Staff Development & Performance Evaluation Assignment

Simple Leadership Techniques

Create Your Own Kappan: Practical Aspects of Teaching

Many leaders find it difficult to manage sustained high-level organizational performance. Most insti-
tutions experience steadily declining results, flat-line stagnation, or roller-coaster performance. Without
a doubt, there are many factors that explain our inability to create and sustain performance excellence.
But as Richard Koch explains:

A great deal of what happens is unimportant and can be disregarded. Yet there are always a few forces that
have an influence way beyond their numbers. These are the forces that must be identified and watched. If they
are forces for good, we should multiply them. If they are forces we don’t like, we need to think very carefully
about how to neutralize them. (1998: 14)

There are two causes for failing to sustain performance excellence that bear close examination. First
is that education has attention deficit disorder. Educators do not expect any strategy, program, or ap-

Rubrics, Checklists, and Structured Collaboration

kappanmagazine.org V92 N8 Kappan 25

STEVE BENJAMIN facilitates the Indiana Coalition of Quality Schools and consults regularly with schools and school districts.

Checklists, rubrics, and regular communication between educators can
help a district set its most important goals, create a strategy to achieve
them, and ensure proper implementation.

BY STEVE BENJAMIN

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proach — no matter how potentially efficacious —
to be implemented with fidelity for very long. Teach-
ers and administrators have learned to hunker down
and wait out each new improvement effort because
so many have been proposed before.

Second is our inability to make sense of the vast
amount of available research — information about
best practices that is easily available, but which many
teachers and administrators are unable or unmoti-
vated to access due to competing demands on their
time, lack of research skills, or their satisfaction with
current practice that is comfortable and judged good
enough.

Although (or perhaps because) leaders have
many responsibilities, it is necessary to focus

their attention on their most important job:
deciding where they are going (goals), how they
will get there (strategies), and whether they are

Deepen your
understanding of

this article with
questions and

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Professional

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Discussion Guide

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making progress.

Instead, school districts should institute a simple
leadership technique — a combination of job aids
(rubrics, checklists) and structured collaboration —
in order to ensure that our best knowledge can be
collected, broadcast, and grown.

THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE

Many central office and building administrators,
teachers, and parents are unable to satisfactorily an-
swer the following four questions:

• What are the most important goals that we are
trying to achieve?

• What are the key organizational strategies that
we believe will help us achieve our goals?

• How well are the strategies being implemented?
• Are the strategies working?

Few educators can provide convincing answers to
these questions. I know that because I ask — many
times each week. Although respondents sometimes
compose a reply after some thought, I find a lack of
coherence, specificity, and alignment when I pool
their statements. I am left unconvinced. Equally
troubling is that far too few principals and teachers
can discuss, with confidence, their most important
performance results: percent of students reading at
or above grade level, percent of students mastering
core academic standards, or three-year trend results
for state testing. Clearly, many leaders have failed to
implement a system that has impressed on stakehold-
ers a sense of urgency about the gap between cur-

rent and desired performance (Benjamin 2007a).
They have failed to articulate the vision and strategy
(if they exist) well enough or to identify methods and
measures for determining to what extent strategies
are being deployed and whether they are delivering
results.

This is not a problem only for schools. Michael
Mankins and Richard Steele (2005) surveyed execu-
tives from 197 companies worldwide in order to de-
termine how effective they had been at translating
strategy into performance improvements. They
found that most companies fail to achieve their
strategies’ full potential and that most strategies de-
liver only about half to two-thirds of their potential.
The reasons include poor communication of the
strategy, unclear implementation steps and account-
ability for successful deployment, and inadequate
performance monitoring linked with consequences
and rewards for strategy deployment. Robert Kaplan
and David Norton (2005) charge that leaders and or-
ganizations spend a lot of time developing strategy
but very little time checking to make sure that strat-
egy is implemented. They found that 95% of a com-
pany’s employees do not know or understand the or-
ganizational strategies and thus can’t implement the
desired approaches.

Why is strategy so critical? Because strategy —
whether at the district, school, or classroom level —
is the work we agree to do in order to close a per-
formance gap. If the work we are engaging in is the
wrong work, or if it’s the correct work and we fall
short in our implementation, then we have little
chance of success.

