At the end of my first year as school leader, I met up for breakfast with someone who was very instrumental in developing school leadership talent, and had founded a graduate level program in educational administration that I attended. He had also been a board chair for multiple area schools. I had asked to meet with him so that I could let him enjoy the fruits of his labor (his graduate program had helped me secure my leadership position) while also gleaning from his wisdom and experience as I planned for Year 2. As we ate we talked about the various challenges and successes of the previous year. At one point the topic shifted to the school board. It was then that he looked me straight in the eye and emphatically said, "You need to own your board." By that he meant that I need to develop them and their thinking in a way that would position them squarely behind me to advance my agenda. Besides for standard school-related conversation about organizational needs, he suggested that I begin the process of developing personal connections with as many individual board members as possible. That included "get to know you" meetings at Starbucks but also something deeper, such as establishing a learning partnership with key board members. (In our community, that meant studying Torah together. In other settings, it may be a different topic of common interest.) I took his advice to heart, and set up a weekly study arrangement with two members of the board’s executive committee. That relationship allowed for a deeper relationship and the deepening of trust. It goes without saying that the chief executive must make board relations a top priority. While board function and impact range significantly among companies and organizations, it is the board’s responsibility, at the minimum, to evaluate you and your work in advancing the organization. (They are also typically tasked with fiduciary oversight and maintenance of the mission.) As with any evaluative process, you want to position yourself on the right side of things — interpersonally and in terms of establishing an agreed-to and properly supported agenda. There are a few other ways that new leaders can ingratiate themselves with key board members and begin the process of effective cultivation. Get to know them well. Find out what each board member does, professionally and otherwise. What are their passions? What other things do they commit personal time to? Learn what you can about their personal lives and families. The more that you get to know them personally, the more you can connect with them about their deepest and most sacred feelings and beliefs. Learn their biases. Ask them about their general feelings about the organization. Is it something that they are proud to be associated with? What are its greatest strengths and biggest opportunities? Discuss their past experiences with your predecessor(s) and with other board members. Ask them about their top issues with the current company performance and culture. Lay out your plan. Develop a 90- to 100-day plan that includes action steps and tangible deliverables. Get feedback on the plan and revise as needed. Then, monitor your progress against the plan and report using that as your basis. If you meet or exceed expectations, wonderful. If not, be willing to notate that and explain why you think that things have not progressed the way that you thought they would. Offer the board a modified plan as warranted. The more that you hold yourself accountable, the more respect and latitude your will garner. Communicate early and often. Develop and maintain a regular, scheduled communication schedule with your board. Update them on developments and don’t hide concerns. Be upright, clear, and responsive. Over-communicate at first so that the board knows that you get it and are on top of things. Then, with the input and approval from the board chair, begin the process of weaning back a bit on the frequency and comprehensiveness of your updates. Start bonding. Where appropriate, invite board members to your home or a location of common interest to interact socially. Let them see another side of you, and vice versa. Also, consider team-building activities that will require you and them to work together toward various outcomes. All of these experiences will build equity and help them see you as more than a distant employee that they have hired to direct their company. And if any blowback reaches them from constituents, they are likelier to cover your back and give you the benefit of the doubt than if you let things run their natural courses. Naphtali Hoff (@impactfulcoach) became an executive coach and consultant following a 15 year career as an educator and school administrator. Read his blog atimpactfulcoaching.com/blog. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s e-mail list for our daily newsletter on being a better, smarter leader. Related Posts: Build a team of workplace teachers The 6 R’s of a principal’s summer school Deepening the workplace bond Teeing up for success: Saying yes to corporate golf events and other business golf Succession planning for everyone (almost!) Own your board originally published by SmartBlogs

Many faculty tend to reside in a silo mentality, focusing on their course, their content, and their expectations. What if that thinking was expanded to view the role of faculty as part of a continuum...Continue Reading »

