Last year Susan Avey, the principal of Bogle Junior High School in Chandler, Ariz., had a heart-to-heart with one of her new teachers about how he was relating to students.
In a previous year, this might have been a conversation based on subjective impressions. The teacher might have gotten defensive. But this year, Avey had a new tool up her sleeve: a survey of her students.
"He came in to talk to me and said, 'I felt like I had really good relationships with kids, but reading my comments I was surprised that I wasn't rated as highly.' "
Drilling down into the results, they found that the teacher's relationships with girls, specifically, were weaker than those with the boys. The teacher was also a coach, and it turned out he liked to use a lot of sports analogies in class. Maybe that habit was missing the mark with non-sports enthusiasts?
This little data-driven a-ha moment is happening more often at schools around the country.
A growing battery of school leaders, researchers and policymakers think surveys are the best tool available right now to measure important social and emotional goals for schools and students ā qualities like grit, growth mindset, student engagement or, as in the Chandler example, student-teacher relationships.
And a group of big-city districts in California, with the federal government's permission, is getting ready to incorporate this kind of survey data into their accountability systems this spring.
[For more of this story, written by Anya Kamenetz, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/ed...ure-what-tests-can-t]
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