Eduleadership
Justin Baeder on principal performance & productivity
Inspection Doesn’t Cause Improvement
Aug 30th
[Arne] Duncan and [Bill] Gates propose developing measures of effectiveness to get rid of bad teachers and increase the pay of good ones. It sounds like common sense. Or does it?
This approach was called the “inspection” method by W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the science of quality improvement. Inspection, he wrote, is not an effective way to improve quality because it has no effect on the process that caused suboptimal results in the first place. Real and continuous improvement, Deming argued, occurs only when the workers themselves study outcome variability and the processes that produce it.
–James Stigler, Rethinking Teacher Accountability – Before It’s Too Late (EdWeek, June 9, 2010)
I almost recycled this issue of EdWeek when I came across this essay from James Stigler of UCLA. He goes on to describe the Japanese practice of lesson study, and explains how it is both a form of accountability and a form of professional development.
Who’s Really Incompetent?
Aug 28th
“If you have a principal who knows there’s a poor-performing teacher and chooses not to evaluate him or her effectively, who’s really the incompetent person?” Mr. Weil said.
–EdWeek on the “Dance of the Lemons” process for transferring teachers
Campbell’s Law
Aug 27th
Named for sociologist Donald T. Campbell, the precept holds, essentially, that the more that numbers are used for political purposes, the more they will be manipulated—and distort the decisions they were supposed to inform.
The very measures that get bandied about most often—like those stellar test gains—turn out to be the most suspect, because their main purpose all along was to promote policy decisions that were already made. And where there’s one set of bad numbers, there will be others.
–New York Magazine: What Downgrading the Too-Easy Grading of City Schools Means for Bloomberg’s Reform
From Wikipedia:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
H/T: Diane Ravitch
Warmth is the Vital Element
Aug 18th
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.
The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Attention Is Everything
Aug 16th
“Attention is the holy grail [of neuroscience],” Mr. Strayer says.
“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”
–NY Times
Seth Godin on Finding the Best
Jul 12th
We’ve taken the smartest and richest people on earth, hundreds of millions of them, and put them to work sorting and organizing and polishing data.
…
Right now, the big sort focuses on finding clever viral videos, but it won’t for long. The power of this coordination is so huge it won’t stop with building Wikipedia and turning the founder of ChatRoulette into a millionaire. Instead, the big sort will relentlessly find and connect and spread ideas that generate productivity and impact.
The Reason They Leave
May 11th
Across all generations, inadequate school leadership is the second most cited factor (after low salaries) contributing to the departure of teachers who leave their schools or the profession because of dissatisfaction. Specifically, 51 percent of those who transfer and 32 percent of those who leave the profession cite poor administrative support as a primary reason for their decision (Ingersoll, 2003).
–Behrstock-Sherratt & Coggshall, Ed Leadership May 2010 (Vol 67, no 8), p. 31
What kind of support should we provide to retain teaching talent in our schools? This article, which focuses on Generation Y teachers, explains that feedback is a critical component of young teachers’ job satisfaction.
I can state categorically that this is true from personal experience – feedback and the knowledge that someone else knows what you are doing (and how well) are essential components of job satisfaction. Being left alone may have been a selling point for teachers in the past, but no more.
Gawande on Checklists vs. Heroism
Apr 30th
We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us – those we aspire to be – handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists.
Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.
-p. 173
The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with (Are the elevator controls set? Did the patient get her antibiotics on time? Did the managers sell all their shares? Is everyone on the same page here?), and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff (Where should we land?).
Here are the details for one of the sharpest checklists I’ve seen, a checklist for engine failure during flight in a single-engine Cessna airplane. … It is slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine, steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position and putting the backup fuel pump switch ON. Bus step one on the list is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine, so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task: FLY THE AIRPLANE. This isn’t rigidity. This is making sure everyone has their best shot at survival.
-p. 177, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Gawande on Learning from Patterns of Failure
Apr 29th
We don’t study routine failures in teaching, in law, in government programs, in the financial industry, or elsewhere. We don’t look for the patterns of our recurrent mistakes or devise and refine potential solutions for them.
But we could, and that is the ultimate point. We are all plagued by failures – by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems and clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber – a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could fly it. They too could have decided just to “try harder” or to dismiss a crash as the failings of a “weak” pilot. Instead they chose to accept their fallibilities. They recognized the simplicity and power of using a checklist.
And so can we. Indeed, against the complexity of the world, we must. There is no other choice. When we look closely, we recognize the same balls being dropped over and over, even by those of great ability and determination. We know the patterns. We see the costs. It’s time to try something new.
Try a checklist.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, p. 185-186
Gawande on Discipline as a Professional Responsibility
Apr 28th
From Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto:
All learned occupations have a definition of professionalism [that includes]…selflessness..skill…[and] trustworthiness… Aviators, however, add a fourth expectation, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others.
This is a concept almost entirely outside the lexicon of most professions, including my own. In medicine, we hold up “autonomy” as a professional lodestar, a principle that stands in direct opposition to discipline.
But in a world in which success now requires large enterprises, teams of clinicians, high-risk technologies, and knowledge that outstrips any one person’s abilities, individual autonomy hardly seems the ideal we should aim for. It has the ring more of protectionism than of excellence. The closest our professional codes come to articulating the goal is an occasional plea for “collegiality.” What is needed, however, isn’t just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline.
Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
That’s why aviation has required institutions to make discipline a norm…we have national regulations to ensure that those recommendations are incorporated into usable checklists that are reliably adopted in ways that actually reduce harm.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, p. 182-183
