School Review - Local Style

I can’t pretend that I was pleased when I learned that this year school reviews would be managed with teams selected locally by the district.  I can’t imagine that the schools to be reviewed were that delighted either.  I thought back to my own days as a principal, or, as we quaintly call them in England, a headteacher.  I don’t believe that I would really have wanted a group of close colleagues whom I knew well – who indeed would have been more than welcome in the school under almost any other circumstances – spending a week there and then telling me how we were doing.

It’s that judgment thing.  None of us really likes to be judged, but at least when it is done by someone you hardly know it doesn’t feel so personal.  But a group of teachers from just down the road!  How could they say such things about my precious school?  They should know what it’s like.  Or, maybe even worse, do they really mean all those lovely things they are telling us, or is it just because we are neighbors and colleagues, or her brother is married to my grade 4 teacher, or we’ll be seeing them next week at a district event or football game?

Still, whatever misgivings there might have been, there were no howls of protest and at least the review team leader would be an outsider.  Then again, even the review team leaders have been around since Cornerstone began and are rather familiar figures, friends, even.

Muscogee County has now had all four of its schools reviewed under this system, and having been on two of the reviews and had news of the other two, I am happy to report that it seems to have worked.

Before I arrived, I mentally listed the disadvantages and potential difficulties that would have to be worked around:

• There would be nervousness in the team about being critical;
• There would be local confidentiality issues;
• The district’s involvement might be seen to reduce the independence of the review program;
• Local knowledge might cloud impartiality;
• Team cohesion would be difficult because we wouldn’t be staying together in the hotel;
• Being close to home would mean that team members would not be able to abandon domestic responsibilities and dedicate themselves to the review.

It was fine.  This is how it worked out.

There was no nervousness about being critical.  Nervousness perhaps: this is my first review; I don’t really know that much about Cornerstone, the others in the team seem to know so much more than I do; I’ve heard that reviews are all about endless writing.  But in the team discussions, everybody said exactly what they thought, and of course that included some quite critical statements as even the best school isn’t perfect.  I realized at once, and said from the beginning, that when it came to feeding back any adverse judgments to the school, that would be my responsibility.  What we discussed in our meeting room – as we thrashed out the balance of strengths and weaknesses – was to stay within those four walls.  On feedback day all the team members reported back on the full extent of the team’s collective perspective.  They did so with smiles and empathy, and it was not a problem.

Local confidentiality was probably the biggest fear for the reviewed school.  It was made absolutely (and no doubt unnecessarily) clear to the team members that they could not go back to their own school and gossip about what they had been privileged to see.  In fact, one of the first things the principal of the first school I went to said was that her faculty member who had been on a review just recently had been professionally silent about it, and that had reassured her greatly.

The district has entered into the spirit of review with interest and effective backing.  Important people from the district made brief supportive appearances in the schools but left the review teams to get on with it in a commendable display of trust.  Members of the professional development services joined some of the review teams for the express purpose of getting to know more about Cornerstone.  They reported that it was a week of fascinating learning for them, and they also were in a position to reaffirm the district’s commitment to the Cornerstone process from a perspective of far greater understanding.  They were valuable team members.  The independence of the teams was not compromised in any way.

Within the team discussions there was no hint of impartiality.  As new reviewers always do, some of the team members had to look beyond their own practice to appreciate the effectiveness of different practices, and to ask the key question: are the students learning as well as could be?  This is one of the lessons that reviewers learn.  As always, they left at the end of the week saying that they had learned more from the experience than any other professional development event they could recall.

Team cohesion was fine.  We were together from 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM most days, and that was enough to gel.  I quite enjoyed saying goodbye after supper and going to my room knowing that my phone was not going to ring with some cry of dismay about the intricacies of the overview log.  We started each day with a short morning meeting in the school, and worked as closely together as any teams I have had.

As for domestic responsibilities, I know that it is incumbent upon team leaders of locally based teams to be sympathetic about minor family crises.  Apart from one sick dog causing a little anxiety, I was not called upon to do so.  The desire to be finished by 7 each evening was a great spur, actually.  There is nothing like a deadline to get the writing done fast.  At the end of each day, we felt that we had stayed on top of the job.  In one of the teams, a member did not realize when she signed up that the day did not end at three-thirty in the afternoon, but the team worked around this and she made a valued contribution.  This, however, is something that needs to be made clear from the outset in the future.  For most of the team members it turned out that the review, far from being an intrusion into a busy home life, was a rather pleasant liberation from family responsibilities.  I tolerantly suggested at 7:00 PM – at the end of our first evening meeting – that while members would be more than welcome to stay on for dinner in the hotel of course I realized that some of them might need to dash off.  Everyone stayed.  The typical response was, “My husband should have that sorted out.  If I go home now, I’ll find myself cooking.”