EVIDENCE-BASED BEST PRACTICE

I borrow the term “evidence-based practice” from
health care. David Sackett and his colleagues (1996:
71) write that “evidence-based medicine is the con-
scientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best
evidence in making decisions about the care of indi-
vidual patients. The practice of evidence-based med-
icine means integrating individual clinical expertise
with the best available external clinical evidence from
systematic research.” Substitute student for patient,
education for medicine, and teacher for physician.
Clearly, educators should engage in evidence-based
practice, but when I ask groups of administrators and
teachers questions about best practices, I am often
greeted with blank stares or body language that sug-
gests that I’ve asked an unfair question. Consider
these questions:

• Can you identify the five dimensions of
reading specified in the National Reading
Panel Report?

• Do you know the No. 1 predictor of future

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reading success in young children?
• What are two of the most important

contributors to greater reading success in
adolescents?

• What are two of the most important
interventions that can be used to support
struggling elementary and middle school math
students?

• Have you teamed with colleagues in your
grade level, school, or department to identify a
list of best instructional practices in your
content area?

I do believe that administrators and teachers
should at least be able to list some of the more im-
portant and generally accepted best practices in their
areas of responsibility. If they cannot state these
guiding principles, there is little reason to believe
that teachers are embedding research-based ap-
proaches in daily practice even though, as Figure 1
illustrates, this should be their goal. In these same
organizations, it is also unlikely that the leaders have
worked to align knowledge about best practice with
such processes as interview and selection, mentor-
ing, collaboration, professional development, super-
vision, and recognition.

RUBRICS, CHECKLISTS, AND COLLABORATION

The two most important reasons why employees
fail to implement strategy are unclear expectations
and failure of the leaders to check for satisfactory im-
plementation. Therefore, the first step for leaders is
to create rubrics or checklists that clearly specify
what each person is to do to support the strategy
(Benjamin 2007b). The checklist becomes a sort of
contract between the district and building leaders
and between building leaders and each teacher. Thus
the rubrics must be lean and represent the vital few
behaviors that will deliver the greatest return.

Atul Gawande recommends that good checklists
“do not try to spell out everything. . . . Instead, they
provide reminders of only the most critical and im-
portant steps — the ones that even the highly skilled
professionals using them could miss. Good check-
lists are, above all, practical” (2009: 120).

Checklists also can help teachers in the classroom.
For example, if a school is facing problems with stu-
dents’ reading levels, a teacher team can compile a
list of the top five causes of the problem. Then they
would gather evidence on potential high-value strate-
gies to combat each dimension of the problem. The
checklist might look like the one shown in Table 1.

Elmore advises that “improving school perform-
ance requires transforming a fundamentally weak in-
structional core, and the culture that surrounds it,
into a strong, explicit body of knowledge about pow-

erful teaching and learning that is accessible to those
who are willing to learn it” (2003: 10). I believe
checklists and rubrics can help us get our arms
around at least the most important knowledge. In
the spirit of continuous improvement — and because
of the half-life of knowledge — rubrics should be up-
dated periodically. Mai writes that “successful organ-
izations must strive both to standardize their opera-
tions around ‘best practices’ and, at the same time,
to look constantly for more effective alternatives —
better best practices” (2004: 212).

“When supervisors and managers are
too busy or distracted to verify work and provide
feedback, there are some potentially negative
consequences.”

— Sittsamer et al.

But merely developing rubrics and checklists falls
short. Leaders must ensure that structured collabo-
ration occurs regularly to determine how well the
organization is implementing a practice.

The best way to ensure that a strategy is imple-
mented is to combine rubrics with regular System-
to-System (S2S) talks. All organizations are multi-
leveled, and S2S talks require leaders from one level
(central office) to meet with the next level (building)
to examine performance data and to look for evi-
dence about how a strategy is being implemented
(Benjamin 2007a, b). I’ve found no better way to learn
what’s happening in an organization — and to ad-
vance strategy and accountability — than S2S talks.
Figure 2 shows one possible S2S exchange between

FIG. 1.
Moving Toward Embedding Best Practices

I can say and I believe our best practices
explain the best can improve teaching and

practices. student learning.

We identified I’m trying my
several; they are best to align my

on a paper practice with
somewhere. our list.
Let’s see if I
can find it.

We are aligning
No best our best
practices practices with
have been all other
identified. processes.

