What I learn from visiting other schools

Twice last week I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of hours visiting two local schools—Toomer Elementary School and KIPP WAYS—to observe classes and meet with the school leader.  Since moving full-time into the executive director position a year ago, no longer with the split duties of also serving as the middle campus principal, I can feel slightly less guilty when I leave campus.  Therefore, I’ve tried to make it a practice of mine to visit another school about once a week.  In the past 12 months, beyond ANCS, I’ve been able to spend time in a variety of Atlanta area schools, including:

• Dunbar Elementary School
• Stanton Elementary School
• King Middle School
• Wesley International Academy
• Whitefoord Elementary School
• Maynard Jackson High School
• Paideia School
• Museum School of Avondale Estates
• Lake Oconee Academy
• Drew Charter School
• Intown Academy
• Kindezi School
• Latin Academy
• Westside Atlanta Charter School

And in addition to Toomer and KIPP this past week, I’m planning on getting to several other schools that aren’t on my list at some point this year, including Utopian Academy for the Arts this Friday.

I’m not sure if it’s the case in other lines of work, but in education, it is very easy to become tied to your own school building, probably because of those feelings of guilt I mentioned—it can seem like you are leaving behind your students and work to visit someone else’s students and work.  But I’ve committed to making these visits in large part because they help me to learn about practices and programs happening elsewhere that might be beneficial to our community at ANCS.  It also helps me to gain perspective on different approaches to school leadership and how the process of change is managed in different contexts.  I’ve been struck by how open principals are to letting me come and sit in classrooms at their schools and to make time to meet with me to talk about teaching and learning.

Besides some specific aspects of certain schools I’m looking at during each visit, I’m interested in generally observing and discussing a few specific questions whenever I visit a school for the first time:

In classrooms and hallways

• What are students doing?
• What are the adults doing?
• If I had to sum up my visit to a classroom in one sentence to someone, what would I say?

For the principals

• What’s been your biggest success in your role in the past few months?
• What’s been your biggest challenge in your role in the past few months and how have you dealt with it?
• If there’s something you could change about your school, what would it be and why?

I learn so much from these observations and conversations.  They often spark ideas that I’ll bring back to our leadership team at ANCS.  They can also surface areas of shared concern where we can partner with other schools to address a particular issue.  And these visits also help me to check my assumptions about different schools.  For example, I’d heard that KIPP schools are generally very rigidly structured, with routines and procedures governing just about every moment of a student’s day.  Yet when I visited KIPP WAYS last week, although I certainly saw evidence of structure—students walking on lines marked in the halls, hand signals for different requests in the classroom—I also saw many examples of connections between students and adults and soul in what was happening in classrooms (and actual soul courtesy of the Lionel Ritchie album that was on in the background during a science class).  So the stereotypical “KIPP classroom” I’d conjured up in my mind didn’t exactly play out in reality.

Along those same lines, these visits have reminded me that despite all the data that’s out there about schools, much of it is incomplete and can’t paint a full picture of what’s happening inside school walls.  Websites like Greatschools.org are filled with haphazard or old data coupled with scattered parent reviews.  Georgia’s own “comprehensive” system of reporting on schools is broader but still has plenty of shortcomings.  So when someone tells me–either as an educator or as a fellow parent–that “I don’t think I’d want my kid to go to [insert school name here]” because the school’s “test scores aren’t that great” or “I just haven’t heard good things about it” (or the opposite—that because a school has great test scores and reputation then “it’s got to be a good fit for my student”), I always try to point out that (1) you should look at more data than just a school’s test scores (see this book chapter titled “What Influences Test Scores (or How Not to Pick a School)” and (2) whenever possible, spend some time at a school before drawing conclusions about it.  Invariably, I’m surprised by something when I step into a school for the first time and watch what students and adults are actually doing.