How We Think About The Impact of What We Do: We Know Quality When We See It

Everything we do in education is about building capacity.  We know that for systemic growth to take place, systemic limitations must be eliminated or restructured to increase efficiency and productivity while constantly increasing the human capital capacity of people within the building.  This is done by either hiring better people or making the ones you have better.  Reflection is one of the most important processes for improving effectiveness and growing our human capital capacity.  Now take all of the educational jargon out of that and what we are really talking about is “Quality”.

 

When we think about it, we all spend about 15,000 hours of our lives in school (not including education past high school) and we are taught by more than 50 different teachers and far more than a dozen administrators.  When asked to remember the best teachers/principals or the ones that had the most positive impact, we normally can only name a select few or remember only a handful of the many we had over our school years.  The vast majority of teachers and principals are erased from our memory or not encoded into long-term memory.  Why is it that some teachers and principals succeed in remaining in our memory for years or even decades, whereas others fade into oblivion or disappear after a very short period of time?  It’s not that they taught a specific subject or were all in a certain grade level.  The memories that last are of the educators that had the most significant impact on our learning and students as individuals. 

 

What is it that makes teachers great?  Todd Whitaker’s research identifies 17 things that great teachers do differently than good teachers, but he actually expanded it to 20 things in subsequent versions.  John Hattie conducted over 1500 meta-analyses that quantified 252 different teacher actions with a corresponding effect size on student learning.  North Carolina New Schools Project and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation identified 5 instructional practices that should be utilized for a Common Instructional Framework that has the most profound impact on student performance.  There’s High Impact Instruction, 10 Strategies, that have been research-based and proven to have the greatest impact on student success in relationship to teaching practices.  Marzano has countless amounts of research on the Art and Science of Teaching.  Atlantic Research Partners did an entire series on the “Power of Teaching: The Science of the Art” and broke down every part of teaching practices into subgroups and distinct factors of each part.  The research that attempts to quantify and qualify teaching practice into what makes teachers great or what the great teachers do differently is endless.

 

What I’ve learned in 20+ years of educational practice is that educators tend to overcomplicate many things.  As a coach, I knew a great player when I saw them play.  Nobody knows or needs to know Michael Jordan's 40 yard dash time or bench press or vertical, but everyone knew who was taking the last shot when the game was on the line.  When I first started as an assistant principal, I remember telling my principal that while I may not be able to completely describe or define what good teaching is, “I know it when I see it.”  This morning, my superintendent shared a book with me by John Guaspari titled “I Know It When I See It: A Modern Fable About Quality.”  Of course I didn’t even make it to lunch duty without the book to read.  The book was about quality and made some great points that we’ve always known, but we often let get cloudy in all of the research and latest educational innovations.    Guaspari (1985) said

 

I’d like to leave you with one piece of advice, he continued.  My hope is that I might be able to spare you some of the pain that we went through.  Above all, listen to what your customers are telling you about Quality.  Your customers are in a perfect position to tell you about Quality, because that's all they’re really buying.  They’re not buying a product.  They’re buying your assurances that their expectations for that product will be met.

 

The boss went on to say “Your customers may not have all the hard business facts.  They may not be aware of your specs and your standards and your inspection reports.  But just because they may not speak with a lot of precision, don’t assume that what they have to say doesn’t have a lot of value.  They may not be able to give you a precise definition of Quality, but one thing is for certain – they know it when they see it! (p. 79-80)

 

As a beginning administrator, I couldn’t give a specific definition of great teaching but I knew it when I saw it.  As a student, I knew it when I saw it.  And as a seasoned principal, I still know it when I see it.  Our teachers can't define what makes a great principal, but they know it when they see it. Don’t overcomplicate education and make things more difficult than they have to be, we all know Quality when we see it!