Last week I attended the EARCOS Leadership Conference in Bangkok. I joined sessions about developing strong leadership teams, teacher supervision and evaluation, child protection, school accreditation, and more. Unfortunately, some of these sessions were less helpful than others, leaving a lot to be desired. I spoke with a few of those presenters after their sessions and asked them how they thought their session went. Interestingly enough, no one I spoke to really felt confident that their session went well, yet they couldn’t be sure one way or another. It got me thinking…
While all of the sessions I attended were very different from one another they all had one thing in common – none of them asked for feedback in order to see how successful they had been. To be fair, the presenters may have had another method for determining the level of success of their sessions. However, I have to wonder whether the presenters and facilitators I worked with ever measured, or even determined, any indicators of success.
I’m sharing this story today, not because I want to bash the presenters at EARCOS but rather because I want to provoke your thinking about your classes. How do you know whether a lesson, unit, or assessment was successful?
Each lesson has an objective, a goal for what the students should be able to do or learn by the end of the lesson. So, at the end of the lesson how do you know if the objective has been met? Are you collecting data that provides evidence of student learning? Perhaps, like many of the presenters I spoke to after their sessions, you’re not always 100% sure how successful a lesson has been.
I want to nudge you to think about how you’re able to know whether a lesson has been successful. We will be discussing this further with Faculty Heads this week and I’m going to ask them to continue the conversations with department teams. Please take some time to think about how you determine a lesson’s success as well as brainstorming other ways that you could possibly use to measure success in the classroom.
Pushing Forward 