Everybody Wants to Talk About Accountability, But Nobody Wants to be Accountable

"Everybody wanna go up to heaven/but nobody wanna die/I don't know why." Peter Tosh

I'm going to tell a personal story from a few years ago. I will change the names to protect everyone's privacy and feelings. I have a school friend who we will call Cindy. Cindy is someone I've known for going on 40 years. 

A few years ago, one of her children was graduating from high school. He joined a group of kids on a senior prank. It was common for soon-to-be graduates to break into the school on the weekend before graduation and move furniture around and leave some goofy posters. For years it was the tradition and had never gone too far with the "damage." In fact, there had never been damage, just some stuff moved around and a few funny posters put up. No harm done. Unfortunately this time, things were a little different. A smaller group of kids from the larger group had decided to do cause some real trouble. Things got ugly. Real vandalism occurred: property was destroyed, walls were spray painted. Cindy's son wasn't actually involved with the real vandalism and wasn't actually in the area where it happened, but he was in the school. I believe her about her son not being in the wrong group, but again — he did break into the school.

The principal found out who some of the people involved were and slowly managed to get a decent list of people involved with the general shenanigans as well as the destructive ones. He pressed charges on those who did real damage to the school and then the principal decided that anyone who had broken into the school would not be able to walk at graduation. Cindy lost her mind. She, and some friends, took to social media and the editorial page of the local paper to air their grievances about the unjust nature of the punishment. Cindy is a parent I know personally. She told me on many occasions that people who commit crimes should be punished. But, when it came to her son, even though he was definitely and admittedly in the school when he should have been, she didn't want punishment.

And that is the real problem I see in society right now — everybody wants to talk about accountability, but nobody wants accountability when it comes to them. We want accountability in theory, but not in practice. Sadly that isn't how accountability works, gang. I can see it in schools all the time. The parent who wants "high standards," but then when his child doesn't make the grade, he wants the child's grade raised. The teacher who doesn't accept late work from students, but routinely fails to do lesson plans, provide feedback, or evaluate assessments in a timely manner. The administrator who has no empathy toward a teacher's personal matters outside of work, but then leaves work early to go to the doctor or the bank. It goes around and around and everyone screams out, "Where is the accountability?" However when put in a situation, they are quicker to say, "But there should be an exception for me!"

Remember Folks -- There is a Pandemic Happening

 

I came across this tweet from @meghan_lawson that really got me thinking about our work as educators. All too often administrators pile huge burdens of work upon teachers because in the end they know our love of the students will prevail. We will take the extra duty, another class, coach another team, etc, because we don't want kids to miss out on opportunities. Which is why as administrators, we need to do the ethical thing and not put more work on the plate without taking something off. It is OK to end an initiative or push it until later; especially now with this pandemic happening.  It isn't a mark of failure or something to be ashamed of. It is humane. We also need to model it for teachers; we need to show them that we say no to things as well. That we take care of ourselves and encourage them to take care of themselves.

Social Media at Cheongna Dalton School

Social Media at CDS

To the new faculty, we have a culture of crowdsourcing social media at CDS. With that in mind, here is a list of some of the places you can engage in our community. Our policy is that teachers and students should not friend or each other on any social media platform. Facebook pages do not require you to friend any student. It is a shared social space. If you have questions or concerns about social media use at CDS, please feel free to ask. Enjoy!

1. CDS Staff Facebook
2. CDS HS Facebook
3. CDS MS Facebook
4. CDS FP Facebook
5. Live Streaming Youtube
6. My Channel with many videos about CDS
7. EdTech Blog
8. Humans of CDS
9. On Instagram we use the hash tag #cdsphoenix (you can also check out the hash tag #cheongna to see people's photos of life here).
10. On Twitter we use the hash tag #cdsphoenix, Ben, Karissa, and I post quite a bit.

Part 4: Let's Talk about Accountability

If your position or department has recently be created, you have some serious work cut out for you. In a previous post, I mentioned getting runs on the board to build your brand within the school. Even if your department or position is clearly defined and has been around awhile, you should still track your time. There are several apps on the market for doing this, but I decided to build my own with a Form. The link is to a copy of the Time Taker Form, I only ask that you create your own copy and then edit and adjust as you need. The Form allows me to record, what type of work I do, who I do it with, how long it takes, and notes to explain in detail what was done.

I was once involved in a rather heated debate about using this Form with a colleague. His argument was that our positions were created and therefore our time and work was understood and did not require defending. I, on the other hand, felt that our positions had been created, but that management did it on a leap of faith; they really had zero idea about what we did or how we did it. Tracking our time was a way to show what type of work we did and how much time that work took. A visible way to describe our role as an EdTech Department.

In the end, we agreed to disagree about that matter, but I still feel that tracking your time is a valuable tool. Especially if you are planning to request more time, money, and/or staff for your team. Believe me -- administrators and school boards are going to ask why you need more. If you can't physically show them, you aren't going to get more time, money, or staff. Tracking your time is doing yourself a favor; plus, it provides that all important component of accountability. If being accountable frightens you, you should stop working in education; you should especially quit working in EdTech. This is a job for self motivated people who get things done, not for lazy lumps.

First, you should provide more than one type of data. Second, you should share this information with your Admin Team and review it. Draw conclusions from it; use it to suggest trends and problems that can be solved. We use student data to drive instruction; we should use perforemce data to make decisions about funding and staffing. 

If you look at the results I have from Term 1 of SY2016-17, you see that some interesting information comes to light very quickly. I spend a great deal of my time focused on the

entire school (40.4%). After that high school (20.6%), middle school (16.9%), and First Program (FP; 10.4%) get my time in that order. This opens up questions as to why? Am I upable to help FP enough? Are FP teachers not requesting my support? How can we better serve FP? What type of support do they need?

You can also see that the majority of my time is spent creating & building (23.4%) and planning & research (25.9%). This makes a lot of sense considering the department didn't exist before. We are in a building phase and the department's role is being defined, but what should the trend be next year? Will the focus continue being creating & building and planning & research, or will it change to focus on co-teaching & co-planning? What direction do we want to move in as a school? Strategic thinking starts with looking at data and dicussing it, reflecting on it, and analyzing it. This leads to informed decision making on the institutional level.

The histogram provides more interesting information. The vast majority of my time is spent in activities and meetings that last less than 60 minutes. What you don't see in the chart, but you can understand from the spreadsheet, is that multiple short times are being used to complete tasks, which suggests that long periods of time to sit and focus on one project are actually difficult to come by in my day. This is only after one term! Imagine what we will have to look at after one year.

Part 3: Everybody's Cheerleader