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.
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