Value of Cornerstone School Reviews---Three Perspectives

 

Leading a Cornerstone Review is Exciting
By John Bartholomew, Cornerstone Senior Reviewer

Some of the excitements are purely practical. There is a certain amount of waiting at airports, delaying meetings or starting with an incomplete team. On one not-to-be-forgotten occasion, I arrived at Jackson airport four hours late, and turned up at the school at the end of the working day to find two of the Cornerstone team sitting in the doorway keeping a lookout for me.

'I need to see the principal,'

'Yes, waiting for you.'

They led me through the school, opened a doorway, and thrust me in. The principal was indeed there, smiling a welcome at me. So was the entire faculty, waiting patiently since goodness knows when for a look at this English apparition.

'I'm sure you would like to say a few words to the faculty about Cornerstone.' Suddenly, I knew how a rabbit feels, trapped in the oncoming headlights. My mouth opened and closed but the intended words stubbornly refused to come out. A feeble joke, mercifully greeted with a friendly laugh, and I began to function. It was not the best of starts. I blame Delta.

Some of the excitements are delightful; I mean the excitement of greeting old friends (even after nine months with Cornerstone they feel like old friends), meeting new ones, and planning where we are going to have our first meal together.

Then there is the excitement that comes with any fresh start. For a week we are going to get to know a school quite intimately. We are going to share our perceptions of what they are doing, we are going to see them at their best; but we will also be there for some of those difficult moments that all teachers know about. We function as a team that will become a machine for collecting, sifting and recording evidence. Then we have to agree upon our perspectives that will enable us to present the school with a coherent view of itself, what it is good at, and what it may need to do next to become even better.

This doesn't just happen. Our procedures have to be carefully arranged so that everyone understands what they are responsible for, and so that we get through the daunting amount of work in time to feel by Friday that we have done the school justice. Each senior reviewer has their own way of working. For me, it involves lists of tasks, a tight agenda for meetings, and making sure that each of the dozens of bits of writing we agonize over finds a reader rather than merely a dusty place in some archive. I have some unvaried strategies:

  • Each member of the team knows from the beginning of the week what they need to have done by the end. Typically, I give several Cornerstone review questions to each one. It is their job to assemble the evidence collected by the whole team relevant to that question and prepare the main points for the feedback and the final report. Our meetings are the time to exchange this information.
  • Meetings move quickly, to ensure that we give good but not exhaustive consideration to each question. We move on when the discussion starts to get repetitive, or when we can't agree. 'We'll all look for more evidence on that tomorrow. When you're in classrooms, look out for examples of the teacher modelling the skills of writing from personal experience - and see if you can find an example of children's work to illustrate it in the report.'
  • We agree beforehand on the questions that we want answers to in our discussions with the principal, the coaches, the grade teams, etc.
  • On Thursday night, we all read through all the evidence forms that everyone has written. It gives everyone in the team a rounded picture.
  • Plenty of writing time is given, but the expectation is that writing will be succinct, that it will focus on how (or even whether) the teaching has brought about the learning and will include relevant examples.
  • When we feedback to the faculty, each team member takes responsibility for the questions they were studying, but knows they are reporting on a whole team perspective.
  • The notes they made for the feedback form the first skeleton of the report.

Ah, the report - the final delight of a fun-packed week. It is what remains after the fond farewells with the people at the school, who for the most part are a lot more comfortable with us at week's end than they had been when we first arrived; the thanks to the district officials who have made our week run smoothly (I still wonder whether Barbara has managed to catch up with the backlog of work that accumulated while she fixed up all our computers and still had time to take us on a cotton field tour and capture that photograph which readers of 'Around The Corner' will have noticed); and the dwindling pile of suitcases as the team leaves the hotel and prepares to re-enter real life.

A computer blinking morosely, a little pile of discs, a pot of coffee on the side and a weekend stretching ahead in which to draw together the vast quantities of writing that have been produced into a report that encapsulates it all without being too long. The devil is what to leave out. At the end of it all, the hope that next Wednesday the school will have something to read in which it will recognize itself and is genuinely constructive for their action plan.

School Reviews: Helping Us See The Forest For The Trees
By Kathy Francescani, Coach, Cleveland, Ohio

There have been times when I've been teaching and I felt like I just wasn't getting anywhere with my students until someone would come to visit my class and marvel at how much progress my students were making. At other times I felt like I was really inspiring greatness in my students, only to have a visitor come in and look around trying to figure out what was going on. While immersed in teaching, it's sometimes difficult to gauge the quality of one's lessons or the extent to which students are progressing. Even the most passionate teachers get mired in the details of teaching at times and lose sight of the focus. It's like the saying, "You can't see the forest for the trees."

Being close to a situation can hinder our perception. I think we need to learn how to view our schools and our teaching with an objective eye. The beauty of a school review is that it gives us the opportunity to get a glimpse of ourselves through the objective eyes of an impartial team of trusted colleagues. We are all invested in this journey towards improving literacy in our schools, and the report provided by a school review team is critical in aiding us in that mission.

I've had the opportunity to be on a team as a reviewer a couple of times and also to be at a school that was reviewed. Both experiences have been valuable. As a reviewer, the most enlightening experience was shadowing a student through their literacy learning. Spending time in a classroom and observing instruction through the eyes of a child in that classroom really gave me a better appreciation for what is meaningful and what isn't in a child's literacy work. After the student-shadowing encounter, I began to reflect on things I did in my teaching and ask myself why I did certain things. When we analyze our rationale for what we teach and how we teach, it is imperative that we keep the child as the focus if we are to improve literacy.

The report our school received from the school review team was instrumental in helping us reevaluate our work as teachers. We received many recommendations from our review team. We were aware that we needed to improve, and the review process gave us some direction for developing a plan for improvement. In addition, the report highlighted areas we were strong in. This, too, helped us see what we needed to maintain and where we needed to apply more energy.

The literacy work in our schools will only progress if we take the time to step back and see the whole picture. Unfortunately, that isn't always easy to accomplish. Through participating in the school review process, I think we can all learn to examine what is effective and essential and what we can selectively abandon.

Reflections on Maplewood Annex's First School Review
By Darlene Tickey, Principal

This year Maplewood Annex School welcomed the Cornerstone Literacy Initiative. We have accomplished so much in such a short time. After a mere nine weeks, we completed our first School Review.

As I reflect on this process, my feeling is that it was a non-threatening learning situation with much discourse between the staff and review team. The total experience assisted us in reflecting on our instructional practices and decisions. It also helped us to continue our focused effort on increased parental involvement in and around our school community. Overall, the review process provided us a means to consider the effectiveness of our school's literacy program. We now have a broader vision of our goals on behalf of student literacy.

Walking through our halls and classrooms, I can see tangible growth in the climate and environment of our school encouraged by the Cornerstone philosophy. Many staff members have already embraced the challenges offered by this educational collaborative. The halls are brighter, the rooms cozier, and the children are visibly engaged in meaningful literacy activities and discourse.

One invaluable benefit of the review is that my staff has taken an even closer look at the practice of teaching, student learning outcomes, and the learning community. Teachers continue to share ideas, strategies, and techniques with each other with a renewed sense of enthusiasm.

The review also provided a vehicle to assess our ongoing professional development activities and acted as a springboard for more meaningful teacher training. The recommendations submitted by the review team were invaluable tools in planning our future professional development.

Most of all, the review heightened my direction as an instructional leader and administrator. The Cornerstone Initiative and our Maplewood Annex goals complement and align with the district's balanced literacy program. I'm looking forward to continuing this exciting and collaborative effort.