What do you subtract to get accountability?

Lauding the Finnish education system is certainly nothing new but something that I came across last week has really stuck with me and I thought it was worth sharing. Morgan Spurlock (the Supersize Me guy) has a new series on CNN called Inside Man and last week he went inside the education system. He spent half of the show visiting a Finnish school and talking to various administrators, teachers, and students. At one point he asked an administrator what he thought about the American obsession with testing. The admin smirked and replied:

“Accountability is what you have left when you remove responsibility from the equation.”

It was clear that this wasn’t just a random statement but a philosophy embodied by everyone involved. Trust in teachers to be the professionals that they are and for students to focus on what they needed to do is the lynchpin of their system. There is no magic formula and in fact their lessons don't look remarkably different than those in a typical American classroom. The difference is simply a trust in the fulfillment of responsibilities. It also doesn’t hurt that their schools are inspiring and modern buildings whereas ours tend to look like (and are often run like) minimum security prisons.  

Spurlock spent the second half of the show in American classroom. Unfortunately, it was in a NYC charter school and not representative of the quality of education or what happens in American schools overall. The lesson planning and management protocol looked pretty gimmicky and low level to me and I would argue that in this case they are subtracting dignity to get accountability.

Update 8/5/13: Check out the EduShyster's much better written take on the charter school piece: 
A Second is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Pinterest for Displaying Model Student Work

The smell of wicker makes me queasy and since Pinterest initially seemed to me like a virtual version of a Michael’s store, I swore I would never use it.  However, I have been searching for a solution for displaying digital student work for quite some time and hadn’t found anything that was fitting the purpose. In a paperless classroom, the walls no longer work for doing such a thing and work tends to fade from memory when posted to a blog or edmodo. So I gave Pinterest a try and have got to say that I am now loving it. It is perfect for the task of displaying exemplary student work to use as examples and motivation.

I’m still fairly new to the Pinterest world but am clearly seeing how it can be a great resource for curating resources across a range of topics. You can follow my developing boards here: http://pinterest.com/blschum/boards/

What About Bob?- Part 3: Have you evolved beyond empty compliments?

Some light summer reading.

This week (it turned out to be a few weeks) I will be reflecting on my involvement with the Marzano Causal Evaluation Model which has recently been adopted as the teacher evaluation framework in most of the state of Florida. I volunteered to participate in intensive coaching and filming sessions throughout the past year and a half that were sometimes stressful but always revealing. I had always been a fan of Marzano’s work but was skeptical about the model for several reasons. Over the next several posts I will be outlining some of the changes that occurred in my thoughts related to the model and why I am excited about the direction that it is taking us in.

The first formal evaluation that I had as a teacher was an extremely frustrating and unfulfilling experience. I had set an observation time sometime in October with the principal who was going to come into my room and evaluate me as I taught a lesson. I lost sleep and stressed about it for days as I continually changed my lesson to try and make sure it was good enough. When the appointed time came the principal did show up. I stopped by to see her at the end of the day and she apologized for getting caught up in something else and we set another time the following week.

Again I lost sleep and stressed about it as I developed a new model lesson. When the second appointed day in mid-November came the principal again did not show up. Trying very hard not to take it personally, I once again tracked her down and we set another observation time. She actually showed up the third time and spent about 15 minutes in my room. When we finally met later that week to discuss the notes she had taken on the observation form I was relieved to see that I had scored at the top level in every category. When I asked her what I could improve on she responded that the kids really liked me and gave me some vague suggestions about differentiation. I left her office feeling good but it didn’t last long as a realized that I really had no idea what I had done well or what I could do to improve. The rosy feedback I got was just a bunch of empty compliments.

Since then I have had many evaluations that were very similar including walk throughs that lasted under a minute, empty suggestions based on check marked forms, and even summative evaluations completed without an observation after the last day of school in June. As I have traveled around and met with a variety of teachers across the country over the past few years I have discovered that this story is more common than not. It seems everybody has war stories about worthless evaluation.

I initially viewed the Marzano framework through that lens; another reform effort that we were going to throw our resources and time into only to have it disappear once it proved ineffective in the real world. The reality is that it represents not just a reform effort but an evolution in how we approach the issue of evaluation. It is about empowering teachers to grow and focus on the areas that they want to improve in. When applied correctly it is not about accountability, “gotcha”, or checklists. It is simply about growth.

The potential impact upon students is exciting. Over the past decade the focus on teacher accountability has shifted into classrooms where increasing amounts of time are being spent on uninspired test-prep activities. It stands to reason that a shift in how we evaluate teachers would also influence what is happening in the classroom and that teachers themselves would begin focusing more on student growth in authentic ways.  

Any change is going to meet resistance and a shift to an evaluation a system as complex as this one is going to be messy at the beginning. Perseverance and a strong focus on growth is key to its success. The bottom line is that it has made me a better teacher and I think it is the most promising development in education since edtech.