PILOTed

KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth Speaks in Westchester

If your parents are in the top quartile (wealth) in the US, there is an 80% chance you will go on to college. If your parents are in the bottom quartile, there’s an 8% chance.

But what if we found ways to change that? What if we found that a certain way of teaching could give kids born to the lowest quartile a 95% chance of graduating high school and an 87% chance to go on to college?

This is the record of KIPP, and as Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, told a group of us on May 22, it’s a record shared by some pockets of public schools and the best charter schools in the country. We had assembled because Westchester Community College offers a series of salons, where they bring the community into people’s homes to discuss literature, media, politics, sports, and arts with national figures.

How does KIPP achieve its results with at-risk students? Barth revealed that KIPP is predominantly middle schools, and the program features

1. Curriculum that includes both character and academics
2. High expectations for each child, that he or she will graduate and go on to college
3. Schools days lasting from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM
4. Homework practically every night
5. Individual support for  any student struggling to learn
6. High degree of autonomy for each school
7. Training, coaching, and supervised teaching for new teachers
8. Variety of assessments of teaching used to inform ongoing teacher professional development
9. Compacts with parents that children will come to school every day with their homework completed

Other high performing schools outside of the KIPP system may have found other effective systems, but this is what has worked for KIPP. KIPP has 125 schools, reaching 40,000 students. KIPP’s growth goal is to double the number of students it serves, but that’s just a tiny fraction of the 55 million students in K12 across the US, or 31 million students in poverty (receiving free or reduced price lunch).

Barth asked the audience a question, “How many of the kids in this country woke up today and went to a school that gave them a shot to compete in today’s global economy?” After a pause, he answered, “1 in 11.”

He then pointed out, that while we would all like to change this immediately, no one knows how to do it; there is no magic pill. And even if someone did know what to do, we don’t have the systems or the resources to effectuate this type of change overnight. Barth proposed a more realistic goal: suppose we wanted to change this ratio to 1 in 3 students over the next ten years; wouldn’t that be remarkable progress and something more likely to be achieved?

Someone in the audience proposed that we look at the charter schools as education laboratories, learn what they do best and how they do it, and then figure out how to apply those lessons to public schools. She asked how KIPP was interacting with public schools.

Barth said that KIPP decided that they would focus their efforts and resources where they had enough control to ensure success. KIPP has conducted leadership academies, where principals or district administrators spend time in KIPP schools and learn KIPP methods, and these have had some success. In terms of KIPP directly working with public schools, the average superintendent lasts for only two years. If KIPP were to set up a program to mentor the public schools in a community, and new leadership came in, what are the chances that the program would continue? (I had the distinct impression that this was not a hypothetical situation, but that’s just a hunch.)

As with other charter schools, KIPP has two funding mechanisms. First, KIPP receives state and federal funds for each student, and those funds come from the same pool as public schools. Second, KIPP receives money from philanthropy, and has raised $195 Million since its founding in 1994. It’s clear that KIPP as an organization will not solve the educational problems of the country: they will not have the reach, their expenditure per student is not sustainable over 30 million students, and public schools do not have the flexibility to try some of their methods.

Yet, thousands of kids have been able to graduate high school and attend college because KIPP gave them the confidence, support, and tools.

 

Picturing to Learn Science

Picture this.

There is a group of scientists discussing a concept. One of the scientists has a new idea. What do you think he or she does to explain it to the others?

Most likely, she grabs a pencil and paper and makes a drawing to illustrate the concept. And what happens? The process of drawing clarifies various issues in her mind. Discussing the drawing with the other scientists allows them to question her assumptions and address any misunderstandings.

Imagine if we used this technique to teach science in schools. Imagine that students drew their understandings of complex concepts to explain their insights to each other and to their teachers.

This is actually the Picturing to Learn methodology pioneered by Felice Frankel. Ms. Frankel is a science photographer who teaches at MIT. Ms Frankel elaborates:

This whole notion of visually representing an idea, in order to communicate or teach, makes the students clarify in their own mind the essential pieces of the idea, creating a visual metaphor.

