on judging.

Peeling my back off the sticky pleather folding chairs in the fluorescent lit cafeteria, I pretended it wasn’t happening. Teachers talked small talk, and gripped the bottom of their seats, while the emcee hushed us quiet.  As a coach, my classic clammy palms showed up to the party right on time, on this occasion, the cold sweat dripped for the teachers on blast.  Transparency was my district’s cornerstone, and the quarterly teacher rankings were making an unwelcome appearance that day.  We all knew it was coming.  Distracting ourselves before, during and after was one of the few coping strategies beyond tears and unfair judgments.  Coaching teachers at that time, left me off the hook for the “transparency” of my benchmark scores next to my colleagues.  My name was nowhere on that projector screen and I still couldn’t stomach it.  This was education though, the great reform to make education great again.  

Today, changing the narrative about test scores is tough.  Hard data smacks us in the face with one swoop of a bar graph.  It’s easy to read, easy to compare and easy to judge.  Digging deeper into the complexity of student growth is necessary, yet often overlooked.  The judginess though, can get out of hand.  

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.  Don’t judge a teacher by her test scores. Stop judging yourself.  

1. Embrace realities. Your classroom’s gumbo pot of personalities, experiences, and abilities can have dramatic effects on student achievement.  The “no excuses” school reform bus would say I’m wrong and that the class makeup is irrelevant.  It’s not an excuse, it’s reality, and facing realities helps us grow.  This year, it’s your gumbo pot and you have what it takes to help them succeed.  Even in their own special way.

2. Triangulate, then judge.  Data triangulation is when a teacher collects evidence of student learning from three different sources. Not one benchmark, or one state test, but three sources. Basically you are cross-verifying your data to make sure it can provide a reasonable conclusion. Think- student work samples, performance tasks and observations. Sounds so logical, but, often,  we are making snap judgments on teachers and students from just one piece of data.  One type of data.  These singular snapshots are barely fair measures of a teacher's influence that year, or a student’s progress.  Think three!

3. Think about the best teachers.  It probably only takes a minute to rattle off the best teachers in your school, the best teacher you’ve had, or memories of yourself at your best with kids.  Now name some of their best qualities. Compassionate, creative, smart, influential, resilient, has high expectations.  What does it look like and feel like in their classroom?  Surely you feel the culture of learning and see the quality of student work.  I’m guessing no one imagines their favorite teacher giving pep talks about test scores.  The best teachers inspire.

Student data is valuable, no doubt.  We use it to make decisions to individualize instruction.   How we approach student data is up for debate.  I challenge you to stop judging yourself, your students and other teachers by high stakes raw test data.  We are educating the whole child, and you are a whole educator with multiple teaching talents and an undeniable impact on your students.