Douglas wrote:
"Not only is it essentially impossible to rid schools of the egregious
teachers, few schools have systematic processes in place to improve system
performance. For example, few have a systematic process to collect data
on how parents, students and teachers perceive the school's performance,
let alone to act on that data."
And even fewer public school systems have systematic processes to collect
such data at the individual teacher level. At the end of the year ask a
teacher "Did your teaching improve this year?" And, "How do you know?"
While the better ones may be able to provide a coherent answer, most of
these will be in terms of what they did, rather than student outcomes."
Our research institute has now been using an instrument which is a
'systematic process to collect data on how parents, students and teachers
perceive the school's performance', and we use the instrument as a tool to
stimulate a self reflective process as a basis for acting on the data.
We have been carrying out this process in 14 New Zealand secondary schools
for 2 years now, but earlier developmental versions of it have been used
in NZ and in a number of US school districts over a period of 7 years.
It is our belief that well performing schools are most often characterised
by having a habit of data informed self reflection which leads to a
process of collaborative decision making which involves teachers, parents
and (at least at secondary level) students.
The absolutely critical factors which have led to the increasingly wide
acceptance of this process in New Zealand are:
(a) that the process is supportive and developmental rather than
judgemental;
(b) that when the process leads to confrontation of fundamental tensions
and contradictions which have previously been undiscussable (and it does),
then contunued external support is provided to the school while it works
those issues through;
(c) that the process models good self-reflective practice and develops
appropriate skills within the school with the explicit intent that the
external facilitators will eventually fade out.
Most of our schools have revealed the presence of parental and student
concern with Douglas's 'egregious teachers'. We reflect that in feeding
back, but name nobody. The hope is that this will result in the problem
being owned by the whole school community - which is not ususally the case
when we arrive. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn't. What is
fascinating is that - when firm supplementary data is gathered to find out
more about the problem - those self-same egregious teachers are frequently
then willing to admit their own problems and enter into remedial action.
None of this is easy or automatic, of course. We are now beginning to see
that the process we use must sometimes be repeated a number of times
before a school can be pushed out of denial and into the confusion which
is the necessary forerunner to active renewal. But we do think that we are
demonstrating that 'school reform despair' is not necessary.
Phillip Capper
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business (WEB Research)
PO Box 2855
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 04 499 8140
Fx: (64) 04 499 8439
--"Phillip Capper" <pcapper@actrix.gen.nz>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>