Self assessment - getting students to practice a critical skill

Happy people evaluate themselves; unhappy people evaluate others.

  William Glasser

Dean Shareski referenced "Who Owns the Data" in response to "An educational Fitbit?" In his post he writes:

... I’ve been asking “Who Owns the Assessment?” I’m not sure we can really give ownership of the learning to students without them having some say in the assessment. Too often students complete work and give it to the teacher as if to say, “I”m done, now it’s your problem”. If a student truly owns the learning, they’ll be reluctant to hand it over unless know they will have some say as to how it’s assessed. Then when it is assessed, they should be able to do something with that data. They should own it.

Dean's observation reminded me of a task I often required of graduate students in my library management classes. In addition to doing their projects, they were also to create an assessment by which those projects could be evaluated - a checklist or other tool of quality criteria. And I asked that the students themselves complete this evaluation, applying it to their own projects. (And I gave them the grades they gave themselves.)

 

For example, one of the assignments was to create a floor plan for a new school library. So not only did the student submit a floor plan, he/she need to submit something like:

The floor plan:

• Accommodates a sufficient number of students
• Has a traffic pattern that allows high and low activity areas
• Includes areas for large, small, and individual work
• Is easy to supervise by a single adult
• Includes computer productivity areas...

You get the point.

Other projects included a library manual, sample policy statements, short and long term plans, etc. And invariably, students found creating the assessment more difficult than completing the project.

The students hated the requirement.

My objective, of course, in giving this as a part of the assignment was to enforce the idea that we as professionals must continuously be self-evaluators, not dependent on our supervisors to tell us how well we've done. As an increasing number of workers become self-employed, entrepreneurial/interprendurial, or  just plain treated like trusted professionals, effective self-evaluation becomes a critical skill.

Why do we not ask our students to be more self-evaluative? Justifying why a solution works, why an answer is correct, or why an interpretation is sufficiently supported is just a foundational ability any independent worker has to have.

Especially writers.

BFTP: YOYO - staff development for administrators

The issue of the use of technology is 5 percent bits and bytes (a spiffy e-mail system that spans continents), 95 percent psychology and sociology (an organization that dotes on sharing information rather than hoarding it). Tom Peters

All administrators can learn. The Blue Skunk

Learning that a Google Teacher Academy for Administrators was to be held in San Antonio in March (of 21010), got me thinking a little about our district's approach to helping administrators learn about any  technology. I believe our approach can neatly be summed up by the acronym YOYO - You're On Your Own.

Well, perhaps not quite. Our library and technology department just takes a less head-on approach. These strategies consciously developed by our department have seemed to work for most our administrators:

• Setting examples of good communication, planning and record keeping using technology.
• Inviting administrators to all technology staff development activities.
• Providing technical support and individualized training.
• Providing clear teacher and student information literacy and technology competency lists.
• Serving on building leadership teams.
• Serving on district staff development teams.
• Placing administrators on the district library and technology advisory committee.
• Providing reports and updates on technology initiatives and budgets at administrative meetings.
• Helping administrators understand what they need to know.*

There are a number of reasons, I've found, that make "teaching" administrators** about technology challenging:

1. Administrators have people. Having ready access to secretaries, librarians, and technicians, it's pretty easy to pass technology-enabled tasks to one's minions. (I do it myself.) Having the librarian develop the slideshow, the secretary access the finance system, or the technician do any software upgrades is a routine occurrence. One can reasonably argue about how much time we taxpayers want our administrators spending on secretarial or tech tasks anyway.
2. What is commonly taught to teachers has little relevance to administrators' daily work. Our staff development efforts tend to focus on teachers and classrooms. Knowing how to use interactive white boards, the online grade book, or clever Web 2.0 tools to make reports sing and dance will not impact the daily work of your average principal. As "instructional leaders," administrators should know of these tools and how teachers themselves should be using them, but do they need to master them?
3. Administrators have other priorities and other tasks than classroom teachers. Administrative work is just plain different from classroom teacher work. Work drives tech use, not the other way around.
4. Technology as a tool for student problem-solving, communication and creativity may not be in alignment with administrators' personal educational philosophy. Or individual leadership styles for that matter. If the principal is evaluated based on her building's test scores, the most powerful uses of student technology use - creating problem-solvers, communicators and divergent thinkers may not resonate with that administrator. But they may happily glom on to reading or math integrated learning programs or data mining apps. My experience shows that anyone happily adopts technology when it increases the chance of his/her personal goals - people are not resistant to technology, per se, but applications of technology that do not conform with their idea of schooling.
5. Most administrators are middle management, taking directions and priorities from a supervisor themselves. As powerful as some administrators may seem, they take their marching orders from someone else as well - including superintendents who answer to elected school boards who answer to the public. So they have a limited degree of autonomy to set their own goals, practice their own educational philosophies, etc.

As much as I hope the Google Academy for School Administrators was wildly successful, I didn't push it here. Were I betting man, I'd say such workshops have far less impact than on-going, less direct means of building administrative "technology" understandings.

 

* I've been thinking/writing about technology skills for administrators for over ten years. A former superintendent, Eric Bartleson, and I published Technology Literacy for Administrators in School Administrator, Apr 1999 and I updated my Rubrics fo Leadership in 2013. Using one of our own principals a a model, I wrote Improving Administrative Technology Skills, for May 2005's School Administrator.

**  Whether we'd like to acknowledge it or not, all the administrators I know have advanced degrees, an above average intelligence, decent interpersonal skills and leadership capacity. I believe, even if we are not always in agreeement, that our administrators act in the best interest of our students.

Image source: http://www.dilbert.com/

Original post December 29, 2009

The dark side of my nature

“You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” John Gardner on maturity (quoted by David Brooks)

Given the choice, I would rather be liked than disliked - as a co-worker, a colleague, a relative, a neighbor. a human being. There is, I'm sure, some survival advantages to being likeable - one is less likely to have one's head bashed in, being able to live long enough procreate, when others feel an affinity toward you as a person. One's self-perception, after all, is in large part made up of reflections and reactions of others. At least mine is.

Yet the older I get, the less I worry about my popularity. I know things I do and say simply honk people off at times. Knowing that some people are just never going to love me isn't that important. It's even, as Gardner suggests, "quite relaxing." Our recent switch to Gmail from Outlook at work royally pissed a few people off, and in meetings, little digs and questions let me know the change is still an ongoing rub and I am personally responsible for their unhappiness.

With some people, you just know nothing will satisfy them. No action will make them happy. Not one thing you can do will make them like you. And I'm OK with that.

In fact, the dark side of my nature asks, "What can I do to drive these people even a little more crazy?" since they will never like me anyway. Personally, I would like someone to invent an ethernet cable that works when I am near and doesn't work when the user needs to get something done and I am not around. (Maybe I will create a Kickstart campaign. Partners?)

I remember a tech once telling her principal, "Nothing I do seems to make you happy. But luckily you are a lot more fun to watch when your mad." I suspect she long ago stopped worrying about her popularity.