Control Issues

I'm preparing to facilitate groups of intermediate teachers from around the district who are tasked with finding and/or creating quarterly assessments.  I've put a lot of hours into this work already, spending vast swaths Labor Day weekend studying the blueprints and sample questions released over the past several months from PARCC.

Once I felt on top of the latest information, and without undue stress about the probability that what I think I know now will change, I turned my attention to the Ohio Improvement Process mandates at work in our district and pondered how PARCC and OIP can play nicely together.

The third arm of this study was to evaluate the integration of PARCC and OIP with Literacy Collaborative, our deeply intentional choice of framework for the teaching of reading, writing, listening and speaking. It took some doing but I ended up with a clear view of the coming work on common assessments.

The week after Labor Day was spent in large part presenting this vision of integration to various district leaders who perhaps have one foot more deeply planted in the land of PARCC, OIP, or LC.  It was a week of acronyms and bridge building, and satisfying work that brought us to consensus.
So far, so good.

Wednesday, my colleagues and I will gather with the teachers involved and set the stage for the work on common formative assessments.  And it is at this moment that I will hand over the control of this project to the teachers, where it rightly belongs.  Or will I?

I believe with all my soul that the creation (or curation from existing resources) of common assessments belongs in the hands of classroom practicioners, who know their students best.

At the same time, I know the time and effort I have recently put into understanding the layers of mandates and expectations. I know the multi-year committment I have to the understanding of how reading and writing work.  So I have strong feelings about what these assessments need to be in order to present teachers with useful data to guide what happens next in their classrooms.

This issue of control is fascinating to me.  One the one hand, I am not delusional and therefore I know that control of this work is not mine to keep or to give way like some benevolent monarch.  On the other hand, I have high standards when I think about the assessments that will be created.

Is it acceptable to hold on to quality control in the interest of shepherding the best work possible? Where is the line between holding high expectations and micromanaging?

I think teachers often face the same control issues.  When they hold tight control of the classroom learning, they tend to be more directive in the name of excellence.  The more control of learning they are able to hand over to students, the more likely that real learning will take place.  That learning may not look like the teacher's vision, but students will own it, and that is, without question, superior to mindlessly spitting back the teacher's expectations.

On Wednesday, my plan is to inspire the work with what I have learned, and then get out of the way!