Making a drawing in order to explain is a means of clarifying in your own mind what you want to say, it forces the students to think deeper. In the process, students reveal any misconceptions in scientific understanding, even with very smart students. This is non-threating and double feedback for the teacher: it shows her what the students are misunderstanding, and if the same misunderstandings continually crop up, it shows the teacher that she needs to adjust her teaching.

Kids are unbelievably visual; it’s the world they are growing up in today. This technique not only matches how scientists themselves communicate, it syncs with how students think. Visual thinking is how we understand science, it’s how Einstein was able to first grasp the concept of relativity.

Through NSF grants, Frankel has introduced this technique in universities, high schools, and middle schools. In one example, a college student received an A in chemistry, and was able to answer a question about which liquid would boil at a lower temperature because she had memorized the formulas and knew when to apply them. When asked to draw the process, she (and others in the class) completely missed the actual reason some liquids boil at different temperatures, the effect of molecular bonding. The teachers were astounded that their students could parrot back the right answers on tests, yet have such large gaps in their conceptual understanding.

At a Middle School in Harlem, Frankel conducted a summer boot camp for teachers. The teachers worked in groups to create pictures explaining the water cycle, which is often taught in 7^th and 8^th grade science. This not only provided a non-threatening way for the teachers to address their own knowledge gaps, it also inspired them to use Picturing to Learn with their own students, and Frankel said the teachers have responded that their students have made unbelievable strides in their comprehension and interest. The teachers reported that over ¾ of their students’ drawings show problematic explanations, many of which would never have been caught with standard textbook problem sets or tests.

Ms Frankel is currently developing rubrics to make it easier for teachers to adopt Picturing to Learn in their classrooms, and can work with school, districts, or content providers that want to incorporate these techniques in their science curriculum, and can be reached through her website: http://www.picturingtolearn.org/

 

Invisible Learning, Aprendizaje Invisible

This is a summary of Aprendizaje Invisible (Invisible Learning, in English), an ebook by Cristóbal Cobo and John W. Moravec on transforming educational systems around the world.

Why is education important? For one, in today’s competitive international labor marketplace, superior education is the oxygen that all potential employees want to acquire.

Image by IK's World Trip via Flickr

 

Modern technologies, like social networking, texting, and digital storytelling, are viewed as inimical to the tried and true techniques of the formal classroom. Outside of the classroom, it’s a different story. Compared to watching television when it was a young technology, kids today are spending more time on the Internet with less supervision. Whatever they are doing, they are learning, but what and how they are learning is invisible to the formal education system. There is thus a whole new environment of learning outside of formal education, including through social networks, games, and searching, with students playing, discussing, finding, and sharing information. The question is not, “Are they learning on the Internet?” It’s “what are they learning?”

Can educators leverage this time and energy to help students learn? Only if we understand that the most significant potential lies outside of the classroom, where students are now spending so much of their time, and if we start understanding the dynamics of Internet usage.

But we need to consider models different from that of a sage lecturing to students who avidly or passively absorb the materials. There may not be one winning idea, there is probably not one learning theory that is correct in all instances, maybe we will need to follow several different possible paths to arrive at superior means of teaching more to more. The goal of this book is to try to unify different learning theories, teaching practices, change management techniques, and technologies to make education more effective, efficient, informative, and adaptive to the needs of our rapidly changing world.

 

Image by RBerteig via Flickr

While you can’t deny that schools are adopting software tools, many times those tools are primarily reinforcing the traditional ways of teaching and assessing. The software that students are using outside of school, and are informally, non-formally, or serendipitously learning from, are more attuned to what most of us regard as 21^st century skills. Additionally, what is often considered new technology by adult teachers and educators is regarded as the norm (at best) and outdated (at worst) by many students. For example, using PowerPoint slides may or may not be effective, but it certainly would not be considered as technologically savvy by high school or college students.