The Lucy Show captured as much as 72% of the total viewing audience on a given night during its time atop television in the first of the 1950s. Since then, television audiences have fragmented; in 2015, top television programs are lucky to draw 10-15%. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (2005) argued that this fragmentation would accelerate as more content and more activity moved to the Net. No longer will sales of music, film, television, books and other popular media be dominated by a limited number of "hits" or "blockbusters". The cost of developing, marketing and distributing a wider variety of digital content has declined rapidly. Options for consumers are growing; they’re no longer forced by limited shelf space to buy the most popular fare. And small time content providers will find it increasingly feasible to maintain a viable business offering customers alternatives to the most popular films, books and the like. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (click for more information) While higher education doesn’t see itself as having much in common with popular media. But as a producer and user of digital media for learning, higher education is inevitably subject to the same forces to some extent. This doesn’t mean that the effects of these forces will be the same, though. Higher education operates in a unique context. The Long Tail suggests that the variety of digital media will grow and with it, choice. But it has implications for cost and quality, too. For teaching and learning, the questions stimulated by the changes Anderson describes include: To what extent is access to greater choices in instructional materials for students and faculty important to improving learning? How will the quality of instructional materials be altered as a result of the long tail? How might the increase in choices and fragmentation of providers act to change the cost of online instructional materials as a result of higher or lower volume of development? Do economies of scale matter more or less than they do in other sectors that deal with digital media? Common and Coordinated Choice of popular media is influenced by social and cultural factors. Consumers will often select the same cultural products as people in their social groups, either because they learnt about it through the group (i.e. word of mouth - which, yes, still matters) or because sharing cultural experiences has social value for them (e.g. a sense of belonging, a chance to demonstrate conformity). Higher education places its own constraints on the diversity of instructional media - most notably the need for institutions to be sufficiently coordinated. Students move from one institution to another; from high school to college, from one university to another, from university to the labour market and so on. Mobility requires, in turn, that each of the participating institutions - in order to be of value to the student and other stakeholders - not deviate sharply from the practices at other institutions. While higher education in North America is not strictly a "system" - indeed in many jurisdictions considerable effort is put into maintaining institutional autonomy - it’s widely recognized that there must be some agreement as to what constitutes, for example, a Bachelor of Science degree. This, in turn, encourages commonality in instructional content used across different institutions and keeps the "tail" relatively short. Instructional materials are most common in lower-level, "survey" courses, such as intro to psychology, intro to business, and the like. The education publishing industry relies on this commonality. Publishers have long offered remarkably similar texts for these courses - similar not only in topics to their competitors, but in the sequence of topics, too. Similarly, Kidwell argued that 25 to 30 unique courses constituted 80% of enrolment. Put another way, approximately 1% of courses offered constitute almost half of enrolment (See Jan Nespor’s excellent notes on common courses here). While rarely discussed in these terms, the commonality of curriculum in higher education is at the root of interest in MOOCs as a cost-saving tactic, as well as system-wide sharing models, such as California community colleges, and the much heralded, but cancelled 500 million fund set aside by the Obama administration early in his presidency to fund the development of common online courses. If we can find commonality we can slowdown escalating costs in higher education and, more importantly, invest more time, talent and resources into the development of the instructional materials offered students. Uncommon and Self-Sufficient But there are also significant obstacles in place that limit the ability and willingness of higher education to take full advantage of common instructional materials. Higher education is a highly decentralized institution. To a much greater extent than other types of organizations, each institution "rolls its’ own", rather than seeking out the best available resources  - regardless of its origins. This sensibility has at least three, overlapping origins: Academics are hired and rewarded on the basis of subject matter expertise. Despite great efforts to elevate the status of teaching, research productivity is firmly embedded as the fuel behind the ascent of faculty and their institutions. In this context, asking faculty to use instructional materials produced by and affiliated with other faculty is counter to self-interests. It challenges established notions of what faculty bring to the table. The model for online course development has its roots in the classroom. In most instances of classroom education, educators work more or less independently to create, deliver and manage the student’s entire learning experience. Despite the presence of service departments that offer technical support and professional development, instructors are still expected to assume full and ultimate responsibility for creating online instructional materials. (LMS systems were created to fit this model and serve ultimately, to reinforce it.) Maintaining difference from other institutions is considered part and parcel of establishing a strong institutional difference in higher education. Overt use of materials from other institutions, for example, puts this difference into question. Online Higher Education: The Long(est) Tail Together, these factors (and others, I suspect) determine the degree to which digital instructional materials are shared across higher education; how "common" they can be. This in turn influences quality, costs and access to the very best materials. As a result of higher ed’s unique practices and logic, there is a rather extraordinary diversity of content being produced across thousands of institutions. This is not a system that emphasizes "hits" or "blockbusters". But unlike other sectors, the diversity of content does not necessarily lead to greater choice for either educators or students in that most of this in-house content being developed remains in-house. Moreover, because these materials are often produced in-house the resources brought to bear on each effort is limited. While this likely appeals to the desire for diversity and, of course, institutional difference and faculty autonomy, it may also be increase the total cost of supporting courses and and lower the quality of higher education by starving the system as a whole of high-end instructional materials and the benefits of economies of scale.

