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This is the sixth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This reflection is on “continuously improving effectiveness.”

I can only imagine that getting filmed on your first day in the classroom is incredibly valuable. Not simply because reviewing that tape can help you make important short-term improvements in your techniques, but because you have that visual record of your baseline for an entire career. I can imagine that as time goes on, I’ll feel from time to time like I’m not making progress, like I’m not improving as an instructor. But then I can go right back to that tape and say, “There’s where I used to be. Of course I’ve gotten better.”

The first of the two videos for this exercise features Colin Seale doing just that, reflecting on a tape of his first day in front of a 9th grade algebra class. He’s good about explaining the rationale behind his rules and the uneven treatment of students he wants to avoid. But he freely admits that he was too chummy, and a student corroborates. He learned the hard way that students will continue to push as the year goes on, looking for any chink in your authority. And when class got out of hand, derailing his lessons, Mr. Seale had to try and veer hard in the other direction.

“It seemed very unnatural to put forth all this effort to make order,” he said. The worst consequences of trying to teach without order, however, aren’t about you personally. They’re about the unfulfilled academic potential of your students. Mr. Seale obviously realized this; being able to joke and laugh with his students of course seemed natural, but wasn’t as important as focusing and motivating his them.

Which leads to the more complicated problem that he identifies: explaining to students the importance of achieving, but making clear the amount of effort required to do well. Setting clear rules and classroom structure early is important, but he also says that showing students the big picture about the value of learning and the effort required to earn good grades is another crucial component of motivating students early in the year.

Mr. Seale obviously realized that these problems are connected: he could be more effective in the classroom if he found ways of investing students in their work and making clear the effort that it required. And that worked for the student interviewed who admitted to coming in early for help on her homework.

The personal anecdotes from corps members in Teaching As Leadership and the supplemental reading on this issue are fascinating, because they illustrate people committing to getting better at their work by reforming routines and building self-reflection into their everyday work. “Over and other we hear from highly effective teachers that data analysis, reflection, and self-improvement are not do-when-you-can tasks but are built into their routine alongside planning, grading, and teaching,” writes Farr. The corps members in the texts describe taping audio snippets of their class to listen to on the drive home, writing daily about their experiences, reaching out to anyone who could help them improve, and realizing that they will never actually reach perfection as an instructor. “I’m getting there,” they tell Farr.

One interesting aspect of having just left my job as an editor and writer is that a large record of how I improved in each of those roles sits in public on scienceprogress.org.

In order to get better as a writer, I read lots of journalism that I wanted to imitate (though I wouldn’t say that my role at SP was that of a journalist). That meant combing through dozens of email newsletters and tables of contents every week to read science reporting in influential publications, particularly Science and Nature. It meant making sure that I understood the foundations of what I was writing about, often slogging through technical research articles—sometimes many times over. And it meant doing extra homework, including reading my sister’s used biology textbook and handbooks of bioethics research, so that I understood the fields I was responsible for.

So let’s look back. Here’s my first analytical post on Science Progress from October 2007: “On the Newsstand: Biofuels.”

Basically, this is me applying my cultural studies training to a complicated area of energy policy and research. Ultimately, this kind of pop analysis wasn’t the most useful thing for me to spend my time on. Frankly it was silly and embarrassing. Just read the comments. Learned from watching the web traffic and email clicks that it was better for me to synthesize and present information from other experts—either with my own writing or editing and producing content from experts with far more knowledge than myself. On the topic of biofuels, take the interview I did a few months later with a Berkeley researcher. After it appeared, someone passed along an email praising the usefulness of the interview for policy professionals, and knew I was on the right track.

Contrast that first post with one of the recent short features I penned on a federal court ruling in a gene patent case: “Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property.”

This piece didn’t represent any original reporting (all the major outlets were covering it, so what could I add?). But it did weave together the key legal and scientific information with the policy questions, linking along the way to SP content that experts had written on the issue of intellectual property rights for DNA. I’m proud, not embarrassed, to read this piece over, and I know it was effective because a legal expert in the field went out of his way to write and say so.