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TABLE 1.
Checklist for Improving Reading Results for Students

School: ________________________________________________________

Date: __________________________

Person Completing Checklist: ____________________________________

= A real priority at this time = OK; need to do more = We have good systems

Students can’t read.

____ We have high-quality screening, diagnostic, and progress monitoring tools in place.

____ We have recent (past three months or more frequently) data for each student. We know at what level
every student is reading.

____ We have identified a list of research-based strategies for phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and
reading comprehension to use with students.

____ We have highly qualified teachers who model these research-based strategies.

____ We have additional instructional time for students who require extra direct instruction.

Students have nothing to read.

____ We ask students at least twice each year (needs assessment) to tell us what kind of material they want to
read.

____ We know that we have materials that span a wide range of reading levels.

____ We have established excellent classroom libraries that allow easy access to books.

____ Students are reading many books.

____ We coordinate with the public library to ensure availability and access.

Students have no time to read.

____ We have an uninterrupted 90-minute reading block in our schedule.

____ Each teacher also sees content time as an opportunity to practice reading skills.

____ Students who need extra help have an extra 30-60 minutes of support each day.

____ We have aligned our homework policy with research and require at least 20 minutes of reading and
writing per night before other work is assigned.

Students lose ability to read during the summer.

____ We develop a summer reading list with input from students.

____ We have two two-week reading camps for all students who are struggling.

____ All students are invited to come to summer camp every two weeks for an entire day to discuss what they
have read, to write about their reading, and to engage in other literacy-building experiences. These
camps are led by our literacy coaches.

Adults are not collaborating about best practices and performance data.

____ We have identified a list of best practices, created a self-reflection tool, and meet weekly to discuss
growth and needed improvements to our list and to our practice.

____ As part of our collaboration, we review student growth in reading.

____ We have highly trained literacy coaches, and all teachers must regularly engage with the coaches —
some more frequently than others.

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a principal and a teacher. This school chose to imple-
ment the Eight-Step Instructional Process (Gold-
berg and Cole 2002) as a strategy for closing the gap
in student mastery of academic standards. Once this
strategy was selected, teachers and administrators
developed a deployment rubric like the one shown
in Table 2.

Using rubrics and structured collaboration im-
poses accountability on the system. Murray Sittsamer
and his colleagues (2007: 39) note that “people will
listen to what you say, but they’ll do what you in-
spect. By nature, human beings are flexible, innova-
tive and error prone. Regardless of [a person’s] ex-
perience, knowledge and attentiveness, the lack of

If the work we are engaging in is
the wrong work, or if it’s the correct
work and we fall short in our
implementation, then we have little
chance of success.

FIG. 2.
Possible S2S Structured Collaboration Dialogue

Teacher: I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to bring today.
Principal: You should know. We’ve been discussing these S2S meetings, our goals, and strategies for six

months, and I’d asked everyone to bring evidence that shows where you are with one of our key
strategies—the Eight-Step Process—as well as student performance results linked to your
implementation of that strategy.

Teacher: This is all new to me. This is just another thing to do. My plate is already full.
Principal: Your students performed poorly on the state end-of-course exam. One of our research-based

improvement strategies is implementing the Eight-Step Instructional Process. Remember? We
expect you to identify essential standards, map your standards, create standards-aligned
assessments, review your student’s performance results on these assessments, and re-teach for
higher mastery. Remember us talking about that? You even have a deployment rubric that you are
supposed to complete.

Teacher: Yeah.
Principal: So, where are you in the process?
Teacher: I haven’t started yet.
Principal: I’m disappointed. How do you feel about your lack of progress?
Teacher: Is there someone here who can show me how to do these things?
Principal: You received professional development on this, and there are sample maps and assessments on

our shared drive, but if you need more help, Kent has the whole system in place. I just met with
him, and he was able to show me performance and reteaching data for last month’s standards.
See these charts?

Teacher: His students were able to make those gains after reteaching?
Principal: Yeah. Do you see why this is so important to me?
Teacher: OK. Yeah.
Principal: I want to meet with you in one month, and I hope to see similar data. I want you to document our

conversation, and send me a copy for our files. Do the summary today so you capture everything
we discussed. Any questions?

