The outside consultant

 

 A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and then keeps the watch.  Carl Ally

My friend Scott McLeod on his blog Dangerously Irrelevant has been writing about good practices for school districts using "outside helpers." If you are an educational leader, his posts are a must read.

Scott's advice made me reflect a bit on my days when I'd be asked to "consult" - mainly in the form of doing technology or library program evaluations for school districts. I did it often enough - and with what I felt was mixed success - to think about how schools could get their best value from me. While not as comprehensive or thoughtful as Scott's posts, this is what I wrote in my handbook,What Gets Measured, Gets Done (2019), about "helpers"...

The outside consultant

Should a district hire a consultant from outside the district to help evaluate its library media program? Since I have often served as a consultant myself, you need to know that my advice may be somewhat self-serving. But here it is anyway…

There are a number of very good reasons not to hire a consultant to help in the evaluation process:

• Good consultants are expensive. (An alternative to a hired gun is to have a reciprocal agreement with another district to trade external evaluators. Accreditation associations often use volunteer evaluators from member schools. These folks know they in turn will get volunteers when they are evaluated.)

• Consultants may not understand the culture, philosophy, and goals of the district.

• Consultants may come to the evaluation with a set of prejudices not in keeping with district philosophy or professional best practices.

• Consultants may not come from recent practice in the field.

• Consultants can only discover a limited amount of information during a site visit. One or two conversations or experiences may play too important a factor in the consultant’s final recommendations.

 Other than that, we are charming and lovable people and can add value to the evaluation process:

• Consultants can bring a sense of objectivity to the evaluation.

• Consultants can bring expertise in building good programs to the district.

• Consultants can lend credibility and validity to the work done by the district evaluation team if the administrative team and school board regard them as impartial and expert.

• Consultants can bring knowledge of current best practices and future trends in the field, and may have knowledge of what other schools are doing that is innovative and effective.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck from a consultant:

• Spell out exactly what result you expect from his/her involvement. (Site visit, written report, follow-up, etc.)

• Have good information for the consultant to use. Inventories, survey results etc, should be done prior to his/her involvement. (Although a good consultant should be able to provide sources for good evaluative tools.) The consultant should only be analyzing the data and making recommendations, not gathering it.

• Get recommendations from others who have used the consultant. Ask about their communication skills, timeliness, reliability, and the usability of the consultant’s product.

• Hire someone with credibility and recent experience in the library media field.

When I visit a district as a program evaluator, my main objective is to help the head of the library media/technology department get across whatever message he or she needs to have the administration and board hear. Most people for whom I have worked have a very realistic picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their programs. 

I also attempt to answer genuine questions these folks might have: Why are more classes not using technology for research purposes? To what extent do our physical facilities help or hinder our library media programs? How can we better use the computers we have in our elementary schools? Do our print collections meet the needs of our students and staff? How can we better allocate our media and technology dollars? Should our budgets support more e-resources? How can I make our makerspace more effective? Does the library program support the learning management system and personalized learning efforts?

The main point here is that the better the district knows what it wants from an outside consultant evaluator, the better off that person is able to provide it. And this leaves everyone satisfied and the district with useful information that can be used to improve.