Central Matters

HelpDesk for the Central Office Administrator

education

How to Host a Successful Accreditation Review – Part I: Prior Year Preparation

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My district recently finished up its (re)accreditation visit.  It was a success! Everyone’s hard work paid off, and I think I was able to celebrate and take care of my normal responsibilities for a day and half before an unexpected project landed on my desk.  

Several years ago, our district chose to seek accreditation as a district, rather than each individual school being accredited on its own.  This year was our second time accrediting as a district.

Many districts opt these days to forgo having their individual schools seek accreditation.  Instead, these school systems seek accreditation at the district level.  District accreditation efforts require leadership and facilitation at the central office level.

Accreditation Review: Pre-visit Year

I must admit I thought I was going to lose my mind a few times during this year.  No matter how closely your own district or school improvement process aligns to the accreditation process, the process requires a great deal of additional work.

So what do you do if you are the lucky CO administrator with this new project?  And if you are an associate or assistant superintendent, you will be the obvious choice.  If you are a member of the curriculum department or have responsibilities with strategic planning, you might also play a central role or become the facilitator.  If this describes you, well, just buckle up, buttercup!

I have created this three-part accreditation series to help out central office administrators who find themselves in charge of this process for their district.  I tried to capture what I learned about how to run the process and share ideas about how it could be better next time, while the thoughts are still fresh in my mind.

If navigating the accreditation process is your baby, then it is best to know this as early as possible.  Read everything you can find on the accrediting organization’s website regarding its process, standards, and rubrics.  Download handbooks and process guides, if they are available.

I also like to review information from our previous accreditation review.  This might be especially helpful is this is your first accreditation rodeo.  However, I offer a CAVEAT about doing this.  

Most likely, in the five years since your previous review, something about the process and standards have changed.  

So while it is good to see what you did last time, where you were, make sure you understand the current process and requirements.

In my case, the last time the district had a review, most of the work took place at the central office.  Schools were not so involved then.  This time, however, the schools ran the same process and completed the same reports that the central office did.  The number of standards had also changed.  

After our last review, the process changed the next year.  The same thing is happening now with a new process being implemented next year.

I offer three pre-accreditation review year items to help you better situation your district for a success review.  Implementing these three items should also save you headaches and hair-pulling during the review year, too.

  1. Attend an accreditation conference.

Many of these organizations (e.g., AdvancED) sponsor state and regional conferences each year.  You and as many teachers and administrators as possible should attend a conference.  It is impossible to make every session, but with a team attending, you can divide and conquer.  This exposes several people to different parts of the process and builds capacity among your school folks.  This is important!  You can NOT do this alone, so build expertise at both the school and district level.

  1. Serve on an accreditation review team.

No better way exists to learn the accreditation process, to internalize the standards and best practices, than to serve as a member of team reviewing another school or district.  Be forewarned – this is hard, hard work, and the hours are loooong.  However, it is a rich opportunity, and you will return home with a better understanding of how to facilitate the process in your district.  You will also return with new ideas and projects (fun).  Encourage teachers and principals to also serve on these teams, too.

  1.  Form teams.

You will need two types of teams.  The first type of team is composed of the lead facilitators from each school.  Ask principals to identify the lead facilitator for their schools.  Sometimes a principal will facilitate his or her school team, but most often it is an assistant principal or instructional coach.  Sometimes schools will have co-facilitators.   These facilitators will then form their school teams.  These teachers and school administrators will lead the effort in their respective schools.  However, these teams need support from the central office – from you.  But these lead facilitators will be your lifeline to the schools and the work they are doing.  This is a symbiotic relationship.  Nurture it.

2016. Deer. Sea Pines, Hilton Head Island.

The second type of team is your central-office level team.  These are the directors and coordinators of all the departments within your district.  For smaller districts or for those with lean central offices, you may need to dip into the school level to round out your team.  If this becomes necessary, the best choices are those staff members whose roles serve multiple grade spans or schools.  For example, a coach who works with middle and high school teachers and students.  People in these roles often have the broader perspective that is needed to complete the accreditation tasks.

If you do these three things prior to the year of your accreditation review, you will be better prepared to lead a successful review.  I love to hear from those of you who have been involved in the accreditation process.  What are your suggestions for preparation for a review?

Stay tuned for my next post.  I will be sharing strategies to implement during your accreditation year.

