Checklist Manifesto

I just finished the audiobook of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande.  Atul is a surgeon who worked with WHO to develop a method to reduce surgical complications and death. His solution, borrowed from the aviation industry is a checklist. He tells his story through numerous in depth anecdotes. It is very readable (or listenable). He despairs that people will not jump on the highly effective wagon of checklists but will spend millions or even billions on the latest and greatest technology, even if it only slightly increases effectiveness.

The correlations to teaching may not be readily apparent, but they exist. He describes effective checklists as those that are short, only hitting key factors that make a difference rather than those that have a plan for every eventuality. Here is one place where I see the field of education having gone seriously awry. When Race to the Top monies became available they came with the string of more stringent teacher evaluations. Many schools, districts and states embraced Danielson's Framework for Teaching as the tool they would use for annual reviews of teacher success. It includes 76 elements from four major clusters. The Danielson Group sees the framework as  "the foundation for professional conversations among practitioners as they seek to enhance their skill in the complex task of teaching." It is evidence based in that the various elements have all been shown to improve academic results of students. As a whole, however, the complete package lacks research to demonstrate that teachers that adhere to the rubric will be better. It does provide useful definitions for researchers to use when examining the topic. That being said, she resists the idea that a checklist be completed during an observation to evaluate teachers.

Independent of the appropriateness of turning her framework into a checklist, is the concept of having a 76 element checklist at all- especially one that requires not just a yes-no response but a nuanced evaluation of how well it is being completed. Checklist experts will argue that a checklist needs to be short in order to be effective. Even when we create rubrics to evaluate student writing tasks they stay on one page perhaps listing as many as a five by six grid of elements and levels of success. When the rubric is pages long, it is bound to be ineffective. Atul explored longer checklists and found them to hinder rather than support the end goal- for him reduced surgical complications and death. If we want to create a checklist that will support our goal of improved teaching, it needs to be succinct; only including the most essential elements, not every detail that can (and ultimately should be) considered.

Similarly, if we look at applying a checklist to teaching a direct instruction lesson, we need to limit its scope and hone in on the details that are essential to success, and perhaps those that when missing are most likely to cause a lack of learning. Perhaps that might look something like:

• stated learning target
• assess prior knowledge
• model the learning 
• allow students to practice
• close with an assessment of the learning target.

Do we need to do more than those few things? Of course. If we do not do one of those things are we likely to limit student acquisition of skills? Yes. These five things we can quickly check and frame our work around. We can use them in lessons using different structures and with material of different levels of complexity. Could a model like this be used for teacher evaluation? Sure, if it were accompanied by an in depth dialogue to discuss the elements. 

Checklist are highly effective at improving success, but they need to be carefully developed, tested and refined. No one's research based proposal will be satisfactory the first time around. We need to see about how to take a good framework and transform it into a useable tool.