 

It’s ironic that now, when there are so many people interested in learning and going to school, we don’t know what a good education is. And it’s sad that, with all the resources and effort societies invest in education, and with all the capabilities of teachers and schools, our education systems do not do a better job preparing students for the demands of our interconnected, rapidly changing, 21^st century world.

A lot of what we know, and need to know, is not formally taught or measured. Even though these acquired skills and knowledge are invisible or ignored by traditional measurement vehicles, they are very visible and valued real life. How are they acquired? How can technology help us teach them better?

The book explores the roots of what makes learning invisible:

1. Technology: Because schools are not adapting the technologies that students are using, the technologies that students use to communicate, explore, amuse, and learn are invisible to formal education.
2. Actions: Students are spending a lot more time on the computer in non-school environments, often doing much more advanced tasks, and these activities are invisible to formal education
3. Knowledge: the skills and capacities acquired using informal learning are different from what are demanded in formal education, and so are invisible.
4. Technical skills: besides the rudiments of learning commands and functions, many technical skills are learned while doing other things, for example when you want to create a video and post it to a social network. Because these skills are not being explicitly taught, they often become invisible to formal education.
5. Assessment: many of the competencies learned outside of lectures, textbooks, and repetitive exercises are not tested, especially on high stakes assessments, so are invisible.
6. Momentum: because the different parties in the educational system have so much vested in their existing methods, technologies, and practices, they do not or cannot devote the time or resources to looking at creative ways of change, or eliminating the practices that just do not make sense anymore. Thus, the lack of attention makes the possibility of change invisible.

What is often taught, assessed, and rewarded at schools is memorization and exactitude. But are these the traits that are most valuable in the real world? In fact, by penalizing errors, we are also hampering creativity and experimentation, two of the key skills most demanded in the world outside of school.

Our education system needs to better understand the technologies students are using, what students are doing with that technology, what they are learning, how to better understand how much students are learning and what they are capable of doing. All those interested in education should be doing this with a lens of teaching how to learn, not specifically in teaching specific skills, and with an understanding that learning doesn’t stop at graduation, learning has become a life-long process.

We are preparing students to live, and hopefully thrive, in a world we cannot even imagine today, so we need to redesign our education systems. Rethinking education has three parts, figuring out what we are doing that works, culling out what we are doing that isn’t working, and devising what to add or change.

Ivan Illich proposed, forty years ago, the idea that a good education system lets all who want to learn learn, it provides access to learning content at whatever moment people need it, it provides the means to teach for those who have knowledge and want to share it with others, and it does not dictate any pre-determined plan of studies, titles, or diplomas. How different from the education we offer today, but how close to where we need to end up!

Rethinking education is a job for all of us.

You can access the book (it is in Spanish) here. And you can watch Cristóbal Cobo present these ideas at a TED presentation (also in Spanish) here.

 

Related articles

• Invisible Learning: Now free (downes.ca)
• Power to the students. (lizhobman.wordpress.com)
• Creating Creators: The Role of Public Education in the 21st Century (21stcenturylearningassociates.wordpress.com)

How do you improve a school system?

McKinsey & Company has cataloged 525 different types of actions that school systems attempt, and most of them work, but in different situations. Many of the interventions are different depending on the stage of the schools. McKinsey breaks school systems into 4 different categories, dependent on student achievement: poor, fair, good, and great.

 

Image via Wikipedia

Poor systems routinely turn out students who do not read and write, and who cannot do rudimentary math. Their teachers are generally low skilled as well. Poor systems that are progressing to fair ones generally make progress with a top down approach, establishing relatively rigid class and lesson structures so that lower skilled educators can still achieve a minimum but uniform level of student achievement. Their goal is students achieving basic literacy and numeracy.

 

Fair systems have students who understand the rudiments of reading and math. They progress by providing more student performance information, setting pedagogy models and organizational structure, securing appropriate financing, and increasing accountability. Their goal is to get the foundations in place.

Good systems have students who are reasonably proficient and meet academic standards. These systems progress to great by establishing and reinforcing the professionalism of their educators with occupational structures and procedures similar to those of medicine or law. Their goal is to inculcate professionalism.