Faculty Attitudes Towards and Experiences with OER & Open Textbooks Useful statistics on why and how faculty use OER (slide format). Many obstacles remain. Read more What 6.9 Million Clicks tell us About How to Fix Online Education Excerpt: In a paper published this spring, the CSAIL team outlined some key findings on what online learners want from videos. These include: Brevity (viewers generally tune out after six minutes) Informality, with professors seated at a desk, not standing behind a podium Lively visuals rather than static PowerPoint slides Fast talkers (professors seen as the most engaging spoke at 254 words per minute) More pauses, so viewers can soak in complex diagrams Web-friendly lessons (existing videos broken into shorter chunks are less effective than ones crafted for online audiences) Read more It’s Hard to Differentiate One Higher-Ed Brand From Another Discusses the challenges of distinguishing universities in the eyes of prospective students. Excerpt: "We prepare the leaders of tomorrow." "We nurture lifelong learners." "We aim to have a global impact, while serving our local community." If mission statements such as these sound familiar to leaders in higher education, it’s no surprise. These statements could easily reflect the mission and purpose of almost every higher education institution — to the point where it’s tough to distinguish one school from the next. In a recent study, Gallup found that the mission, purpose or vision statements of more than 50 higher education institutions share striking similarities, regardless of institution size, public or private status, land-grant status or religious affiliation, or for-profit or not-for-profit status. Read more Competency-Based Education: Leadership Challenges Great article by by Thad Nodine and Sally M. Johnstone about the role of CBE in US higher education from Change Magazine. Excerpt: Competency-based education (CBE) can help the nation meet its graduation goals and address the shortages of skilled workers that are emerging as the economy improves. Several community colleges have developed their own versions of CBE programs, and two states are instituting CBE programs statewide. College leaders report that developing CBE programs offers opportunities to personalize the educational experience for students. They also say that doing so presents challenges and highlights the barriers to individualized educational delivery imbedded in existing systems (e.g., in programs, curricula, enrollment processes, and instructional and learner supports). College leaders also say that CBE offers opportunities to develop partnerships with local business and to work with faculty in cultivating a vision for change in higher education. Read more      

 A multiple choice question begins with a stem or lead-in that is addressed by a correct response chosen from a list of alternatives. Writing a good multiple choice question that elicits an answer based on knowledge, not guessing or misunderstanding, is an art. For example: Who was the twentieth president of the United States? Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Arthur Grover Cleveland This question tests recall of the twentieth president. The stem is parsimonious, including only the ideas and words necessary to answer the question. The "distractors" are parallel, possible answers-all presidents from around the same time. Compare to this question: Choosing the first president of the United States was a tremendous responsibility. He would set precedents for subsequent office holders. The Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington who had led the colonies to victory against the British. James Madison, who was married to Dolly, was the fourth president. Who was the twentieth? James Brown LeBron James James Garfield James Bond In this question, the stem is overwritten with information you don’t need to answer the question correctly. Irrelevant information may be testing your reading comprehension more than your twentieth president knowledge. Even if you know the correct answer, you may get it wrong because you can’t get through the reading. The distractors are implausible. If the correct answer is embedded in a group of possibilities that are totally outlandish, you will get the right answer not because you’ve learned it, but because you can use general knowledge to eliminate the others. That’s a bad question. If written correctly, a multiple choice question can be very effective at proving mastery in Bloom’s Taxonomy’s elementary cognitive categories of remembering and understanding, and to a lesser extent in the third category, applying. According to Cathy Davidson, educator Frederick J. Kelly introduced multiple choice tests in 1914.  They were intended to improve the equality of grading. Teacher bias as well as individual differences such as wealth or poverty would not prevent a student from being graded correctly. Multiple choice questions also made grading less time-consuming for teachers, freeing them to do more instruction. Incorporated in standardized tests, multiple choice questions allowed us to compare student proficiency in different areas of the country. Good goals, right? Don’t we share these goals today: To evaluate students without bias. To give them equal opportunity to learn despite where they live or learn. To free instructors to have more time to teach and interact with students. So why are multiple choice questions criticized so much? Davidson says it’s because we try to use multiple choice questions in areas where they don’t work such as ….problem solving, collaborative thinking,  interdisciplinary thinking, complex analysis, the ability to apply learning to other problems, complexity…creativity, imagination, originality… Demonstration of these types of learning, Bloom’s applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, requires more than picking out the right answer if there even is a "right" answer. Kelly created multiple choice questions to measure basic skills important to twentieth century American work and citizenship. He admitted that they only tested "lower-order" thinking. Extending the multiple choice format to measure higher-order thinking results in many flawed questions. Piled one on top of the other in repetitive quizzes or long tests, these ill-conceived items become anxiety-provoking, deadening experiences for students. In this context, they are weak indicators of student learning achievement. Through digital programming we have the potential to create robust profiles of students showing how they process, retain, and apply information. This gives us the opportunity to approach the challenge of assessing student performance from a fresh perspective, one that may even use testing rarely. Let’s start by identifying the problem we want to solve: How do we make sure that students have learned what they need to learn to be successful in the world? Now to test your understanding: Which statement best describes this blog writer’s point of view? Multiple choice questions are easy to write. Multiple choice questions test critical thinking. We should rethink how we assess learning. We should never use multiple choice questions.

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