​We’re halfway through our week-long new teacher program at my school, and it’s going well. They have their laptops and have had a whole lot of training on the way we utilize the Google suite of applications, they’ve had a thorough, stop-and-meet-the-office-folks tour of the school, and they’ve had time to sit with their division directors and not-their-division directors (always seems nice to foster some cross-divisional interaction); they’ve had time to get into curriculum planning with their department heads, and yesterday they even had a panel of students who just shared their experiences of teachers here.

Every year we tweak the program based on some end-of-year feedback from the previous cohort, but by and large the program remains essentially the same from year to year. Now that we’ve been doing this for almost 15 years we have some principles and our goals pretty much down pat. Shifting to a very tech-intensive, laptop-enabled environment had us adding a big chunk of content, and we learned a few years ago that cutting a few workshops so that new folks could connect with department leaders and teachers sharing courses made the prospect of actually teaching a curriculum to actual kids a little less daunting.

The goals of the program are pretty basic:

• Become more familiar with the school as an environment.
• Meet some of the cast of characters, including some students (in the panel) and some parents (in a panel tomorrow after a session on the advisor program).
• Begin to understand the school’s culture in ways that the website and the comprehensive Teacher’s Guide to Life and Work that we create can’t fully do.
• Get some work done on curriculum and lesson plans that will ease the inevitable stresses and strains of the opening weeks of classes.
• Bring new folks up to speed on the technology-related aspects of work and school culture.
• Bring new folks into the ongoing conversations about the school’s strategic directions—design thinking happens to be on our plate this year.
• Build a little group spirit among the members of the cohort.
• Begin (because that’s all you can do, even in a week) to help new folks build their understanding and skills around school-specific aspects of the work—in our case, how our advising system works, what it means to be an diverse and inclusive community.
  
  

We’ll check in with the new folks individually and as a group as the year goes forward, and what we’ll collect is a list of “I wish I had known that…” topics that we can try to fold into next year’s program. We’ll also collect, especially at the beginning of the year, feedback that reminds us that this program, and some of the sessions in it, can feel like being asked to drink from a firehose, no matter how gently we try to pace the week.

All of this reminds us, in a human sort of way, that starting work at a new job in a new school is really hard. We try to acknowledge the anxieties that the new folks bring, often by referring to our own. “You’re never too experienced for pre-school sleeplessness,” we tell them, and this seems to help, at least a bit. I can recall being haunted by the names on class lists before starting my first job; it was like a nightmare version of the roll-call at the end of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. “It will get better,” we tell them, and our biggest single intended lesson is, “You are NEVER alone as a teacher here.” I think our school culture, once the year is under way, is consonant with that assertion.

But the big lesson, and there isn’t much we can learn from it except to accept it as part of the messiness of working in a place and a profession full of people—people whose needs, aspirations, and differences we are bound not only to accept and to celebrate but to accommodate as best we can within the framework of our own goals and aspirations as well as the school’s mission—is that the new teacher week will always feel like way too much when it is happening and will seem way too little in retrospect.

Sometimes the balance between such contrasts is the best we can hope for, and I think that’s okay. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to seek feedback and to make changes where we can.

The main thing, though, is that our new folks will at least start the year with a pretty good sense of how the place works and what and where the resources are that can make their lives better. In my head there is a countdown to the first day of classes, but nowadays it’s largely a happy background noise. I remember, though, being at the stage in my career when that countdown felt like the voice of Dick Clark at New Year’s Eve of 2000, with the all excitement and nervousness around the Millennium—and the Millennium Bug.

And that all worked out just fine, now, didn’t it?

(BTW: Next up for our new faculty: advising, parent panel, quick overview of our philosophy around curriculum and assessment, quick intro to design thinking, and living and working in a multicultural community–plus more quality time to plan and talk specific academic policy stuff with department leaders.)

A couple of weeks ago I was in Las Vegas for the annual Sloan Consortium Emerging Technologies Conference.  And, I have to say, it was fascinating experience.  The theme of the conference was (probably no surprise to those following educational technology trends over the last number of years) the personalization of the educational experience.