Great systems uniformly produce highly functioning graduates. They continue to improve by increasing local and individual responsibility, with more peer based learning for professionals and students, and encouraging innovation and experimentation.  Their theme is to  improve through peers and innovation.

The interventions for the first two levels tend to be top down, while the higher levels look to empower educators and students. As the report points out, you can prescribe adequacy, but you unleash greatness.

Six types of interventions tend to span all levels:

• Revising the curriculum
• Ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure
• Building technical skills for educators
• Assessing students
• Establishing data systems
• Creating policy documents and laws

While many school systems attempt to implement these interventions, successful implementations (those that move a system from one level to a higher one) have six attributes:

1. Leaders have selected, and members of the school system follow, a critical mass of interventions that together will move the district forward. There is not just one quick fix, and it's not trying to do everything at once. Assessing the situation and then selecting a cluster of interventions that can be done well that will move the school system to the next level.
2. Leaders contextualize the interventions to the school system, generally through interactions with other stakeholders, to get the critical buy-in. Leaders have to obtain the support of stakeholders, and they do this through a combination of context, persuasion, and mandates. Leadership is a key ingredient for success, and the leaders need to balance how they communicate, what issues become matters of negotiation, and what issues are dictated.
3. The systems maintain the integrity of the interventions over time; they stick with the interventions over years so that they can achieve the desired results. Educators have to internalize the new teaching processes, changing the way they think about teaching, and this takes time.
4. There are structures that allow teachers to share practices and the system to disseminate and scale them.
5. Teachers understand and buy in to a professional career path, understanding that continuous learning, sharing, and adopting what works is part of their responsibility.
6. New leaders are cultivated, so that the leadership of the system is self-sustaining and self-reinforcing.

While the average superintendent in an urban district in the US currently stays at the position for an average of three years, the report points out that this is a formula for failure. This combination of six success factors requires change from quite a few stakeholders, many of whom will normally strongly resist change. All the systems that have overcome that inertia have initiated change with the introduction of a highly energized competent leader who stays for an average of at least six years, but that is generally not sufficient. Most also have experienced either some political or economic crisis or a publicized analysis or report that is highly critical of the system.

 

Image via Wikipedia

Hope for improvements in our school systems thus lie with some external event triggering a desire for change in the community or school system; the ascendency of a good leader; following the six attributes of success; and being conscious of the school system's level.

 

Somehow, that doesn't sound so complicated.

Related articles

• Transforming the Public Education System Through Data (impact.webershandwick.com)
• Editorial: There Has to Be a Better Way to Grade Tests (nytimes.com)

My Problems with the Common Assessment

The PARCC (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) released a draft of their assessment frameworks for ELA and Math, and asked for feedback: http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-content-frameworks.

Here are my three major objections.

The Industrial Age Paradigm

The assessment framework reinforces the current model of schools as factories and children as raw material to be forged into a uniform product. The assessment framework is still based on a cohort of students starting in Kindergarten and learning a prescribed dose of skills and knowledge each year through 12^th grade. For example, while the ELA standards allow teachers or schools to select the specific reading passages, passage specifications are bounded by grade:

Use of grade band-level complex text: Leveled texts that are below grade band level in complexity are not a substitute; the standards indicate students should be reading grade band-level complex text. Flexibility is built in for educators to build progressions of more complex text within grade band levels (e.g., grades 4–5, 6–8, 9–12) that overlap to a limited degree with earlier bands, but reading text from the appropriate band level lies at the core of the Model Content Frameworks.

Students are children and children are individuals as are teachers. Why can't we bust out of the early 20^th century mentality that everyone should be learning the same things in the same years?

The flawed concept of effective valid standardized tests of cognitive behaviors

There are basically four types or results one can assess: feelings, knowledge, behaviors, and results.

