Evaluating initiatives through Outcomes, Measures and Supports

     Brian Setser recently wrote an intriguing post about the importance of evaluating schools, whether online or face to face, in the context of outcomes, measures and supports. Effective schools demonstrate SMART planning, measurable results and willingness to consult experts for professional support and training in order to accomplish their goals.  In response to that I would like to offer two scenarios that demonstrate a mini version of this train of thought.  I work at a school and several months ago we had an initiative dropped on us that turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle. Over the past couple of years, several faculty members had suggested the school purchase some Smartboards.  Smartboards are very cool, but also very expensive, and require significant training in order to use them to their full potential.  A Smartboard is something that takes some planning. Well, one day we showed up to work to find a Smartboard leaning against a hallway wall. (It was an older donation from a business that was upgrading.)  Once it was discovered by the faculty members that it would require time and training to use it properly no one wanted to have it in their room. It ended up not being used (again, it was also an older model). The Smartbaord initiative did not work because it was not planned, didn’t have the real support of the teacher stakeholders and did not demonstrate any value. Yet, the interesting thing was that even though the Smartboard incident was a failed initiative it did lead to a very positive one.

     The back and forth dialogue about Smartboards led us to the conclusion that something similar should be implemented in the classrooms to improve the quality of instruction through creative student/teacher interaction.  After careful planning, budgeting, discussions with administrators, faculty and other professionals, we decided to set up the classrooms with a document camera and projector combination. This set up works even better (in our opinion) than a Smartboard setup at a fraction of the cost, and with very little teacher training involved. The way we implemented the initiative was by offering the document cameras to a handful of progressive teachers.  These teachers enjoyed using them and told the other teachers how great they were.  The teachers were so excited about them that they set up their own training sessions to teach each other.  They also developed novel ways to use the cameras (did experiments under them, wrote notes and then posted them online for students to review, etc.) Even now they maintain a networked notebook to share their creative ideas with each other. Surveys show that it has been a huge success with faculty and students. This initiative was successful because it was well-planned, involved stakeholders in the decision process, was relatively easy to implement and did not require huge amounts of time and effort on the part of the users to learn how to implement it in the classroom.  Outcomes, measures and supports are necessary to consider when implementing new learning initiatives, even small ones.