Reading that old post may be like watching a video of myself on the first day of school, but I know from my experience at SP that I can continuously improve. I was light years away from being where I wanted to be at that job, but I was always getting better, and that was satisfying.

The trouble is that while some 70.1 percent of new high school graduates started college last fall, many people already enrolled in community colleges don’t finish. Leonhardt reports:

Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree — a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education — ever do so at any college, statistics suggest.

On top of that, data on students in community college is apparently scarce. A CAP colleague explains that the federal student loan and Pell grant structure is designed to get students enrolled, but does little to track them on their way to a degree or credential.

While that’s unfortunate, it’s not surprising. Lack of data is a consistent problem in many corners of the education system. Another CAP report demonstrates the problems that arise from the fact that most high schools only pay attention to how many of their students move on to college, not how well prepared they were to make the transition. Fortunately, there are success stories of schools that have recalibrated their learning goals to ensure that students aren’t just exposed to college preparation work, but that they actually learn how to do it.

Now TFA is all about capturing as much student tracking data as possible, within the context of a given year. That’s no small order, but the year is the scope of your work as a teacher. What if, as a teacher, you kept track of this information from year to year, and were able to follow your student through the school system to see how they were doing in the subject you taught? And what if the district also kept data on college enrollment, and those systems synchronized with college data. What if, years down the road, you knew what role you and other teachers played in shaping that student’s education?

Complicated, sure, but it’s just text in a database.

Wireless Generation student tracking softare. (via CAP)

I noticed on one of my observation visits that the teacher almost never put down her clipboard. On it, she kept a chart that allowed her to track student progress and comprehension, take notes on students who needed additional help after short conferences, and what elements of her lesson plan were working. Over the course of the period, a wealth of information flowed onto a few thin sheets of paper. There has to be a better medium for capturing that data, I thought.

My iPhone came to mind—surely there was some way of capturing what was mostly qualitative information in a digital format that was more flexible and durable than the butcher paper progress charts on the wall. But the first ways I would incorporate a smartphone into classroom instruction are significantly different from the educational games described in a recent Fast Company article, “A Is for App.” While fascinating, the report makes it clear that a there’s a divide between educational technology that focuses on engaging students and educational technology that amplifies the power of a key classroom variable: the effectiveness of the teacher.

One of the key points from the Teaching As Leadership chapter on how to “Execute Effectively” is amusingly blunt: insist on seeing reality. The teacher I was observing was taking notes on the reality before her: were students learning what her lesson was intended to teach?

Effective teachers, writes Farr, are constantly using a variety of methods to capture information about where students really are. “They use brief end-of-lesson assessments, student interest surveys, and objective-mastery tracking systems to get a better understanding of student progress,” he says.

Now some methods for checking for understanding are instantaneous, simply, and brilliant: having students simultaneously write answers on small white boards or index cards, signing the first letter of a correct response in American Sign Language. Those results are more ephemeral than any note that ends up on the a clipboard, but part of the point is to make sure that your lesson is effective in the first place and to check for instances where you must re-teach a concept you failed to communicate. Yet what if you could capture those small, rapid checks for understanding and analyze them within the context of more formal assessments? That’s a lot of data you could work with. Again, a smartphone is a tantalizing device because it can handle just such a task.

Now, in her article, Anya Kamenetz explains some impressive instructional tools, especially the TeacherMate, a cheap handheld device that elementary school children can use to practice math and reading skills that align with lesson objectives. A Chicago South Side elementary teacher explains:

the software on her laptop lets her track each student’s performance. Once a week, when she plugs each student’s TeacherMate into her docking station, she downloads a record of their game play and generates reports for herself as well as for parents. Then she sets the precise skills, levels, and allotted time for the upcoming week. The programs are synced with the reading and math curricula used in the school — right down to the same spelling words each week.