• Feeling assessments involve questions like, "how confident do you feel that you learned how to do X?" Feelings are the least reliable and least expensive way to assess.
• Knowledge assessments are more objective. Multiple choice questions "Which is the main idea in the following paragraph?" are one way of testing knowledge, as are short answer questions, and, in some cases essays can also test knowledge (or skills). Knowledge assessments test whether the learners can recall facts or procedures, they are fairly straightforward to develop and score, although more expensive than feelings assessments. One reason knowledge assessments are flawed is that they can only test a subset of what a student has learned over a period of time. For example if a teacher happens to have spent time on the specific areas tested (from, say, tailoring classes to what was tested in previous years), while neglecting areas that aren't being tested, the test will give a false result on total knowledge. Most current high stakes assessments test basic knowledge.
• Behavior assessment tests whether the learner applies knowledge or skills when placed in a situation that calls for them. These assessments are much more expensive to develop, and need to place students in novel situations, so they cannot merely regurgitate facts or directly apply algorithms they have memorized. When I was developing content and assessments, our rule of thumb was that, when teaching and then using behavior assessment, we needed to allocate 1/3 of the budget for the cost of assessment development and administration, and content development and instruction was 2/3.
• Results assessment tests whether the students are better able to achieve organization-wide goals. In the case of education, we'd want to evaluate whether they become better citizens, better workers, or better parents. This type of assessment is extremely difficult; can we even come to an agreement on what a better citizen, worker, or parent is? How could we possibly measure it? How could we determine how student activities in 1^st grade make students better citizens, and what could we do with that information?

The goals of the PARCC Assessment Framework (assessing to know if students have the cognitive skills and knowledge to perform real tasks, and determining interventions when they do not) are noble. But my experience tells me that the cost trade-off of deep assessment versus saving money never works out. Following my old rule of thumb, where 1/3 of the cost is assessment, and 2/3 of the cost is teaching, you could reallocate that money and effort to essentially teach 40-50% more by using a simpler assessment. Would you rather teach more students more skills and knowledge (and not completely know the effectiveness) or teach less, but assess better? When the final dollar allocation decisions get made, we always seem to tip the scales toward reducing assessment costs in favor of teaching or savings.

Thus, to me, it seems more likely that PARCC will eventually fall down when it comes time for states to put money behind developing and scoring the assessments, and we will end up with tests not significantly better than the ones we currently use.

High stakes assessments always get gamed

If we are going to use assessment to determine teacher pay, teacher retention, and funding for schools and districts, the people being rewarded or penalized will search for ways to maximize their outcomes, and some of those will affect the validity of the students' test results. I know I am not the only person who writes about this, but here are three previous PilotEd articles that address this issue:

Interview with Sharon Nichols

Mapping state proficiency standards to the NAEP

Many states cheat on standardized tests

What's my recommendation?

With the current direction of the Common Assessment, it's as if we've taken some of very smart, competent people, and we've told them, "Build a great road to that mountain over there." And they'll spend a lot of time, effort, and money building a great road to the mountain. But what we really need is a road to the sea, so what we'll get is a great road leading us to a place we don't really want to go to.

The whole debate about what students should know, when they should know it, and how we assess it is extremely important for our society. Rather than using that debate to frame high stakes assessments that merely tweak our current educational paradigm, we should

1. Rethink what it means to offer education.
2. Use the Common Core Standards and the PARCC frameworks as the bases for defining the skills and procedures needed by educators and parents.
3. Build out corresponding community, pre-service, and in-service curriculum for all who will guide student learning.
4. Develop resources for educators and parents to unleash to potential for each child.

Related articles

• Who Wrote the Common Core Reading Standards? (dconrad3.wordpress.com)
• Elimination of evaluation/assessment practices? (education420.wordpress.com)
• Module Six - Standards Based Assessment (tracyfeltonbportfolio.wordpress.com)

Many States Cheat on Student Proficiency

Virtually all states have proficiency standards below those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

There is a wide variation in what states call proficiency; students who achieved proficiency in the lowest 5 states would have been labeled basic in the highest 5 states.

