Third Eye Education
  • Read
  • Listen
    • Season 2 | 2022
    • Season 1 | 2021
  • Meet
    • writing team
    • podcasting team
    • origin & founders
  • Collaborate
    • connect with us
    • mission & vision
  • Share

Reframing Our Future with Results Based Accountability

11/28/2021

 
​by Julie Brock
Shrouded in blame and punishment, accountability has been twisted into a punitive action versus the rich conversation it actually is intended to spur. To account is to reconcile, balance, see the full picture so future decisions are better informed.
 
In his Fast Company article, Four Ways You’re Getting Accountability Wrong, Mark Lukens explains why a culture of accountability is vital to the success of any organization. The principles Luken presents ask leaders to:
  1. focus on the goal
  2. look at what is working well
  3. create a culture in which progress includes failing forward.
“Whether you’re looking to fix a problem or to replicate a success, don’t act until you’ve understood why you got the results you did,” says Lukens.
Depending on how many classes of students move through a classroom in a day, it is possible to have three to six ‘micro-organizations’ that look to an educator as the ‘CEO’ responsible for setting the tone and expectations of their collective work.
 
How, then, do we function as a leader cultivating a collective culture of accountability as well as one of individual progress?
Related Read: Shifting Views on Assessments: Avoiding Blind Spots
Mark Friedman, author of Trying Hard isn’t Good Enough, created a data framework that helps communities work toward big, shared goals. The crux of his argument is that no one organization can own the results of an entire community. It takes many organizations contributing to get sustainable solutions. Within each contributing organization are departments or programs that contribute to the overall effectiveness of the organization. For example, a large school district may think that they do own the graduation rate for their community, but they do not—they do not have every student who lives in their boundaries attending their school, so they share that result with other education settings.
Picture
Each educational setting can contribute to the overall graduation rate; yet, it does not have to look exactly the same. It is why school choice exists. Imagine each of those settings creating a culture of accountability in which students understand the systems serving them and also understand their role within the overall culture. It creates collaboration, cooperation, and communication. 
Related Read: Opening Classroom Doors to Allow in Community Collaborators
The conversation that data inspires what leads to actionable change. Our educational systems are limping along. The last blow of COVID damaged our barge and we cannot bail the water out faster than it is coming in [1]. And it is all levels. No educational setting is immune. We are a fleet of zero—grad school education settings taking on water and pivoting to figure out if the bucket brigade will work from a different angle.
 
That’s the thing with pivoting. I think about basketball. Once that pivot foot is set, it cannot move before a dribble. Players are stuck in one place until a pass or a path opens up for them to move. It is stationary, but all the while we keep spinning…thinking something will change.
Related Read: You Have Learned Something / You Have Lost Something
But it doesn’t.
 
Instead, I ask…
  • How long will we stay in place on the sinking barge?
  • How long will we wish away a pandemic that will not abide by our will?
  • How long will we, as a community, admire those on the barge trying to bail themselves out while throwing pithy advice across the bay? Or worse yet, gaslighting their circumstances:
    • “It’s hard for all of us.”
    • “You signed up for this.”
    • “It can’t be that bad.”
All the while, people are screaming at school board members, students are throwing things at teachers, and we comment safely from the shore.
 
The state of education can be overwhelming, stifling, and feel futile. But a classroom’s contribution matters. A department’s contribution matters. A building’s contribution matters. An afterschool program’s contribution matters. They matter when we hold ourselves accountable to a shared result. Students want to learn. According to the 2019 Minnesota Student survey, 97.8% of Olmsted County 9th graders (current 11th graders) said “if something interests me, I’ll learn more about it.” In that same survey, 99.2% of 11th graders said they will learn more about something that interests them.
Related Listen: "Project Based, Data Driven Education," a podcast conversation with Anna Tavis
Maybe we need to co-design around standards with students. Ask them how they want to learn the standards, what will resonate, and what will ultimately spur them to learn more within the content area [2]. Results Based Accountability™ (RBA), Friedman’s framework, asks for a community of people to solve community problems together. It isn’t a framework that leaves people behind. If we adopt this framework within communities, new partnerships start to blossom. Youth who move between organizations are more likely to be supported when there is a framework holding us together around the success of youth. Pair RBA and the co-design process with students, and now we have created partnership, collaboration, and ownership for youth over their own education, potentially fueling that 97-99% curiosity students reported in 2019. ​
Related Listen: "Giving Students a Say," a podcast conversation with Myron Dueck
The nice thing about RBA is that we can start right now, today, using it in classrooms. We don’t have to wait for the community to get on board: it can start a ripple effect. In fact, we may already live in a community that is using RBA to effect systemic change. Strive Together is a national nonprofit that has seventy communities across the nation doing this kind of work. If you live in Minnesota, there are seven cradle-to-career communities and two promise neighborhoods working for systemic change.
 
Accountability isn’t about shame and blame. It has to be reclaimed and untwisted from its negative connotation to create space for creativity, for innovation, and a way to get those on the shore to help get those on the sinking barge off and together—find our way into the next wave of education.
 
Interested in learning more about RBA and using it in your classroom / department / building / feeder system / district? Let me know and we’ll collaborate!
[1] This is where I tell you, I am a mixed metaphor monster. Enjoy the bumpy ride!
[2] This is typically where a “yeah, but” comes in. I’m not asking for standards to be ripped from the hands of professionally trained educators. I’m asking that we raise autonomous humans, and that includes giving them a say and honoring it where we can, and where we can’t, we explain why not. “Pushing a car off the building would be a cool way to learn about gravity, Jean, but we just can’t put people at risk that way.”

​Juile Brock has worked in the world of education for a few decades now and currently is the Assistant Director of licensure, accreditation, & assessment  for WSU's College of Education. Find our more about her on her website.


Comments are closed.
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    ​Third Eye Education posts weekly articles focusing on education and innovation. 

    Archives

    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021

    Categories

    All
    Adaptability
    Autonomy
    Belonging
    Change
    Classroom Culture
    Collaboration
    Communication
    Community
    Creativity
    Cross Curricular
    Discomfort
    Empathy
    Engagement
    Feedback
    Flexibility
    Impact
    Initiative
    Intentionality
    Mindfulness
    Perspective

    RSS Feed

    Tweet to @thirdeyeed
Picture
Articles
Podcast Episodes

​Third Eye Education is supported by Dover-Eyota Public Schools
  • Read
  • Listen
    • Season 2 | 2022
    • Season 1 | 2021
  • Meet
    • writing team
    • podcasting team
    • origin & founders
  • Collaborate
    • connect with us
    • mission & vision
  • Share