This is to what I’m imagining: fine-grained results that test individual student understanding of specific lesson objectives, safely and flexibly stored in a digital format for export and analysis. Kamenetz reports that Arne Duncan is a fan of the platform and the company that makes the software and designed the device, Innovations for Learning, has seen the tool adopted in 500 schools in 15 states. All very impressive.

But the article makes it clear another premise that companies in the education technology space rest upon is that smartphones, OX laptops, and learning software, “are tools for expression and connection, not just passive absorption,” unlike Sesame Street and, apparently, teacher instruction. And this is where things start to get wish-washy. “A system built around tools that allow children to explore and figure things out for themselves would be radical for most developing-world schools, which emphasize learning by rote. In the United States, which is currently so in love with state curriculum benchmarks and standardized tests, it could be just as hard a sell,” writes Kamenetz.

Huh? Why is structured learning the opposite of creativity?

Education that quashes student creativity is obviously no good. Kids should experiment, express themselves, and learn from a diversity of perspectives. But leaving room from student creativity and ensuring that they can comprehend complex passages of text or sift information from word-based math problems are not mutually exclusive.

Simply put, a lot of stories about innovation in educational technology are overshadowed by the myth that the way we teach now is suffocating students and their only salvation is in devices that will make them digital artists and publishers.

I think all students should learn to be digital artists and publishers. Just throwing the tools at them isn’t going to do that. Using technology to leverage good teaching seems like a better approach.

Contrast the educational quiz games model with one that expands the power of teachers to collect and analyze data from their existing lessons. That’s the focus of a successful company not mentioned in the Fast Company piece called Wireless Generation. Here’s a summary from my CAP colleagues that makes the clipboard and pen system sound downright medieval:

The company’s core program is software, which allows teachers to use a handheld device—rather than paper—to assess and collect data on their students. The data teachers collect can be used to immediately create web-based reports on individual students, classrooms, schools, districts, and even demographic subgroups. The better and more immediate data allows teachers and administrators to easily monitor student progress and tailor their instruction to students’ needs. The online nature of the data also allows teachers with similar classroom issues to find each other and collaborate on solutions. Because they can track students’ progress over time, it is easy to see what is working and what’s not.

The company makes its mission clear right on its website: “The test for any Wireless Generation product or service is always: does it really help educators to do their jobs?” The assumption being, no matter how good the software or hardware of our new magical learning devices, teachers are not going to vanish from classrooms any time soon. So innovation in educational technology should make the most of their work, especially since effective teaching is so highly correlated with student achievement.

Have I ever planned at the level of detail outlined in the TFA training materials? No. In fact, I’ve worked on projects far more complicated, expensive, and involving more people than a semester of classroom instruction that have been executed without as much planning as the Teaching as Leadership rubric describes. That said, there are some connections to effective (and ineffective) methods for designing, building, and producing web publications, a process I am familiar with. Moreover, some of the explicit decisions necessary for effectively editing and organizing articles on a web magazine resonate with the necessity for planning explicit demonstrations of reading comprehension skills.

The crucial point of focus in purposeful class planning is of course the “big goal” for student achievement. Hitting a certain level of performance on a standardized test, advancing a certain number of grade levels towards mastery of a subject, etc. Subsequent decisions and resource allocations can be judged based on whether or not they contribute to meeting the goal. In publishing websites or magazines, a clear goal is likewise necessary in order to measure success, make clear decisions about the allocation of time, money and talent, and to design a way to present information to your audience.

In setting out to design the current magazine I work for, Science Progress, the original goal was to fill a gap in the science policy sphere, where there was no publication addressing science from a progressive perspective. That goal presumed a certain audience that included policymakers, academics, journalists, and professionals in the industry and lobbying world. Success shaping the opinions of these audience members is somewhat difficult to measure, but there are useful proxies: web traffic, mentions and references, and policy ideas we publish that are taken up by Congress or the administration.