There are 40 cases of states reducing the rigor of their state high stakes tests between 2005 and 2009.

In over half the cases, self-reported (by the states) improvements in student performance do not correlate with student NAEP test score results.

This is from the NAEP report Mapping State Proficiency Standards onto the NAEP Scales at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2011458.asp.

This isn't a new phenomenon. We knew this from the previous report in 2009.

So what should we do about it? Should we make the NAEP tests standard across the states? Would we be better off just making sure everyone knew how their state student achievement reporting compared to national averages and let changes occur from local pressure? Should we abandon high stakes testing? Should we try to get testing "right" and then set national standards?

Please let us know what you think by responding on the following form. We'll collate the results in a post on August 22.

Related articles

• Title I Schools Combat Low NAEP Scores with Imagine Learning English (prweb.com)
• Standardized Tests' Measures Of Student Performance Vary Widely: Study (huffingtonpost.com)

What great teachers do

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) recently released a study, The Road Less Travelled, How Developmental Science Can Prepare Educator to Improve Student Achievement: Policy Recommendations.

Most of this report is a justification and call for states and the federal government to use NCATE to accredit schools of education and providers of professional development. Buried in the report are some nuggets on excellence in teaching.

The emphasis of NCLB over the past 8 years, ESEA currently, and the Common Core standards is on student achievement: determining standards on assessing students based on those standards.

Data shows that teacher performance is the single most important school influence in improving student outcomes. The teachers who best influence student achievement:

1. Know their children as individuals, which may be even more important than knowing the content being taught, and makes students feel acknowledged and respected.
2. Provide an emotional foundation for learning for their students. As emotion affects cognition, students who feel safe and excited in the classroom are more motivated to learn.
3. Organize and manage their classrooms to be efficient learning environments. Students who are comfortable with classroom roles that are congruent with learning are better able to focus on the tasks of learning.

In fact, these findings correspond to other studies which indicate that professional development and teacher training that focus on good teaching techniques have a more profound influence on student success than those that focus primarily on specific content areas.

When we all talk about teacher competence, let’s concentrate on making sure teachers have the knowledge, skills, and resources to know their children, provide appropriate emotional support when needed, and organize and manage their classrooms efficiently.

Leading for Learning

Your vision for how to fix schools depends on your metaphors.

I've just finished reading Phillip Schlechty's Leading for Learning.

At different times we imagine schools as factories, suppliers of learning, warehouses, or prisons. Factories take uniform raw materials (students) and transform them into end-products (workers or taxpayers). If we look at schools as factories, we want use statistical process techniques to become more efficient; we want to come up with the one best technique for any situation, and replicate it, until we scientifically determine that something else works better.

Suppliers of learning seek to meet the needs (content, entertainment) of customers (students). Thus, schools as professional learning organizations will want to find the best content, and economically deliver it to students.

Warehouses are places to store things (students) while other things get done; school here is a service that allows parents to work without worrying about their kids. Prisons prevent potentially dangerous people from inflicting harm on society while hopefully teaching them not to do it in the future.

To a certain extent, schools are all of these things, they all touch on different aspects of what we want schools to be. But all lead to centralization, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and stagnation. And eventually, according to Schlechtly, they lead to the alienation of schools from society, as those who bridle against the educational rigidity and who can afford to send their kids into better environments while resenting paying for the schooling of other people's kids.

Schlechtly cogently argues against national standards. National standards further remove education from the community, lead to narrowly focused testing, and add further support to the entrenched bureaucracy and power structures.

He argues that we must envision schools as learning organizations. Teachers learn to provide students with engaging work that helps them learn, students become better learners, both in groups and as individuals, and communities actively participate in the education of their youth. Only when the community becomes a real part of the educational process will they commit the resources necessary to guide students to become citizens of the 21^st century.

It's an interesting perspective, and meshes with what Project Tomorrow calls free agent learners. Wouldn't it be great if schools could ignite kids to want to learn while teaching them how?

Is this the way to evaluate teachers?

