After her training in using the VALUE rubrics, Mullaney gathered nine faculty members on her campus to be the core of the two-year college's project group. They were previously unfamiliar with the rubrics, she says, but together they "went through them with a fine-toothed comb" and agreed "that these rubrics do represent an accurate way to assess these skills." The professors brought in their own (and their colleagues') assignments to see how well (or poorly) they aligned with the rubrics, Mullaney said. "Sometimes their assignments were missing things, but they could easily add them in and make them better."
The last step of the process at the institutional level, she said, was gathering a representative sample of student work, so that it came from all of CCRI's four campuses and 18 different disciplines, and mirrored the gender, racial and ethnic demographics and age of the community college's student body. Similar efforts went on at the other 60-odd campuses.
Yin Wah Kreher on 17 Mar 15"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"
