One of my teachers sent this to me today and it was perfectly timed. We usually see things like this early in the year to kick things off, but I started thinking that maybe this is the perfect time to remember to focus on the relationship and what feelings of hope and future we give students as they move forward into next year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-f-pierson/student-teacher-relationships_b_3203159.html
As my cohort members and I presented our evaluation findings for our various programs, I was struck by the idea that we do not do enough of program evaluation in education. We are in the habit of purchasing and/or implementing new programs that have been developed and used successfully in other settings and thinking that their previous success will automatically make them effective for our division. However, there are multiple variables at play in these implementations. Different population demographics and sizes. Different levels of staff expertise, staff buy-in and implementation fidelity, and division support. Overall differences in the specific needs of the division. All of these things vary from division to division, making the idea of pulling a “canned” program like Accelerated Reader (AR) out of the box and having it successfully achieve it’s objective seem unrealistic.
Yet that is what we do in public education. Even though we are constantly touting the importance of quality assessment and data-driven decision-making, we do not typically take time to perform pre- or post- assessments on our current or prospective programs. Several of the groups in my cohort, including my own, determined that issues with their respective programs did not have as much to do with the program itself as with its implementation and the resources and focus given to it. The question then becomes whether these programs are being put into practice unsuccessfully by choice or because there are obstacles at the division or school level that are limiting the program’s effectiveness.
By making it a division-wide policy to perform some version of a Program Evaluation on programs they are considering using or a Process Evaluation after the second year of use on current programs, divisions could better ascertain if their programs are appropriate for addressing the given need, what resources are needed to make them successful, whether the division can realistically provide those resources, and what variables are currently causing problems with the success of the current programs. This would help divisions choose the most appropriate programs for their needs from the start, realistically explore what they need to do and provide (i.e. staff development, purchase resources, etc…) to make them successful, monitor if these steps are being taken with fidelity, and check the see if the program is having the desired effect.
In addition, an immediate benefit of these mini-evaluations would be a better understanding of the programs on the part of those who work directly with them. Given the time and financial constraints of public education, evaluations such as these would need to be performed in large part by the teachers and staff responsible for their implementation, possibly as summer “focus groups.” This would bring the evaluation to a grass-roots level that would serve to get a clearer understanding of current or potential issues from those directly responsible for using the programs as well as giving those primary users a deeper understanding of the programs, their intended focus, and the key elements for their success.
Ultimately, these programs represent an effort on the part of school divisions to reach out to students, often struggling students. So, an ongoing policy of evaluating programs and making sure they are as effective and appropriate as possible would be a valuable use of division resources in advocating for student needs.
I attended the Virginia Department of Education’s 2013 Spring Teacher Evaluation Institute last week. During the course of the institute, Dr. Leslie Grant, Assistant Professor of Education at William and Mary, made a comment about the power and importance of good assessment practice. She suggested that teaching and improving teacher’s skills at creating quality assessments is one of the most powerful professional development activities you can undertake as an educational leader and went on to say that the benefits can be as dramatic as moving the entire group (shifting the bell curve) one standard deviation (approximately a 10-point increase) in the course of a year. Not being a high-level stats person, I cannot get more technical than that, but the assertion still stands that by creating quality assessments that truly guage what students do or do not know and then using that knowledge to guide instruction, we can educate students much more effectively and improve student achievement. As she said, and this is a phrase I have heard in numerous other places through the years, if we have quality assessments, “teaching to the test” is not a bad thing.
Below is an article related to building quality assessments that gives some guidelines to use when creating good assessments. In addition, it was recommended to me that Teacher-Made Assessments by Eye-on Education is another excellent resource to use for improving in this area.
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/TOEFL_Institutional_Testing_Program/ELLM2002.pdf
Take this as a public service announcement for those yet to present their evaluation summaries from a lesson learned during mine. Maybe because I felt good about my Saturday Zen presentation or because I felt very knowledgeable about our evaluation material and data, I went into this most recent evaluation summary with a lower level of preparedness for the spoken part than I should have. I felt like I had done so much with the evaluation write-up and the executive summary that I knew the material backwards and forwards and could talk at length about it. The problem was that the goal is not to talk at length. The goal is to be concise and direct, communicate the information confidently and clearly, and keep the presentation and answers within a range that holds the client’s interest. On a typical presentation, people typically worry about not having enough to say. In this case, though, summarizing 64 pages into 5-8 minutes required more practice and preparation in order to think in advance about what was essential to communicating our findings clearly, concisely, and effectively.
