A better model of accountability

The last of my reports from the NSBA conferernce:

At his session on "Change and Stability" Douglas Reeves discussed the challenges of systemic change in large, complex organizations, as well as the implications of some recent research.

Reeves suggested that any organization considering a significant change should first complete an "initiative audit". His "Rule of 6" refers to "Initiative Fatigue" and the natural limit to the number of new initiatives that an organization can successfully manage at any one time. He stressed the importance of making clear to all stakeholders, at the outset, those things that will not change.

Reeves defines "teacher leadership" not by positions or titles, but as "the act of influencing the classroom practices of professional educators." His 2008 research indicated that the single greatest influence on professional practice is “advice from colleagues”, which far outweighs the impact of graduate courses or professional journal articles.

This suggests that one key to successful change is to provide opportunities for teachers to observe models of best practice, as demonstrated by these “teacher leaders”.  A number of schools accomplish this by digitally capturing examples of mini-lessons and effective teacher collaborations which are then posted on the web or shared via DVD. It turns out, that the most confident teachers are generally willing to share their mistakes as well as their successes  He also discussed the importance of creating a safe environment for teachers to "critically review and rehearse successful practices."

He encouraged schools to develop a culture of "hypotheses testing". Rather than beginning from an assumption of "this will never work" or "teachers will never buy in to it", Reeves argues for a culture of curiosity and accountability: let's test promising ideas and see if they actually work. He says that far too often, educators live in the culture of the untested hypothesis - such as: "if students performed poorly on a test, we need to drill them harder" – without subjecting the hypothesis to examination. 

Reeves suggested that not only should we have broader, more meaningful measures of student competency, we should also measure the "antecedents of learning"; that is, we should monitor the factors that we know contribute to a positive educational environment. (This is consistent with current work being done in the development of national school climate standards.) Said another way, we should be monitoring and measuring what the adults in the school community are doing, as well as the students.

A legitimate criticism of the accountability movement is that it defines accountability far too narrowly. If the only measures by which schools are held accountable are standardized 11th-grade math and reading scores, then that's where the instructional focus will tend to be.

A couple of his research results:

• The number of extracurricular activities in which a student is involved (up to four, where the impact begins to level off) is predictive of a student’s GPA.
• the amount of non-fiction writing done by students is predictive of achievement in all subject areas.