Lessons from serving on a WASC Visiting Committee

Last week I served on a WASC visiting committee to a school in Roseville. I won’t say that it was a fun experience, but it was definitely educational! As I worked, I compiled two lists – one of program ideas that I thought were interesting and potentially had applicability at TBS, and another of points to remember when it comes to our own CAIS/WASC process. Here are some lessons I learned that may be useful for our own thinking of the accreditation process.

1. Don’t fret too much about crafting the perfect schedule for the visiting committee, because it might just get tossed out. In our case, we stuck to it Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, but that was it – just two half days out of 3.5 days total. Note: Perhaps this reflected a lack of communication between the school and the VC Chair before the visit, but the schedule they proposed had us spending far more time in the classrooms and talking to children then served our needs and questions. Instead, we wound up making time to talk 1:1 with the faculty.

2. The VC will notice if only the strongly verbal students are presented for conversation and interviews. What we saw with the students in small groups was noticeably different from what we saw in the classrooms.

3. Provide separate times for faculty and parents to meet. The parents are unlikely to offer genuine critiques of the school when any employee is present. Also, if you have a major school-wide initiative that you have written about in the self-study, make sure that the parents who do meet the team are at least somewhat informed about the initiative – it does not look good when no parent in the focus group knows what an ESLRs is, for example.

4. Because the faculty engage with the VC differently when in small groups and alone, provide both group and 1:1 time for faculty to speak with the VC.

5. Don't expect the VC to spend lots of time in the classrooms. While that is a completely understandable desire – and one of my regrets was how we needed to limit our classroom time – the primary responsibility of the VC is to verify what has been written about in the self-study, and there is a limit to how much of this can be done via classroom observation.

6. The self-study report should rock. This goes beyond grammar, or consistency of content; the depth of thinking and thoroughness of process should be communicated in the report, and examples to support each point should also be referenced (or it raises suspicion that the reports doesn’t accurately reflect reality). A report that is weak means the committee comes into the school with certain assumptions already in place. In our case, it was evident that certain lines written in 2008-09 hadn’t been revised before the final report was submitted in December. So it’s important to be accurate in the self-presentation; because the VC can tell that certain lines were written years ago, and are not clearly relevant in the present, any discrepancies stand out like red flags. Another reason for a great self-study document is because there is simply too much work for the VC to do, in too short a period of time to be fully done thoroughly. Thus, excellent self-studies (and corroborating documentation) are needed, to streamline the process for the VC.

7. Organize the documentation so that it can easily be cross-referenced to the self-study report, by providing the chapter and sub-heading that it corroborates. Documentation doesn’t need to just be binders full of paper, either – displays are great. And, because the committee might want to return to the hotel to work in the evening, rather than stay on site, providing digital versions of as much documentation as possible is also appreciated (so the VC isn’t overwhelmed hauling binders back and forth). And, although massive amounts of documentation are laborious to get through, they are useful when the VC is looking for documentation to support a point, and can shift their thinking if you have the right things in there. So, develop a plan to provide documentation for each point of the self-study report.

8. Every classroom must do on-going ESLR documentation each year, with correlation of examples to the ESLR sub-goal. This was by far the best aspect of the documentation with which we were presented, and gave us clear evidence of the attempts to teach towards the ESLRs.

9. The VC might throw a curveball at you. We were visiting a school that is one of 220 in a for-profit company, and our questions led us to request a phone conversation with the Senior VP of Education in their corporate office – and, we were told, we were the only VC to do so, out of the 10 or so schools that are currently going through accreditation - because we had questions about the process of corporate initiatives around professional development, and commitment to the site in the face of declining enrollment, that could not be answered by the personnel at the site.

10. Not all members of the VC will have done all of their HW. While they will have all read and re-read the self-study report, lots of writing happens on-site (even though drafts are meant to be written before the VC arrives at the site).

11. The VC will give off-the-record verbal coaching to the principal, based on its investigation. The form of this coaching may be “This is what we saw, have you seen it, if not now you know and need to address it.”

12. The VC prepares a confidential portion of the report that is a Justification statement with 11 short segments. Therefore, a school undergoing accreditation should consider and prepare for each of these segments in the presentation of its self-study and initial report:

a. Involvement and collaboration of stakeholders in doing the self-study that accomplishes the five parameters of the self-study.

b. The defining of the school’s purpose through expected school-wide learning results and academic standards.

c. The use of professionally acceptable assessment process to collect, disaggregate, and analyze student performance data.

d. The acceptable progress by all students toward clearly defined expected schoolwide learning results, academic standards, and other institutional and/or governing authority expectations.

e. An organization for student learning that supports high achievement for all students.

f. Curriculum, instruction and assessment that supports high achievement for all students.

g. Support for student personal and academic growth that supports high achievement for all students.

h. Resource management and development that supports high achievement for all students.

i. The alignment of a long-range schoolwide action plan to the school’s areas of greatest need to support high achievement of all students.

j. The capacity to implement and monitor the schoolwide action plan.

k. The use of prior accreditation findings and other pertinent data to ensure high achievement of all students and drive school improvement.

