Helpful tips and tricks for facilitating a focus group.

This document includes stategies for qualitative interviews, sharing guidelines, a step-by-step guide and other helpful tools.

The questions that follow are intended as sample questions, and do not constitute a required list. These are examples that hiring departments and search committees can use to help them assess candidates commitment to and experience with creating inclusive and equitable educational and workplace environments.

Gathering information and perspectives from diverse constituencies related to how they are experiencing the policies, programs and practices implemented in the school will inform the MLL/ELL Program Quality Review process and scoring. The information gathered through focus groups or interviews will also help the community understand the hopes and aspiration of the diverse constituencies as improvement plans are developed to meet identified needs. Enclosed are initial sets of questions designed for diverse constituencies related to effective policies, programs and/or practices for MLLs/ELLs. These questions can be used with focus groups or for individual interviews. Please feel free to adapt or add questions to meet the needs of your community and the MLL/ELL Program Quality Review. To save time and create opportunity for conversations related to the MLL/ELL program quality, the use of focus groups is encouraged. Enclosed are protocols for engaging students, parents, teachers and school administrators. In each protocol there is an introduction to the process and its purpose within the MLL/ELL Program Quality review. The inquiry is designed to start with an open-ended question that has several follow-up questions to prompt discussion. Each open-ended question has links to the Tenets and Pillars and will help the review teams gather data to inform their scoring of indicators, pillars and tenets.

A survey developed by Teaching Tolerance, which can be shared with students to understand and begin conversations around racial inquities and personal beliefs.