By this time, most of you have heard of how the Los Angeles Times used a statistical technique called Value Added Modeling (VAM) to determine the good from the bad LA teachers.  You're also probably aware that this technique is being lauded by groups from the US Department of Education, State Education departments, and others as a way to compensate and employ teachers. The teachers whose students improve the most get raises, while the ones whose students stagnate get fired.

The Economic Policy Institute released a report this week that shatters the notion that VAM is or should be used as a major factor in evaluating teachers.

The report found that:

• There are broad year-to-year inconsistencies. For example, one-third of the teachers who are highly ranked one year repeated, one-third moved to the middle, and one-third moved to the lowest rankings.
• While teachers did correlate with their students scores for a year, they just as strongly correlated with those students' scores for the previous year, something they couldn't possibly have effected.

Factors, outside of teachers having significant impact on student test scores include: influences of other teachers, specialists, or tutors, school attendance, at-home activities and environment, curriculum materials, family resources, and peers and friends. Teachers who have students who are learning English show statistically significantly worse results than teachers who have primarily native English language students.

Research shows that reliance on high stakes tests narrows and over-simplifies classroom focus to only what is being tested.

The report concludes that the results of VAM methods are too unstable, imprecise,  and unreliable to be used for operational decisions.

Systematic observation is a much more reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness, when it is performed by well qualified peers or supervisors. Observations do not have to be made in-person, they can also be made by video, or review of lesson plans and student work.

It's all about me

I was sitting at a presentation at the Podstock conference in Wichita, and Alan Beam, a principal and fellow attendee, leaned over to me, and said, "Some of these presentations must drive you crazy. You're obviously a planner and information gatherer, and most of these presentations are being given by simplifiers and doers."

It turns out that Alan had his team go through the Kolbe assessment, which helps individuals maximize their talents, and teams understand how to work together.

We had a quick conversation, where Alan confided that he was a person who tended to jump into things, and that he hated to follow rules; two traits not often found in educators. He was having his staff take the test so that they could all learn how to make the changes together that would improve the school.

I decided that I'd take the Kolbe test myself, but also decided to take the Strengths Finder test as well. Strengths Finder had been recommended to me by George Johnson of TEL.A.VISION. Little did I know that both tests would show that this type of behavior is typical for people like me.

The Kolbe Instrument

The Kolbe Instrument costs about $50, takes about 20 minutes to complete, and then it takes another half hour to digest the results.

Kolbe analyzes you according to four modes of operations (MO):

• Fact Finder: to what extent do you act based on simple summary information or look to gather more information and detail before you act?
• Follow through: to what extent do you look for rules and guidelines, and to what extent do you look at each situation as new or unique?
• Quick Start: to what extent do you take risks, and to what extent do you wait until the right path is clear?
• Implementor: to what extent do you analyze and plan before acting, and to what extent do you act quickly.

Kolbe places you in one of three groups for each MO, do you lean to either one of the two extremes, or are you in the middle? It said that I tend to gather information, am flexible in deciding whether to take a risk or stay with what is familiar, am flexible about whether to follow rules or devise new ones, and tend to plan and analyze instead of jump to immediate action.

As one who gathers information and plans and analyzes, is it any wonder that I would take both suggestions and try each test?

Here is the chart for me:

In Fact Finding, I tend to research, establish priorities, define objectives, and assess probabilities, and I present information comprehensively (just like now). It also means I do not jump to conclusions, and I have a hard time giving yes or no answers (as anyone who knows me will testify to).

In Follow Thru, the instrument says I coordinate schedules, can react to changes, draft guidelines, identify inconsistencies, and take notes, and can relate to both those who multi-task and quickly seek shortcuts, as well as those who are very structured. I can build systems, but I can also see when they don't apply and adapt. I don't like to give guarantees I may not be able to meet.

In Quick Start, I'm willing to try out new ideas, but not just because they are new, only when I think they are better. I often come up with metaphors and tend to reduce risks, and I can mediate between those who want to try something new and those who want to stick with what's worked before. I like challenges and tend to take calculated risks, but do not like too many changes at once or too many competing deadlines.