I went to the conference with a particular focus: to explore data analytics and the work coming out of colleges and universities to advance this field.  I know that data analytics hold great promise for K-12 education, and yet I’ve been wrestling with their place within the independent school environment.  For generations now, we have told families: “we know your son/daughter; we know how they learn; we will give them the personalized attention and support that they need to succeed.”  And yet, we can all admit that even with our low student-teacher ratios, our advising systems, and our tight-knit communities, we do still have students who “fall through the cracks” every so often, despite our best efforts.  I went to Vegas to see if there was anything that we could be doing to ensure that students don’t fall through the cracks, but more importantly, to see if there was anything more that we can do to predict which students might be on the verge of falling through the cracks in our classes and prevent that from occurring.  The answer seems to be both yes and no.

One of the most interesting and anticipated sessions of the conference was on the preliminary findings of the “Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework.”  This project, funded by the Gates Foundation, was formed to try to determine whether there were predictive analytics across schools that could help determine student success in online courses – that is: are there any data points across many schools that can help predict the success of students before success or failure becomes apparent.  The goals of the project are noble: to figure out ways to increase graduation rates, lower drop-out rates, and help students succeed.  The findings so far: while each school might be able to identify predictive analytics for their campuses (and many do), the study has yet to find predictive measures valid across all campuses.  That said, it was also clear to the researchers that different learning environments create important variables on the institutional level.  In other words, student success is greatly impacted by the academic environment created by schools (I am sure a few of you are thinking, “well you didn’t have to go to Las Vegas to understand that, Brad”).  And yet, within schools data points can be developed to understand when a student is going to falter before failure occurs so that there can be an intervention from the start.
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My primary take-aways from the conference focused on what advantages and challenges independent schools have in thinking about using data more effectively to enhance student learning outcomes and greater personalize their educational experience:

• It was clear to me that independent schools start off in this world of personalization with one incredibly important advantage: we are mission-driven, purpose driven, and an increasingly large number of us are process driven.  We create academic environments that are likely unique to our geographic reach, and, we know, reach a particular set of students well.  Therefore, if we continue to genuinely talk with prospective applicants about fit our environments and communities, and work to make good matches during the admissions process, we have a great advantage in helping students achieve success.
• We also have done an excellent job of sharing qualitative data in our schools for years.  My experience in independent schools has been that through advisory systems, class deans, classroom teachers, tight-knit communities, and even comment writing, we regularly share information about our students (particularly those at the top or bottom of a class) and try to act on that information quickly.
• We do not do a good job of using or understanding the quantitative data that we have, or thinking about what data we should be collecting.  It seems to me that this work starts with identifying the key variables for academic success within our own communities.  And, remember, according to at least the preliminary findings from the Gates funded project, in each of our communities, these variable will be different.  This makes sense, right?  In some schools, Model UN might be the most intensive experience that a student can have, whereas in other schools Model UN is a small club.  In some schools, chorus is just a class that students take, whereas in others chorus is constant performances, competitions, and events.  In some schools, AP Art History is the toughest course at the school, whereas at others, it is just another course.  Our schools have different variables.  And, those of us who have been around the same schools for long enough know innately what those variables are (for example, when I was at Holton-Arms, I knew never to allow an advisee to take AP Art History and AP Biology at the same time).  But, we never use the data to back it up.  We never knew what the expected impact would be of a student taking a given schedule, or participating in the fall play, or playing varsity soccer.  But, we have that data.  We know what the GPA of our students is when they participate in certain major events, teams, performances, etc..  We can cross-reference the data, look at historical trends, and make better informed decisions.  We could be helping students and their families be able to make better informed decisions during the advising process, and pre-identify students who will need academic support because of the combination of course work, activities, clubs, and extracurriculars of which they plan on being a part.  Drilling down another level, we might be able to identify particular stress points within our school calendars where students across the board find challenges, and then act accordingly.  And, we might be able to use admissions data more effectively to identify students coming into our program who need more support.

I know that many of us in the independent school community don’t particularly like to dive into the realm of data.  It’s not why we got into teaching and education, and why we particularly like independent schools focus on the personal and relationships.  And yet, we can all agree that our primary motivation for being in education is to help students learn and grow.  It does seem (and many schools are proving) that data can be part of the equation helping us to get to that goal.  Independent schools have the huge advantage that we are already good at the personal and relationships, by adding some use of data to the equation, we can likely get to the truly personal faster and more effectively than other schools.