guide explains the Collaborative Action Team process in detail. It described the five stages in the process and the steps a team takes during each stage. it helps the team understand what needs to be accomplished to achieve collaboration that promotes student success. The Guide also includes a review of the literature on collaboration and references to additional resources, organizations, and publications that can complement these materials.

Download:
The Collaborative Action Team Guide is available in PDF format.

Toolkit

The Toolkit serves as a companion to the Guide. It provides a variety of "tools" — activities, resources, and information — that you can use during each stage of the process. The Guide references the Toolkit items that can help at each point in the process. You may not need everything in the Toolkit to develop a Collaborative Action Team and reach your goals — pick and choose Toolkit items depending on your needs.

Many of the items will help local team members organize and facilitate team meetings and plan the work that needs to happen between meetings. You can also use the Toolkit items with smaller groups and committees, instead of the whole team. Every step in the Collaborative Action Team process has at least one corresponding Toolkit Activity that will help your team build specific skills. Each Toolkit Activity contains ready-to-use instructions and materials the facilitator can use. It identifies goals for meetings and suggests timeframes and formats for activities. Facilitators may tailor the activity to meet the team's needs. The Toolkit also includes a Troubleshooting Guide to help teams as they encounter barriers along the way and a section with Icebreakers and Energizers for group activities.

Toolkit Masters

The Toolkit Masters consist of transparency masters and/or handout masters for each Toolkit Activity. They also include a set of Action Planning masters you will use throughout the Collaborative Action Team process.

Like the Guide and Toolkit, the set of Toolkit Masters is available to you in its entirety in PDF format. The transparency masters are also available as Microsoft PowerPoint slide presentations and the handout masters and Action Planning masters as Microsoft Word templates.