As in Implementor, I'm strong on conceptualizing solutions and imagining future results, I can create temporary fixes and deal with abstractions. I do not need to touch something or see a 3D model of it to know it's there or possible. As I just told my wife, this means I'm not the one who should be mowing the lawn, fixing up the house, or washing the dishes (although I didn't quite get the response I wanted from this statement.)

The instrument says I tend to be critical of ideas or plans that lack depth, resemble something that did now work in the past, or are not fully developed, and that I might get upset than when people do not meet their commitments.

In summary, it says that I am excellent at coming up with unique strategies, prioritizing  opportunities, and dealing with the unknowns in complex problems. According to Kolbe, I am the go-to person when elaborate projects are in trouble.

My biggest concern with this instrument is not knowing if the descriptions relate to my specific results, or whether they apply to anyone who was in my triad. For example, did I get the same feedback from my 7 in Fact Finding as someone who scored a 10? I'm closer to a 6 than a 10, and it's a little arbitrary that 4-6 is considered in the middle triad instead of 4-7. I would think that a 7 would tend to get a lot of information to make decisions, and that a 10 might be paralyzed, never acting because of concerns of not having enough data. But did the assessment give the same description for both? I just don't know.

Strengths Finder

The Strengths Finder is run by the Gallup organization. Similarly to the Kolbe instrument, it's goal is to help you find what you are good at, so that you can accomplish more. The Strengths Finder asks about 170 questions to determine which of 35 common traits most resemble you, and then describes how they apply to you.

The Strengths Finder costs about $25, along with the Strengths Finder book.

My five traits are Learner, Individualization, Achiever, Arranger, and Strategic.

As a Learner, I persevere until I have the knowledge and skills to attain a goal (not that different from the Fact Finder profile from the Kolbe instrument). I tend to concentrate for extended periods of time.

A person with Individualization tends to look at the unique qualities of each person, and can figure out how people who are different can work together productively. I help people with their jobs so that they can finish them at or before they are due (or, as my kids say, I can be a nag). I am driven to assist others with advice or support, and I can often figure out how each person can benefit the group.

Achievers have stamina and work hard. Combines with Individualization, I can be a good advisor to people, offering suggestions and asking questions. I like challenging situations, and am willing to step out of my comfort zone, devoting my full attention to the challenge o accomplish a goal.

Arrangers are good at organizing, and are flexible (not that different from what the Kolbe said). I like goals, and like to be held accountable (and hold myself accountable) for reaching them. I like to work with individuals who know the difference between right and wrong, and tend to distance myself from those I think lack this clarity. Even though I often notice when mistakes are being made and accuracy is being sacrificed, I tend to trust my team mates and tend to resist the temptation to push others aside.

Strategic people create alternate ways to proceed, and are good at spotting patterns and relevant issues. I often identify problems, and different solutions to the problem, before others see them. Piecing together patterns of cause and effect allows me to propose alternate routes to a goal. I am most stimulated when I collaborate as part of a team, although I may appear impatient when others do not see the issues or solutions quickly.

The Strengths Finder suggested that I seek out opportunities to teach or present to others, to be a catalyst for change, look for roles that require broad technical competence, look for new situations that require someone to develop a skill quickly, and to work in an area of continuous changing technologies or regulations.

Summary

All in all, the two tests agreed much more than they disagreed:

• I like to learn, and then use that knowledge or skill to achieve goals as part of a team.
• I am generally good at creating and planning, but also good at adapting to changes.
• I don't mind the unknown, but I'm not one to rush into something new without assessing the risks and devising some plan and metrics.
• I value and seek diversity of cultures, opinions, and aptitudes.
• I hate not meeting deadlines or goals, and when someone says they are going to do something, I expect them to do it or let me know in advance.

I'd love some feedback about whether this represents me, and I'd love to hear about others' results with either of these tests.

And one more thing. I loved the presentations at Podstock.