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TABLE 2.
Deployment Rubric for the Eight-step Instructional Process

Strategy: Our Eight-Step Instructional Process (align taught and tested curriculum with state academic stan-
dards, especially core standards, and use data to improve teaching and learning through mastery model) goal
is that 100% of classrooms have fully integrated the model and have reteaching data by the beginning of sec-
ond semester.

Person or Department Completing Rubric: ________________________________________________

Date: __________________________

= Have not begun = Some progress has occurred = Completed successfully

Districts and
schools must

set clear
expectations,

and leaders
must engage

in periodic
review and
candid talk

regarding

Curriculum Alignment and Assessment Development

____ We have determined essential/core standards.

____ We have sequenced the standards by three- or four-week blocks and have clearly indicated how we will
maintain mastery of core standards by revisiting them throughout the year. We have placed a copy of our
map in the High Performance Culture folder on our web site.

____ We have developed three- or four-week standards-aligned common assessments.

____ We have developed brief, short-cycle assessments for each of the essential standards (single standards).
The purpose of these is to provide regular practice and to use when evaluating the effects of reteaching.

Instructional Development

____ We view textbooks as resources, not primary instructional plans.

____ We have engaged in action research to identify best-practice instructional approaches.

____ We have posted our best practices in the High Performance Culture folder on our web site.

____ We have developed milk crate folders for our standards.

progress. Mastery Learning

____ We have administered three- or four-week assessments.

____ We have identified weak essential skills that should be retaught.

____ We have developed reteaching calendars.

____ We have developed high-quality mini-lessons using the template (bell-ringer activities).

____ We track retest data.

____ Teachers meet biweekly to review retest data.

____ Principal and teachers meet monthly to review retest data.

____ Students set goals, identify strategies, and track their own performance on mastery of the standards.

____ We celebrate success data formally.

Core Values Adoption (We have adopted the belief that . . . )

____ All students can meet with success, given enough time and resources.

____ Data must drive instruction.

____ Teachers must collaborate to improve the quality of instruction.

____ Principal, teachers, and students are accountable for improved learning results.

____ Alignment of standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessments is required in today’s accountability
environment.

____ Continuous improvement will be required to make our strategy work effectively in our school.

____ There are no “quick fixes,” and improvement will take time.

____ Fostering good reading skills for our students is another important area of focus that needs our attention.

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–
—

timely, relevant and accurate feedback is sure to have
a negative impact on performance.”

CONCLUSION

Districts and schools must set clear expectations,
and leaders must engage in periodic review and can-
did talk regarding progress. Use checklists and
rubrics to set the expectations and System-to-Sys-
tem talks to review progress. By using this technique,
you will attend to several major leadership shortcom-
ings. Because leaders have many responsibilities, it
is necessary to focus their attention on their most
important job: deciding where they are going (goals),
how they will get there (strategies), and whether they
are making progress. K

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Steve. “Minding the Performance Gap: Focusing
Leaders on the Vital Few Competencies.” EDge 2, no. 3
(2007): 1-19. a

Benjamin, Steve. The Quality Rubric. Milwaukee, Wis.: ASQ
Press, 2007. b

Elmore, Richard F. “A Plea for Strong Practice.” Educational
Leadership 61, no. 3 (2003): 6-10.

Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things

Right. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Goldberg, Jacqueline S., and Bryan Cole. “Quality

Management in Education: Building Equity and Excellence in

Student Performance.” Quality Management Journal 9, no. 4

(2002): 8-22.

Kaplan, Robert S., and David P. Norton. “The Office of

Strategy Management.” Harvard Review 83, no. 10

(2005): 72-80.

Koch, Richard. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving

More with Less. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1998.

Mai, Robert. “Leadership for School Improvement: Cues from

Organizational Learning and Renewal Efforts.” The Educational

Forum 68, no. 3 (2004): 211-221.

Mankins, Michael C., and Richard Steele. “Turning Great

Strategy into Great Performance.” Harvard Review

83, no. 7/8 (2005): 65-72.

Sackett, David L., William M.C. Rosenberg, J.A. Muir Gray, R.

Brian Haynes, and W. Scott Richardson. “Evidence Based

Medicine: What It Is and What It Isn’t.” British Medical Journal

312, no. 7023 (1996): 71-72.

Sittsamer, Murray J., Michael R. Oxley, and William O’Hara.

“Turbocharge Your Preventive Action System.” Quality

Progress 40, no. 11 (2007): 37-42.

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