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Educator, Know Thyself

Learning where you are is the first step in establishing your direction

By Joan Richardson

Tools for Schools, April-May 2001

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2001. All rights reserved.

Stop to look at a map in any large shopping mall and you’ll find that your position is marked with a large X and the words "you are here.’’ Once you’ve identified your location, you can determine the best route to reach the shops you want to visit during your excursion.

In staff development, the self-assessment is the "you are here’’ sign that lets you know where you are on your journey. As in any journey, staff development travelers also have to stop along the route to gauge their progress.

In a self-assessment, a person or organization collects information to determine how a defined group of individuals perceives a situation. Individuals are asked to honestly respond to questions about a given situation in which he or she is involved.

For example, a school improvement team might be asked to assess how it works together as a team or how it perceives the climate in a school. A study group might be asked to evaluate the quality of its meetings.

Sometimes, a variety of groups in a school might take the same survey in order to determine whether they perceive a situation differently. For example, teachers and parents might both be queried on a survey about school culture. Differences in their perceptions of the school might point up areas of concern that need to be addressed.

"Optimally, a self-assessment is experiential learning. It’s a discovery process. You’re after some level of ah-has,’’ said Robby Champion, a veteran trainer and staff developer.

Because groups are often learning something new, Champion cautions that trainers and staff developers must be prepared to let a group go through various stages as members assimilate the information they receive back. At first, groups may experience some cognitive dissonance as they try to adjust to the new information. They may feel defensive about what they’re learning about themselves or their school. Others will find it validating because the results will square with their own perceptions.

"Be conversational. Slow the pace of your discussion. Above all, listen to what they are saying, both in the self-assessment and in the conversations surrounding it,’’ she said.

Champion offers a general outline that can guide trainers and staff developers as they work with self-assessments.

Determine whether the information that will be acquired through the assessment is worth the investment of time to administer and tabulate.

"It may not seem that way, but using a self-assessment is time consuming. Is the return on investment going to be sufficient to invest your time in this?’’ Champion said.

On the surface, a self-assessment may seem to require only 10 minutes to administer. But anyone administering such an instrument needs to also calculate the time for tabulating and sharing the results with participants. The amount of time required will vary from instrument to instrument.

Determine the information you want to receive as a result of doing the self-assessment and select an instrument appropriate for that use.

Anyone who administers a self-assessment has an obligation to understand how the instrument was intended to be used, Champion said.

For example, many staff developers use a popular personality inventory to identify individual characteristics as an aid to understanding group dynamics. Champion, who calls herself a "raging extrovert,’’ comes out closer to the introverted category on this tool. After doing some research on the instrument, she learned that it is intended to measure how individuals prefer to make decisions. For that purpose, she said the instrument was quite accurate.

She recommends that trainers and staff developers test any self-assessment before using it with a group.

If nothing else seems to be quite right, design your own self-assessment.

When trying to gauge the work of a school improvement team, for example, a team leader may need to design his or her own assessment.

Designing your own self-assessment can be as simple as asking team members to mark their progress towards pre-established goals on a scale of 0-10.

For a team’s work, the team leader may want to have the team measure its progress at several points along the way and to visually display for team members where they are at each step in their journey.

"In the beginning, they may rank themselves higher because they aren’t as familiar with what needs to be done,’’ Champion said.

She suggests that teams re-grade themselves by asking "knowing what you know now, how would you rank yourself’’ on various measures at the time they began working together.

Be prepared to answer questions from participants.

Before administering the self-assessment, Champion suggests drafting questions that participants might ask. Then, prepare yourself to answer those questions. In certain situations, she said it might even be helpful to do live practice sessions with someone else who can act as a participant and pepper you with questions.

"This gives you an opportunity to not stutter around in front of the group, to be more prepared when they throw you the hard questions,’’ she said. Her list of most frequently asked questions include these:

Ensure privacy for participants as they respond to the assessment.

Responding to an assessment is not a time for group work. Individuals should be able to move to a space that gives them some privacy, if that is their choice.

Don’t ask individuals to put identifying information on the response sheet.

Ask them to fold the completed sheets and place in a box. Don’t remove answer sheets from the box until each person has finished.

Tabulate the results privately.

Remove the completed surveys from the room while you tabulate them. If the assessment is being done during a daylong training session, the trainer might do the tabulation during a break or during lunch. If the assessment involves a team that meets regularly, the team leader might tabulate the surveys after one meeting and be prepared to present them at the next meeting.

Share results publicly but ensure confidentiality for individual participants.

The trainer or team leader should ensure that the results are held privately until they are available to everyone.

Don’t post individual results anywhere in the meeting room.

Go through each dimension of the assessment and tell participants how the majority responded.

Put the summary of the results on an overhead or a piece of poster paper that can be displayed for everyone to see.

Provide plenty of time to digest the results.

Participants will want time to talk over the results. They may want to talk aloud about what they have learned. They may want to reflect quietly and privately about the results. Be sure to manage the time so various options are available for different personalities.

The group may need to use other instruments or collect other data to confirm the results of the self-assessment.

If there are areas in which there clearly needs to be improvement, create an action plan and solicit ideas for how the group could respond to this need.

Agree on the next time the assessment will be given.

If the assessment was given in an ongoing group, select a time when the same assessment will be administered again. This will put some teeth in the action plan and ensure that everyone on the team heeds the norms or goals that have been established.

 

Resources

"Assessing a School Staff as a Community of Professional Learners," by Shirley Hord, et al, Issues about Change, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999. Describes the work of the Southwestern Educational Development Laboratory to identify the characteristics of a school that is a learning organization and its development of a self-assessment that could be used to identify other schools’ progress toward similar goals. Does not include the completed survey, but after a close reading of the article, a reader could develop a workable survey for his or her own school. The article is available online at www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues71/welcome.html.

Comprehensive School Reform Research-Based Strategies to Achieve High Standards, by WestEd. Offers a coherent framework for planning schoolwide improvements. Includes numerous tools and activities to facilitate planning and implementation, including surveys to determine readiness. The entire guidebook can be downloaded at no charge as a PDF file at www.wested.org/csrd/guidebook.

Data Analysis for Comprehensive Schoolwide Improvement, by Victoria Bernhardt. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education, 1998. Targeted for non-statisticians. Shows schools how to gather and use data, clarifies what data are important for various purposes, and demonstrates how to communicate and report results. Available through NSDC’s Online Bookstore, www.nsdc.org/bookstore.htm. Price: $37, non-members; $29.60, members.

"Four ways to make a survey slip and fall,’’ by John Roden, Journal of Staff Development, Fall 1998. A primer for developing a good survey and using it without making fatal mistakes. Includes a list of web sites for more information on survey development. Available online at www.nsdc.org/library/jsd/roden194.html.

Learning the Craft of Training, by Robby Champion. Oxford, Ohio: NSDC, 2000. Answers very fundamental questions about training, including the development and use of self-assessments. Available through NSDC’s Online Bookstore, www.nsdc.org/bookstore.htm. Price: $75, non-members; $60, members.


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