These questions were crucial because without a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to measure, we might have built an accompanying website that didn’t present content in an accessible manner or move ideas where we could measure their influence. (Indeed, some of these factors changed over time and those problems arose; many we addressed by changing the site.) In fact, many web publications make the mistake of designing a site without starting from the content it will contain—in essence building a house frame without thinking about the interior floor plan. This is just like instructional razzle-dazzle that ignores learning goals.

For instance, a common design planning approach to mocking up a website is to create a page layout and fill areas where text will go with blocks of placeholder “dummy” text—often Latin from a Cicero speech that begins “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” The problem with this is that while it creates a nice page to look at, working with dummy text ignores the primary function of the page: to provide content to your readers. Without real text and images, you can’t know if you have made your columns too wide, left too little space for photos, or if you’ve foregrounded the key ideas presented in your features.

Doing this well does involve a considerable level of detail work that spans editorial and development. Websites (like this blog) run on top of “content management system” software that groups posts or stories into “content objects.” A content object in most instances is an abstract grouping of all the components that make up an article: the headlines, body text, associated images, as well as the little blurbs used to promote the articles around the site and the tags or categories that group it with similar articles in an archive. Working out the appropriate model for these objects seems akin to translating curricular standards into learning objectives: it’s a process that has to happen early in the planning process that patterns a great deal of subsequent work. Hence getting it right is important.

Part of what interests me about the abstract process of planning patterns for website content is that it exposes some of the individuals steps to creating effective content itself. If you can’t write a set of pithy headlines and blurbs that draw readers in or pick a provocative image that evokes the main idea of an article, then it’s likely that the main idea of the piece isn’t clear. When I edit articles, I make explicit decisions about how to present main ideas in the opening paragraphs and then translate that same language into the headlines and summaries of the article that will appear around the site. This is itself a reading comprehension strategy: I am deliberately engineering context clues for readers, labeling and marking keywords and ideas.

Even as I was reading about reading comprehension in the literacy materials included in this exercise, and the potential for demonstrating to students the processes and habits of effective readers, I realized I was underlining these suggestions in the text. This was one of many strategies I could model. But more importantly, the recognition of my own habits is a foundation upon which to plan strategies that develop the student habits I want to see. That is, observing myself will be a way to visualize and map the strategies students should learn and demonstrate when it comes to reading comprehension.

That said, I’m intimidated by the open-ended question of how to choose among instructional strategies. How am I to know that presenting one concept will be more effective as a lecture instead of through a more complicated cooperative learning activity? I suspect experimentation will be necessary, and that means designing lessons in such a way that I can document the effectiveness of one approach, try another, and compare the results. When you’re building a website or sending an email, a lot of this information gathering can be automated, tallying site visitors or click-throughs. But perhaps effective grading and traffic strategies can come close.

My original assumption was that the video material that accompanies the pre-institute work would demonstrate techniques that we should imitate. But it’s clear that learning how to close read the videos will be necessary to critiquing future classroom observations, because while the clips may show components of effective teaching, some of those pieces appear ineffective in isolation.

Case in point: the crescendo of videos for this exercise show Ms. Pahjua using data to demonstrate progress to her elementary students; Ms. Mitchell working with high school math students to graph their progress and reflect on how they can improve; and testimonials from Mr. Holloman’s students, their parents, and his colleagues, about his rigorous expectations and dogged work to wring the best out of every student. The use of data and the visualization of progress in the first two videos are obviously important, but their results may be hard to gauge without more information on the follow-up investment from the teachers.

Mr. Holloman’s chemistry students, on the other hand, describe a teacher who is constantly pushing them to do better. “He wants us to succeed,” one says. Another drops perhaps the highest praise and demonstration of achievement I can imagine for his class: she wants to major in chemistry in college.

In her video, Ms. Pahjua is administering reading tests and holding mini conferences with her second grade students about their upward progress on a standardized reading scale. She is warm and encouraging. She has data on previous reading proficiency tests right at her fingertips. But in asking her first student about how to improve her score and move ahead, there is a short exchange about how long the student should be reading every night. The student suggest 10-15 minutes.