College and Career Readiness with AVID

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Sometimes for my day job, I am able to visit other schools and districts. This is usually an enjoyable experience, and one from which I learn a great deal.  The teachers and administrators in these host districts typically relish the opportunity to show off a new program or provide an opportunity for their students to shine.  

Jeff_OldTruck
Old truck on early spring day.

A few times I have visited schools because I served as a member of a district’s accreditation review team.  Most of the time, however, I visit to observe how a school or district has implemented a new program or initiative.

About a year ago, I visited two schools in Anderson, SC.  Each school was an AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) school, meaning that they hold students to high standards and provide support and resources to help them achieve those standards.

Often, students in AVID programs often do not fit the typical profile of a college-bound student.

 

Many times they are the first in their families to attend college. Many times AVID students come from the “academic middle.”  

So what did I see when visited these classrooms in the AVID schools?  First, I saw students engaged in AVID tutorials.  Students completed a handout noting a point of confusion from their current studies.  Small groups formed based on the topics identified through the point of confusion handout.  Nothing too unusual so far.

Then the magic began.  Students presented their points of confusion to the other members of their group.  The group worked through each point, providing notes and hints, and adding clarity for the student presenter.  

So what?  Well, students were fully engaged with academic content that mattered to them.  This engagement occurred when the student presented his or her point of confusion and when the student was providing support for another student’s point of confusion.  Teachers long for students to think critically about academic content, and AVID provides a way for students take their class discussions to a higher level.

During the morning, my team visited teachers and students in a high school.  The students involved in the tutorials were freshmen and sophomores.  We also spoke to seniors who enthused about the benefits of the program.  My colleague and I asked the seniors what they would suggest we tell a rising freshmen we wanted to recruit into an AVID program.  They quickly articulated several recruitment points.

In the afternoon, we visited a middle school.  Admittedly, I was not expecting to see the same level of engagement during the tutorials.  I was delighted to discover sixth grade students involved in the tutorials with a high level of engagement as well.  

Is AVID for every student?  No.  Should every school have an AVID program?  Perhaps.  I know that I liked what I saw students and teachers doing at the schools that I visited.  

Don’t forget the Curse of Knowledge

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knowledge headAs a central office administrator, have you ever trained others on a new program, but realized shortly afterwards that the training did not result in any discernible change in practice?  Did you feel like you were just spinning your wheels?  

I know this has happened to me on more than one occasion.  Perhaps I would have been more successful if I had taken into account the Curse of Knowledge.  The phrase ‘Curse of Knowledge’ comes from a 2015 Edutopia post entitled “The Teacher Curse No One Wants to Talk About.”  

The writer, Christopher Reddy, discusses the idea of the Curse of Knowledge, urging educators to keep the curse in mind when they become frustrated with their students’ failure to grasp content knowledge.  

The Curse of Knowledge basically means that once someone has reached a level of mastery of a discipline, whether chemistry or pole vaulting, that she often forgets how difficult or lengthy the path to expertise was.  

I often forget about the number of hours I have logged over the past 14 years in our district’s student information system.  When I train others on how to use a certain functionality, I tend to forget that they do not have the same level of exposure that I do to the product.  Otherwise, why would they be at my training?  Am I right?

Reddy provided several ideas regarding how to mitigate a teacher’s Curse of Knowledge.  While all of the ideas are effective, ‘narrative’ and ‘spacing’ resonated most with me.  

Using narrative as a way for teachers to mitigate the Curse of Knowledge means that they provide students with a story framework to shape their current learning.  Reddy relates the effectiveness of narrative to oral tradition.  Indeed, many cultures, including the many American Indian tribal cultures, have strong oral traditions that would provide pegs for students to hang their new learning.  

Engaging students with a story provides them a familiar and low-stakes entryway into the new topic.

So what type of narrative could I use to facilitate learning and retention of my workshop topics?  For example, when I am teaching someone how to build ad hoc queries, I can use a story about choosing what clothes to wear.  The closet is my database, and my clothes (fields) are all organized by color (topic).  When I know what look I am going for, I can find my clothes under specific categories.  

Another technique shared in the article is spacing.  With spacing, the specific learning is periodically revisited, thus ensuring that students practice it to the point of automaticity.  For example, if students studied multiplication tables earlier in the year, the teacher will periodically review them with the class.  She might do this in various ways, such as a bellringer activity or as a bonus question on a current test.  

