The Role of Leadership in Sustaining School Reform: Voices From the Field - July 1996

Developing a Self-Assessment System

Our conversations with forum participants revealed that for every one who used self-assessment for professional purposes there were two or three who viewed it as an appealing but as-yet-untried solution to the problem of collecting evidence of effectiveness. As pathfinders, they may not score high on traditional rating systems, but as accountable members of an education system, they appreciate the importance of documenting progress. From what participants said about their work and their approaches to accountability and from our own experience as educators, we have learned a few simple principles to guide development of a self-assessment system.

Like any other assessment, self-assessment has three components: (1) the criteria that define effectiveness in a given setting, (2) valid and manageable data collection methods, and (3) appropriate analytic frameworks.

Criteria. First, criteria for assessment must be identified. In self-assessment, the basic question is, "Am I doing a good job?" Answering that question begins with describing what a "good job" looks like in the relevant context. In one setting, a leader may decide that being a perceptive and available listener is highly desirable; in another setting, having and sharing well-founded ideas about reform options may be key; in still a third, a friendly but firm management plan may be necessary. Participants in the forums had expectations of themselves that varied by context and stage of professional development. These expectations are the foundation of their criteria for self-assessment. Although criteria may vary widely, in this instance they ought to reflect concern with both the nature of educational institutions and the particular values and circumstances that influence practice in a particular place. Criteria are implicit in the leadership dimensions identified in the forum discussions, but other skills and knowledge may be demanded by particular reform movements. Being effective involves meeting the demands of a given situation, not necessarily demonstrating a set of unrelated skills included in a generic definition of leadership.

A problem with conventional assessment criteria may be that the values and priorities they reflect are not particularly relevant to the challenges of sustaining a given reform effort. However, they usually have the virtue of being well known and historically defensible, and this is no small matter with regard to overall fairness. If other criteria are to be added to the mix or substituted for conventional criteria, they should have at least as solid a foundation. A leader should be able to make the case that any criterion that is the focus of assessment is important for the success of the school.

Methods. Second, data collection methods suitable for use in self-assessment vary in their relevance, practicality, and accuracy. Some self-assessment strategies are fairly subjective; reviewing one's own journal entries is among these. Others are more objective, for example tracking time spent coaching, counting the number of different people involved in substantive school activities, or adding up the dollars earned from grant writing. Still others fall between those two; collecting feedback on surveys or open-ended questionnaires or in face-to-face meetings might be included in this group. While strategies differ in their technical rigor, many can offer useful insights about performance and progress when used appropriately.

Data analysis. Third, analytic approaches should make technical sense and illuminate the important issues. For example, using incidents recorded in an impromptu journal can provide evidence of trends only if the writer understands something about the origin of the entries, in general. That is, if a journal keeper writes a daily account, essentially an expanded appointment calendar, it might give a dependable summary of how time is spent. However, if a journal keeper writes sporadically, most often motivated by strong feeling of one kind or another, then that account can be used only to chart the more limited arena of the nature and frequency of emotionally loaded occurrences. Similarly, in many cases, using surveys that primarily measure satisfaction may sometimes be less useful in determining whether a project is going well than in determining whether opinions are changing. Data analysis methods should answer the self-assessor's burning questions.

Different strokes. As a forum group in Philadelphia pointed out, many easy-to-use strategies would serve equally well to document many commonly adopted criteria for success in sustaining reform. Choosing a strategy that matches one's learning style or circumstances makes a lot of sense. In table 2 we show a few of the ways a leader might use self-assessment to document progress or accomplishment in criteria drawn from the four main categories of leadership dimensions identified by the forum participants. Our examples are quite narrow, but the possibilities are limitless.

Connecting with the system. For forum participants, the appeal of self-assessment was that it permitted them to create an accountability system tailored to their avowed principles and situation. However, they also recognized the importance of being responsive to legitimate demands of other authorities in the district. This suggests that some aspects of self-assessment could be aimed specifically at components of professional performance that are deemed crucial by outsiders. For example, if a leader determines that becoming a better listener is her personal goal in the overall effort to create a more caring academic community, she might keep records of her progress in a journal used for self-assessment. To support the whole school's effort to hold all members accountable for achieving that goal, she might choose another, publicly visible indicator to show her contribution. Another leader might take advantage of personal feedback from a mentor from the community to support a self-assessment of efficiency, but share other data with the superintendent to show, for example, higher productivity or lower labor costs.

Disconnecting from the system. In a way, planned obsolescence is an essential component of sustained reform. As one California group said, we can see that reform is sustained if it is still happening after the leader departs. How can a leader build in supports for his or her departure? Every person on a school staff ought to be making an important contribution, but if reform is to survive normal turnover among leaders (and other staff) then its work must routinely be shared by many. Leadership will always be needed, but only when its many forms and purposes are distributed among able people is it capable of sustaining reform. Paradoxically, participants spoke warmly about the need to share responsibility and authority while at the same time describing work days that often ran around the clock.

Perhaps another target for self-assessment, then, is skill in creating roles and systems in which others assume leadership and the formal leader is sometimes just a strong team member. This might not make the work day shorter, because serving as a team member may also involve long hours, but seems a prerequisite for helping a school become self-sustaining. The capacity to disconnect from the school without derailing reform may be a key component of sustaining leadership.
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