The summer term is often when the most evaluation occurs across our school teams. Planning afternoons, away days, and the ever-elusive ‘gained time’ prompt us to consider what we’ve been working on this year. The most effective teams will evaluate and debrief throughout the year, of course, ensuring that it is the norm to review practice and make improvements, and not wait for a certain interval to make a change.
But it’s inevitable that in the summer we turn our attention to the next academic year. Every team in the school should celebrate successes, strive to improve, and spend some time this term evaluating how they can grow. So, how should we effectively evaluate the work in our teams?
What:
Team debriefs are most effective when they do not just react to outcomes, but purposefully review various areas of the team’s work. Here are some ‘whats’ that you could evaluate:
Vision and values – if your team has a certain sets of values, or a clear vision for its work that year, then you can reflect on how evident and purposeful those have been to the team’s work. Empty values or a long-forgotten vision are not serving the team, so key questions might be: what are our values / vision, if those didn’t stick? And how can we make these a tangible part of our work? Is the team able to articulate the values and vision?
What were we aiming for? If you did this last year, or had a plan for improvement this year, it’s time to see how you did. Hopefully(!) the team reflected on its goals throughout the year, but, if this is the first time they are resurfacing, discuss with the team how they went and what the barriers were to meeting those goals. What can we learn for next year about the way we set, approach, and review our goals?
Processes – Tannenbaum et al’s (2013) research shows that effective debriefing (summarised here) has many factors, but one of them is reviewing processes and not outcomes. They recommend scheduling debriefs well in advance so that they are not associated with a win or a loss, to use a sporting reference. So, reflect on which processes need a tune up and conduct debriefs that evaluate the way the team is working, and not on its outcomes alone.
Consistency – you might have agreed team processes earlier in the year, and your team members then executed the plan; but how consistent are the approaches across the team? Is the marking consistent and based upon the principles the team co-agreed? Is the behaviour policy used the same by all in the team? Use scenarios and examples to work out if you are as consistent as you should be.
What’s next? Of course, a mid or end-of-year evaluation process should also focus on what’s coming up next. What should the team prioritise for next year? Where in its journey is the team’s work currently sitting, and what needs to come next to further the team’s effectiveness?
Snagging list – Adam Robbins (2021) recommends keeping a ‘snagging list’, a shared document which details issues or challenges that crop up throughout the year so that we don’t wait for a year to pass by and then forget or misrepresent things that have occurred. Create a shared, live list that team members that can add to at will, and add to meeting agendas so that they are regularly discussed and acted upon. This also removes the huge build-up of issues over time which then leave the team confused as to where to begin.
How:
I like to use a variety of methods to gather information, interrogate the feedback I receive, and give a voice to staff on the team.
Surveys – nothing fancy, just use Google or Microsoft to create a survey for your team. Try to make these specific and about something you’ve covered recently. Don’t make the scope too broad. Say we’ve just had a department meeting about diversity in our curriculum, and a few threads came from that meeting. Your survey could have 2-3 very targeted questions for the team to answer, looking at what they think of our current provision, and what they would do / recommend to change this in the future. This gives all staff a voice and builds on something targeted that you have already raised and discussed. Then, show the staff what the feedback was and what prompts it has given you, before you narrow down the trends into a certain direction.
Live discussion – if you are going to use people’s time by gathering them together, try to make the most of the collective brainpower in the room by having lively discussions about what the team is evaluating. See the climate subheading next if this sounds like a difficult thing for your team to implement well at this stage. Both Andy Buck and Doug Lemov have written about methods to manage these meetings in my upcoming book, The Power of Teams, but, in a nutshell, try to give time in the meeting for: thinking time, uninterrupted individual feedback, and discussion in pairs or small groups before building up to the wider team. There should be a systematic method for everyone to have their say.
1:1s – as team leader, your job is to make sure that everyone has a voice and has been heard. For some people, even the safest group debriefs won’t elicit their true thoughts. Go around the team, listen to them and incorporate their views into the evaluation process.
Climate:
Evaluation and feedback can only be effective if the team feels willing and able to share their views. If it isn’t a team norm to share openly and have healthy discussions, and possibly conflict, then a lone end-of-year evaluation process will yield little. The climate for team evaluation needs to be built on belonging, psychological safety, and team humility (lead and modelled by the leader) that striving for improvement leads to mistakes, vulnerability, and requires mutual support. It should also be regular and just ‘part of what we do’.
A leader can improves levels of psychological safety on their team by asking for help, admitting when they don’t know things, modelling how to ask for and receive feedback about their own work and performance, and by decoupling fear and failure. In this team, we learn from mistakes, we support each other to improve, and we know that bumps in the road are inevitable.
Follow up:
Evaluation is layered, and can’t be done in a single sitting. Information gather, discuss, come up with proposals, then evaluate again. Teams need to make decisions and get on with the work at some point, but if you’re going to put the effort into getting team feedback to help you evaluate, then you need to set off on the most informed foot when the plan begins.
Codify your findings – the snag list we mentioned earlier documents issues. But, over the course of a team’s life, you could conduct hundreds of team debriefs and hopefully improve many areas of the team’s work. It’s important that during these meetings, notes are made and recorded, so that lessons can be learned and reviewed in the future. This method may also help you spot patterns, and codify some of the best ways that your team works and improves. Think of this as an extension of the snag list: what did we identify? How could it improve? What did we do? What impact did it have? What’s next? The record of your evaluations now will pay off in weeks, months, and years.
Do what you say – an evaluation process is labour intensive. It can be energetic and purposeful. People will give their views in good faith. So it’s vital that the evaluation leads to action. Be transparent about feedback, set a direction of travel, make sure everyone understands how and why things are going to be tweaked or changed, and what you hope you will achieve from doing this. Staff won’t buy into debriefing if nothing happens after.
Enjoy the sun
Sure, evaluation processes lead to more work and can give you a dose of humble pie, but I love a good team debrief. It’s something special to behold when your team openly give feedback, work towards solutions, and are invested enough in the team’s work to really lead on improvement. This is why we work on teams: because we are stronger together, have a variety of views and experiences, and the best way to leverage this is to ensure that everyone is involved in the team’s direction.
This summer term, I wish you and your teams well as you embark on improving your work for both staff and students.
Thanks
Sam
References.
Robbins, A. (2021). Middle Leadership Mastery. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.
Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55, 231–245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394
Sam Crome 