Students studying symbolism in a work of literature would utilize spacing through continuing to identify and trace the development of a symbol in future works.  Teachers of English Language Arts often use this spiraling technique to review and reinforce prior learning.

Spacing is an easy way to consistently reinforce learning that it strikes me as a great way to also offset the summer slump that plagues students.  If students are reinforcing their learning of a particular concept throughout the year, with different lengths of time between the reviews, then the summer break may become just another interval.  Bolstered by the reinforcement during the year, the student may have achieved automaticity with the skill or content by school year’s end.  

How does spacing apply to professional development?  Let’s say I have introduced a new school improvement tool to leadership teams.  I might want to use spacing to reinforce the initial training on the tool. I could do this by communicating to the leadership teams through the tool.  I might refer the tool or the process when I email the teams.  I might ask them to collaborate with me using the tool.  

I tend to think that narrative and spacing are strategies that we – administrators and teachers – use automatically.  Think about your work this school year.  Have you used either of these strategies with educators or with students?  Do you believe spacing could help students retain information over the summer months?

I would love to hear how you might have used either of these techniques.  Tell me your ideas in the Comments.

education

Welcome to Central Matters!

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Have you noticed that teachers have quite a few online resources to support their work, and principals have resources and networks upon which they can call as well?  Central office administrators, however, have few.

But Central MATTERS, and as central office administrators we handle a lot of MATTERS.

Coordinators, directors, and assistant superintendents need more online resources to help them with their daily work, I think.  

Over the years that I have been a central office administrator, I have often been tasked with creating new programs or implementing new initiatives.  So where to start?  Often, I spent a lot of time in research, trying to learn all that I could and find best practices around my project.

Other times, I wasn’t starting a new project, but an existing one needed a re-start or overhaul.  I have often found myself looking for better ways of doing something that we typically have to do each year –  a better way to deliver test training or streamlining the school improvement process for example.

Sometimes a principal or instructional coach has asked for information on a specific topic or issue.  As CO administrators, our role is to support principals, teachers, and schools.  We are often their ‘on-the-spot’ resource center.

Few of us arrive in the central office with much experience in most of the areas that we will be called upon to provide support.  Really, how could we have expertise in all the areas we may be asked to support or provide leadership?  

But what about our graduate programs, you ask.  Did we not learn what we needed to know through those many months of toil?  My answer is no, not really.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not knocking our Higher Education partners, because I do believe that most graduate programs will prepare us for leadership roles from a big picture perspective.  For example, a Master’s in Education program will provide an educator with an understanding of the broader ideas in education, what is involved in being an educational leader, but the program will probably not yield explicit knowledge and skills for someone who must manage the day-to-day responsibilities of an accountability program or a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) program.

The real education begins once you are in the position, and you realize there are some nuts and bolts that must be assembled – every. single. day.

Those of us from small school districts often have the ‘multiple hats’ problem, too.  In larger districts, central office administrators tend to have one main area of responsibility.  Administrators in smaller districts might direct multiple program areas. Sometimes we must take off one hat (e.g., curriculum) and don another (e.g., testing).  

I call this the central office shuffle. Okay, maybe I only call it that in my head, but I bet a lot of you know exactly what I am talking about here.  Each day we must decide which department, program area, or project has the immediate need and prioritize our to-do list accordingly.  The struggle is real.  

Because of our varied responsibilities, we sometimes lack the time to research a topic, program, or process.  Staying on top of the periodicals and education newsletters that pertain to our areas of responsibility is daunting.  I know some of you out there have a messy stack of Education Week issues on your desk, touched only when you carried them from the mail room to your office.  No?  Maybe it is just me then.   

Often, it would help just to know what our colleagues in other districts do.  Central office administrators often work without the support of a learning network, especially in smaller districts.  

I have found that the best information often comes from others who have already tackled a similar project.

Listening to and learning from my colleagues in other districts is rewarding for me personally and extremely helpful to me professionally.  I enjoy local and regional job-alike meetings, as well as state and national conferences.

I do not purport to know much, but if the little that I have learned in the past thirteen years in the central office can help a colleague, then I am happy to share what I’ve learned, both successes and those pesky ‘opportunities.’    And I look forward to learning from you, too!