Performance management and all that

I have done a lot of thinking about perfomance reviews in schools over the years. In my last post, I considered some ideas about leadership, tasks and responsibility. Constantly reflecting on conversations with friends and colleagues (and, yes there is an overlap in those groups), I have had three discussions in the last few days:

• do leaders become anxious when their view of the world is disturbed?
• does this apply to leaders at all levels?
• does performance review only take account of objectives related to tasks and outcomes rather than processes, values and aims?

As usual, there are more questions than answers!

I saw this on Twitter today from Prof. Wiliam @dylanwiliam Good teachers benefit students years after they stopped teaching them, so value added can't identify good teachers: bit.ly/nM3G3v

If everything we do in schools is geared to students, I would suggest that we need to ensure that teacher 'performance' is measured not by output/outcomes (or, at least, not solely - we do still operate in a certain culture of course); there must be 'soft' measures - such as how a teacher affects the emotional maturity of the students in her/his care. And how do you measure that? Here is another spot from Twitter today:

from @combi31 Facilitative Leadership - The"Easy Way" is.gd/yltHfv #learning #coaching #Leadership

So, if all teachers are leaders of learning then we need to move towards being facilitative leaders of learning, able to cope with perturbations in our perceptions of the world and to proactively use them to move forward with our students.

A brilliant example at my school's weekly staff briefing this week when a colleague reminded us all about the lollipop idea to avoid hands up in class - that was at morning break, by the end of the day there was a buzz of conversation about it! That reminded me that we mustn't ever rest on 'what we always did' .... because then we might 'get what we always got'.

Comments welcome as always please.