“Okay, let’s go for 20, how about that?” Ms. Pahjua replies, “You say 10 or 15 and I say 20. So let’s go for 20 minutes, every single night, and I bet that if you read for 20 minutes every single night, you can go from a 2.6 to a 3.0.” A perfectly reasonable suggestion, but even for a second grader, this lacks enough context to get the student invested. Rather than negotiating nightly reading time on a case-by-case basis, this is a requirement that seems ripe for clear expectation setting, either by spelling out evening reading time in a set of easily referenced class rules, or perhaps even through personalized student reading log.

If Mr. Holloman were running this classroom, I can see the second graders explaining to the camera that they didn’t originally like reading at home at night, but that their teacher called regularly to see if they were doing their assigned work. Eventually, they were reading 20 or even 30 minutes every night because they were reminded daily that it was their responsibility and they wanted to meet the big goals that they had set for learning new words and tackling more complicated books.

This sort of investment could also benefit from the technique that Ms. Mitchell walks her students through: crafting bar charts that track their progress on a series of tests. She helps them connect each point of data to the effort they put into studying for the test, drawing a clear connection between personal effort and academic success. “What’s nice is that this shows you can do it,” she says to one student, pointing at his best score. “This shows you don’t always study enough,” she says, pointing to one that is significantly lower.

Mr. Holloman runs his class like a submarine commander, setting extraordinary expectations but refusing to let a single student slip through the cracks. As he says in a previous video, he is perpetually available for extra help, and as students in the clip for this exercise attest, he doesn’t hesitate to call their house in the evening to see that they’re doing their homework and studying for his class.

That sort of commitment I can easily identify as the mark of an effective teacher. I can less easily identify it as a technique I’ll find natural. What I do know I can do is deploy a wide swath of strategies to communicate class expectations to students and their parents, make myself available to provide help, and track progress transparently. This is one of the first areas where I feel like my experience in online communications will be directly applicable.

Victor Wakefield’s “menu of communications strategies” outlined in Teaching as Leadership (p 70) immediately appealed to my obsession with organizing documents and my experience producing a weekly newsletter. Among other things, Mr. Wakefield issues newsletters tracking class events and assignments; he communicates with parents regularly via email (and through letters for those without Internet access); and he produces biweekly progress reports that parents must sign.

In anticipation, I’ve already started exploring efficient software for producing a regular email newsletter for my classes. But the phone instincts like Mr. Holloman’s, and the unwavering commitment to his students they demonstrate—that’s not something I can prepare for very well at the moment.

Fortunately, I have my own personal data on how my outreach and communication skills have improved in the face of various challenges—reporting for a newspaper, organizing high-profile events, running a magazine. I don’t have a bar graph to visualize the improvements, but I know that when I extend myself, often by picking up the phone to talk to an expert, I often learn something useful and it reinforces the benefit of listening to someone else’s ideas and concerns.

I remember several crucial phone calls over the past few years—to ask experts for insight on new research or even to apologize for a reporting mistake I made—and each one made me better at what I do. That’s a fact I’m confident will apply in teaching as well.

Research demonstrates that leaders who set exceptional expectations for their teams can get exceptional results. TFA’s own data bears this out for teachers who set lofty goals for their students. But new teachers will lack an important component of the argument that their students can meet these big goals: evidence that that teacher’s students have successfully hit high expectations before.

Addressing a new class of chemistry students on the first day of school, Paul Holloman says in the video for this exercise: “If you don’t care about making an A, there’s the door. Hit it. Get gone now. Because I don’t want to have you in my class if you’re not willing to work and make an A.”

His tone, as he admits, is blunt. He is stern and even intimidating as explains his expectations for hard work and attendance. “There’s nobody in here who can’t make an A,” he says. At first glance, this might sound like an ambitious but brutal pep talk. But for an observer, what makes his expectations talk absolutely convincing is the data he has to back it up from his previous three years in the classroom.