I know that all of us have our evaluations running through our minds 24/7 right now and could recite data, numbers, discussion, and conclusions for hours. I did all of the typical prep work for the presentation, but the mistake that I made was thinking that knowing the material and giving it a cursory “fly-over” made me prepared to present that information in a manner that would inspire the confidence of a professional client. So, the lesson learned is that if I could present to my client again, I would have spent more time focusing on the “less is more” principle, boiling the presentation down to the essentials, and practicing, practicing, practicing to make sure that I was able to keep that focus and not run the risk of losing the client’s interest or understanding.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
We used this video today at our staff development meeting. In it, the speaker, Ken Robinson, discusses why he thinks that imagination is so important and why and how we are “killing” it in education. Although the title is somewhat indicting of the educational establishment, I saw it as a positive. Perhaps it is because my division is currently working to initiate and model a more Project-Based Learning approach to education or because there seems to be a more consistent push by education’s governing bodies to undertake activities and styles of learning that require more creativity and deeper thinking. Regardless, I saw the video as an affirmation of some of these trends. In addition, I found it to be profound in its assessments that a) all children are born creative and we educate that out of them (I have a 4-year-old at home who wants to mount an octopus on the car ceiling to hand him stuff, and I dread the day that he loses that wide-eyed wonder and creativity), b) a large part of this is due to the fact that the educational establishment is really created as a breeding ground for people going to college even though most people won’t, and c) creativity is extremely important to future success regardless of how much knowledge you have. If you consider that last point, even if you become a Ph.D. in astrophysics, if you cannot think creatively, you are relegated to nothing more than regurgitating the ideas and theories of others. As Robinson points out, in a world that is changing as quickly as ours, it is the ability to imagine that moves you forward and that we need to figure-out how to introduce/re-introduce and foster in education moving forward.
I heard something on the radio this morning and thought that it translated nicely to a leadership activity. Elvis Duran (The Elvis Duran Show on 102.7) was talking about one of the members of his staff moving up to take on his own morning talk show in Boston. He was recalling a lunch he and the young man had had years before in which they talked about this person’s aspiration to one day host his own show. The young man went on to thank Duran for helpign to guide and mentor him towards his goal during the ensuing years. Duran commented that in order to have a great organization, you have to have a group of people all working vigorously towards their dreams and you, as a leader, need to know what those dreams are so that you can help them grow. This made me think, “Do I really know what the dreams and aspirations of all of my staff members are?” If not, am I doing all I can to help them and the school grow? Gathering the dreams and aspirations of your staff would be an interesting opening activity for a meeting and could prove invaluable in helping grow the individuals and the capacity within the school or other organization.
As part of their “intimacy and technology series” (It’s not what you think) regarding interpersonal connections in the workplace, NPR interviewed Shayne Hughes, CEO of Learning as Leadership. He was of interest because he banned all internal e-mail in his organization for a week. The attached article from Forbes Magazine outlines his reasons for doing so and makes some interesting points about how e-mail affects us at work. Among other things, he suggests that e-mail is an impersonal tool that makes it easier for us to communicate more harshly with one another than we normally would, sidestep difficult issues for the easier issues, and misprioritize on not prioritize at all because either it is easier to delegate or we are too distracted by the constant onslaught of e-mail to think deeply about issues. Any of this sound familiar in your day?
The article and the interview suggest that by cutting e-mail and forcing more intimate face-to-face interaction, we will be forced to prioritize our work a little better. Let’s face it. If we have to walk to the other end of the building to deliver a message, we will all probably evaluate its importance a little more thoroughly. it will also remove some of the mind-blocking noise and distraction that prevents us from being able to think clearly and deeply. As a leader, it also helps remove you as the “fire hose,” the person who is always there to take care of everyone else’s problems. These are typically things they could have handled themselves, and by removing the e-mail you remove other people’s opportunity to immediately hand their problems to you to be fixed.
This article seemed to go along well with an intermediate suggestion that I found during our time management exercise last summer. If you’re not ready to take the radical step of stopping all e-mail, try turning it off and only looking at it at designated times of the day. While this won’t remove the intimacy issues, this will cut some of the distractions and help you focus.
The interview was not posted yet, but you can go to http://www.npr.org and listen to Weekend Edition for February 10.
