Evaluating Your School’s Program

How do you know when you have a good year at school? When the people around you talk about having a good year or a bad year, what do they have in mind? As an administrator, it matters that you feel a sense of satisfaction or concern when things are actually going well or going poorly as the case may be. You play a key role in setting the tone for celebrating success and learning from failure. But you need to know what success looks like, and it’s often not enough just to trust your intuition. Further, Mark reminds us that we will never be effective evaluators if we are under the tyranny of only keeping up with what’s urgent. Effective evaluation requires clarity about our desired ends, attentiveness to our current progress, and scrutiny of our chosen methods.

 

Mark Kurtz speaks with a background in both teaching and administrating and also shares the connections that he’s made between raising strawberries and school children. Mark takes us through an overview of the who, what, and where to evaluate, offering a trove of penetrating questions for administrators and school boards.

 

You’ll hear Mark describe the four quadrants used by Steven Covey and others to develop time management skills. If this is new for you, use the link below to find a copy of this diagram and consider keeping it in front of you for the section near the beginning where Mark introduces these concepts and gives a few examples of quadrant one and two activities.

Links

Four Quadrants for Time Management

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey: https://a.co/d/2D8FvBL