P.L.A.T.O. and Stanford...
Several years ago, in the early stages of this whimsical idea of teacher accountability and how to score/grade/gauge it, I received an interesting phone call from the Advanced Placement folks asking if I was free for a few days to attend an educational scoring opportunity at Stanford. Sure, why not?
Flight paid for, so I was picked up by a limo at the airport, driven to a hotel right beside Stanford's beautiful campus, and given an itinerary...
The next morning, I, along with about 20 other educators, showed up in a small conference room in the Education Building. We were met by a team of researchers and Carol Dweck, the author of Mindsets, then a new book just recently on the shelves but with years of background and prep. They told us we were there to help them fine tune and gauge the potential of a teacher observation program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was called: PLATO [and there were others around the nation working with different observational tools and criteria for each subject in school] - the Protocol for Language Arts Teacher Observation.
All of us were dumbfounded and resistant. Suspicions about APs involvement, how the tool might be used, why this tool... and more popped poured out from various of my fellow educators. Then one of the researches said something like this: "This is the train we're on, and we want to build the best tool we can to make the ride work." Then most of us shut up. We realized that this new buzz phrase of accountability was here to stay, even though it appeared that nobody who created it [politicians and special interest groups] and promoted the mythos behind it [all media on all sides of the political and opinion spectra] were ever held accountable for their failures.
I won't go into the details of the scoring mechanisms other that to tell you that we watched videos of classroom Language Arts teachers in grades 3-6 from around the nation. They were paid a small stipend to allow a 360 and a front-facing camera in their classroom to record their teaching for a specified number of days/weeks. It was not all classes, and these were volunteers who believed they were doing a good job and whom the administrators in their schools believed were above average educators.
While watching these videos we scored the teachers on various things like feedback, direct instruction... and so on. Anyway, I got a chance to see educators from around the US giving it their supposed best, and I was appalled. We were instructed not to judge but to score, and for the purposes of the scoring mechanism, I did that, but as a professional educator who takes the process and importance of education very seriously, it was disturbing. Of the 50+ educators I witnessed and scored, only two showed any signs of actually doing anything productive and meaningful/useful... Some were utterly horrifying in the failures. Besides all this, later I was drowned out of the program. Ha, and here was the reason: my scoring was off. Ha, I asked for feedback, one of the criteria in effective teaching and instruction, and NEVER got any from Stanford. Ha, ha, ha... We were scoring other educators on their ability to provide it, but we never received it to help us with scoring. Lord love the system that created that.
Anyway, it's been a long time and PLATO, has not, to my knowledge, hit the administrative halls of education,even though several aspects of the system had promise. Likely the Stanford researchers and their failures to provide feedback to the evaluators was part of it.