13. The VC cares deeply about the use of data to drive instructional decisions – see 12.c above. How that data is collected is less important than that there be some degree of sophistication about disaggregating and analyzing the data on a class-by-class basis. On a related note, the school should have an articulated policy about sharing and reporting data with families.

14. Be prepared to revise the action plan. This is stated in the process guidelines, but is really true if the VC comes up with areas for attention that had not been encompassed in your self-study. Also, the action plan should contain “SMART” goals that are effective for accountability and action planning. S = specific, M = measureable, A = attainable, R = realistic, T = timely. The VC will notice if these are not used.

15. The VC will gather the faculty and staff to deliver commendations and recommendations before it leaves. It will answer questions about them, but won’t/can’t comment on the recommendation for a term of accreditation that it will make. The in-person recommendations it makes may also be phrased differently, or even be slightly different, from the ones that go in it’s final public report.

16. The VC appreciates a decent hotel - clean, good sheets, nicely appointed rooms, decent breakfast on-site, and an executive workroom were all greatly appreciated during our visit.

17. Gift baskets for the VC are appreciated, and noted when not provided. These could include school swag, fruit and chocolate, locally produced items notable to the locale, and even items from companies owned by parents of enrolled children.

The only one of these lessons that may have limited applicability to the TBS accreditation process is #12 above, since we are following the CAIS accreditation protocol rather than the WASC protocol, so this fall I’ll get myself on a CAIS committee and see that from the inside as well. As I stated at the top, I also have a list of ideas for program implementation here at TBS, but that’s a list for a different day.

Video game model as learning tool?

This article was written by Dr. Judy Willis, the neuropsychologist who hosted the webinar that I attended with several TBS faculty last week (props to Tanya for sending around the article). Here's the first three paragraphs of the article, to whet your appetite.

A Neurologist Makes the Case for the Video Game Model as a Learning Tool

By Judy Willis MD

The popularity of video games is not the enemy of education, but rather a model for best teaching strategies. Games insert players at their achievable challenge level and reward player effort and practice with acknowledgement ofincremental goal progress, not just final product. The fuel for this process is the pleasure experience related to the release of dopamine.

Dopamine Motivation

The human brain, much like that of most mammals, has hardwired physiological responses that had survival value at some point in evolutionary progression. The dopamine-reward system is fueled by the brain's recognition of making a successful prediction, choice, or behavioral response.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that, when released in higher than usual amounts, goes beyond the synapse and flows to other regions of the brain producing a powerful pleasure response. This is a deep satisfaction, such as quenching a long thirst. After making a prediction, choice, or action, and receiving feedback that it was correct, the reward from the release of dopamine prompts the brain seek future opportunities to repeat the action. For animal survival, this promotes life or species-sustaining choices and behaviors, such as following a new scent that leads to a mate or a meal and remembering that scent the next time it is present.

Today's learning walk

My absolute favorite aspect of being in administration is the ability to go into every classroom in the school and observe students and adults teaching and learning together. Today I did a "learning walk", in which I managed to see nine classes in about 80 minutes. As Tony Wagner says in The Global Achievement Gap, "The learning walk is one way to essentially audit what's taking place in a group of classes in a given period of time.... you have a snapshot of the teaching and learning that take place in that school. It's obviously not a way to evaluate individual teachers or an entire course, but this kind of sampling detects patterns within and across schools."

My walk began in the middle school, where I observed a 7th grade science class discuss a recent experiment on photosynthesis, and the relative effect of heat compared to light on the process. I then moved into a 6th grade math class, where students were putting the finishing touches on their Plan-A-Park Projects, and consulting this rubric to improve their work. In a 7th grade math class I watched as students wrestled with multiplication using negative numbers, predicting patterns and utilizing thinking routines to explain their thinking. In 8th grade English, students were engaged in a Reader's Theater read-through of the final scene from Romeo and Juliet.

I headed to the elementary level, where a work period was underway in Temescal Creek. Half the students were working with various pattern works from the TERC: Investigations curriculum, and the other half were using math-based Montessori materials such as the Stamp Game and Bead Frame to extend their understanding of multiplication and division. In Blackberry, students played class-favorite Roll and Record, or created number sentences based on the culinary exploits of the titular character in The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. In Laurel, students chose from a variety of activities during Reader's Workshop, including card work with consonant blends, sound/symbol association, investigation of short "a", spelling work using the Wilson Fundations program, and games that involved matching initial blends to word families.

In Strawberry, students were engaged in a poetry writing workshop. They worked at a range of places along the writing process continuum, from brainstorming to draft to editing to publishing, on pieces including concrete poems in the shape of rivers and boats, acrostics, and prose poems. One student was working on his mastery of syllables:

Geckos can blow our minds asunder.

They can climb and it makes us wonder,

Is destroying their habitat a blunder?

Students in Cerrito were working on poetry as well; they read a poem titled Melodic As Machine Guns, and analyzed it for "unbeautiful imagery." They then moved on to brainstorming ideas for their own unbeautiful poems, developing one of those ideas into a full-fledged concept, and writing a first draft. My learning walk ended in Sweet Briar, where students ended their mornings in a read-aloud, before discussing appropriate transition to hot lunch, and the cleaning procedures to use with the non-disposal plates and silverware that were introduced this week.

