How Do I Know You're Good?

I'm literally neck-deep in projects right now. Between the various committees and advisory groups that I've been invited to join, all of them seem to be demanding some of my time at once. Oh and I'm supposed to be running a school. One of those projects involves developing a proposal for a new principal compensation plan. Principals are paid on performance and I am advocating that we need something more than test scores to tell that story. The problem is that isn't easy to determine what we should use. In my discussions this week, someone asked me a short, but difficult question. "How do I know that you're a good principal?" It's not very easy at all to sum that up and it becomes even harder to begin to apply it to all principals. A lot of what we do as educators can't be summed up into a test score. It isn't always easily quantified and the timelines of our effectiveness don't always fit into the school calendar year. Test scores aren't what students remember about us and if you ask the public, it's probably not the first thing they will mention. But it is still important. 

This is exactly why I did the exercise at the recent faculty meeting. The word cloud our staff created of what our next Teacher of the Year should be is just as complicated as the answer to my question. Take a look at the words below. How do I know if you are passionate? How about fun, adaptive, or reliable? In fact, I think I could argue that not a single one of the words that our staff list can be accurately determined in a test. Instead, you see them in day-to-day actions and their consistency is the key to success. So how do you know if a teacher displays there? You have to watch and you have to pay attention a lot. Unfortunately, our roles don't always give us the privilege of doing that as much as we should. So in the spirit of choosing the right person, I ask that we all take a little more time to watch over the next few weeks. Test scores and student performance can only tell us a piece of the story, but you have to look for the people that are caring, positive and adaptive.