Several consistencies and patterns jumped out during my learning walk. One was the degree of individualization that was structured into the program, as seen in the Blackberry, Laurel, Temescal, Cerrito, Strawberry, and Wildcat (6th grade) classrooms; in each case, children were engaged in activities that were related by theme, and provided with an opportunity to choose from within the structure provided by the faculty. In contrast, the 7th and 8th grade students were working on the same work at the same time, as a collective group - a technique that happens throughout the school as well. Another similarity was the emphasis on creativity; from Blackberry's literature-based number sentences to the poetry of the 4/5 classrooms and the math projects in 6th grade, students were given opportunities to express their creative thinking in the service of problem solving. Equally present was the emphasis on critical thinking; first grade students were asked explain why certain numbers showed up more often than others in their game of Roll and Record, 4th grade students were asked to analyze poetic imagery, and 7th grade students were asked to reason about the impact of different conditions on the result of their science experiments. The importance of understanding the role of patterns in mathematical thinking showed up from Kindergarten, where a child pasted pictures from The Very Hungry Caterpillar in a "sweet, not sweet" pattern, to the third grade TERC: Investigations work, to the 7th grade attempts to predict and extend patterns abstractly. And finally, in six of the eight classrooms I visited without consulting a schedule prior to the start of my walk, students were engaged in mathematical and language arts, which has me wondering if it was coincidence, or a manifestation of how our teachers plan their days.

Executive Function and Neurobiology

During lunch and recess today, a group of seven faculty and I gathered to watch a free webinar from ASCD called "Strengthening the Brain's Executive Functioning." Executive functioning includes important higher-order skills such as analyzing, prioritizing, decision making, delay of immediate gratification, judgment, tolerance, empathy, and organization, and occurs in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain. Neural networks in the PFC are the last part of the brain to mature, and are at their peak period of growth and formation between the ages of 9-16 (though the PFC is in a state of constant maturation from the age of about 5 to about 25). No wonder, then, that so many students in upper elementary, middle school and underclassmen in high school struggle to stay organized, track their materials, complete work and in general manage their responsibilities at school and home; there's a neurobiological reason for their poor decision making! One implication is for schools; it is important to promote the development of neuroplasticity, which leads to increased executive functioning, by providing activities and opportunities to build flexible perspectives, learn to interpret and apply information to new open-ended tasks, search for multiple ways to solve problems, and develop metacognition - which obviously can't be accomplished in a teach-to-the-test environment. Another implication is for parents - how you choose to allow your child to spend his/her free time has a direct impact on the ways in which the neurological wiring of the prefrontal cortex is progressing, and thus how your child's brain is literally being formed. As one teacher pointed out in our discussion afterwards, if a child is playing video games for hours on the weekend, those neural pathways are getting tremendous reinforcement while others are neglected. In turn, this shift towards more complex digital lives for children has implications for schools - for example, if those are the neural pathways that are strongest for a child, rather than saying "no screens in school," we need to intentionally use screens to introduce both skills and concepts that we wish children to master. This is a perspective echoed by some of the interviewees in Monday's AP article "iPads take a place next to crayons in kindergarten" (sent to me by a friend who is a preschool teacher - thanks Lars!), and supported by the evidence from this webinar.

The host of the webinar was Dr. Judy Willis. While you can find the handouts of the webinar available for download here, I recommend you check out her great website, which includes information about the intersection of neurobiology and education.

My first day back from Spring Break

I don't think I've ever posted a blow-by-blow account of my day before, and I may never do it again. Here goes:

8:30-9:00: Email session #1.

9:00-9:25: All school sing-along. The middle school students teach "Ease on Down the Road" from their recent production of "The Wiz" to the rest of the students, who are up and dancing!

9:30-10:55: 8th grade English. I am teaching a mini-unit this week on formal poetry, as part of the 8th grade study of Romeo and Juliet.

11-11:45: Meeting with Mitch. We discuss preparing faculty and parents for the placement process of assigning children to classrooms for the 2011-12 school year. More information about this will be coming soon.

11:45-12:00: Lunch.

12:00-1:15: Student Success Team meeting with Mike R, Nancy, Laurie, and Mitch.

1:15-2:15: Observation in Blackberry. Kyla teaches students about pollution and how the SF Bay became polluted in various ways over time.

2:15-3:15: 6th grade SST meeting with MaryBeth, Marcella, and Norman.

3:15-3:45: Email session #2.

3:45-4:15: Meeting with Amy Helmstetter, Extended Day Director.

4:15-5:00: Parent phone call planned from before Spring Break.

5:00-5:30: Conversation with Mitch about various topics, including 2011-12 staffing.

5:30-6:00: Opening mail, checking phone messages, saying hello to administrators I hadn't checked in with yet, and various and sundry tasks.

6:00-6:30: Conversation with Shira Freeling, Associate Business Manager, about enrolled contracts.

All in all, it was a wonderful, rewarding day. I feel lucky to work here at TBS!

Lovely, even if flawed