Over those three years, his class average has been a 93, he tells the new students. He points to a chart on the wall by the door displaying the test scores from the previous semester’s end of course exam. “This is my job,” he says in an after-class interview, “It’s serious business.” To demonstrate his commitment to his job, he tells the class that he is regularly available to help them, even answering question for athletes during halftime at basketball and soccer games.

Taken altogether: the firm classroom rules, the willingness to be available for many hours of outside-the-class help, and the record, written right there on the wall, of producing some of the highest student achievement in the state of North Carolina, all make the goal of a class A average on the final exams seem both sufficiently ambitious but also feasible.

Goals this specific have not driven most of my professional work. Somewhat by necessity, they have been more abstract and my colleagues and I have not tracked them with quantifiable metrics. For instance, Science Progress, the magazine of progressive science and technology policy I work for currently, set out to draw a clear connection between science and the progressive values of pragmatism, justice, and equality. The project began with the understanding that 1) no such publication existed in this specific space, 2) there were influential conservative journals generating a significant amount of discussion around issues of science and public policy, and 3) at the time of the launch, in 2007, a conservative presidential administration had severely damaged the relationship between science and policymaking by attacking science that did not support favored policy outcomes.

Three years later, the magazine enjoys the respect of colleagues and contributors, has generated good responses to certain pieces of content, and has generally seen steady attention as measured by website traffic and email list metrics. But while we may have a big goal that is fairly easy to state—to influence public policy by connecting science and progressive values—our ways of measuring whether or not we have hit that goal have remained qualitative and imprecise.

Considering where the project is now alongside the readings on the importance of setting big goals, two facts stand out. First, setting goals and working hard did make the first two years of the project a success: my colleagues and I worked hard, often outside normal hours, to ensure the success of the magazine and the larger political goals it represented. In that regard, I see the clear benefits of setting lofty goals to aim for and the utility of not setting a prescribed path to get there. We experimented with a variety of topics and types of content and attracted more of the same as a result. Likewise, students in my future classroom will see big, ambitious goals before them, and we will experiment with the best instructional tools to help them learn and reach those expectations.

But second, I see clearly now that part of the problem with our plans for Science Progress lie in the fact that we have articulated few measurable goals for checking our progress toward the lofty expectations we set. What’s heartening to learn is that there are proven ways of creating quantitative milemarkers for abstract goals. As Steven Farr explains in Teaching As Leadership, the Cleveland Orchestra set out to define its success as something highly abstract and subjective-sounding: “artistic excellent.” To measure their progress towards that goal, they crafted proxy indicators, including the number of standing ovations, the number of pieces they could play perfectly, invitations to prestigious festivals, ticket demand, requests from composers to debut new works with the orchestra, and other groups that imitated their style.

The point being that even for something as abstract as achieving “artistic excellent,” setting measurable indicators was not only possible, but facilitated getting a large group of people to move towards the same big goal. While I won’t be able to walk into my classroom this fall with three years of data, like Mr. Holloman, to back up my claim that I can motivate a group of students to work together with similar ambition, I will understand the method and know that it is possible.

This first response involves reflecting on the teaching approaches of Aurora Lora, a corps member who taught in an elementary school in Huston—and considering what about her approach seems challenging, surprising, manageable. Ms. Lora’s Story is effectively a new journalism-style novella about her four years at Blair Elementary, wherein each chapter is organized around a central theme, but cycles several times through anecdotes and incidents involving one particular student from each of her four years.

Behavioral issues rob two of Ms. Lora’s students of significant amounts of learning time. For those students, and for others who are well-behaved, she crafts differentiated instructional materials that allow them to maximize the amount of time they have in the school year, address areas of need for each student, and generally capture their academic attention. While Ms. Lora employs a host of effective teaching strategies in the stories that describe her four years at Blair Elementary, I found both her responses to behavioral problems and her individualized instructional approaches particularly striking because they dovetailed nicely and represented techniques that I am sure will require substantial practice before I’m comfortable with either.

Ms. Lora’s two particularly challenging students during her years at Blair are Tanya and Douglas. Tanya learns quickly and is ahead of her classmates, but disrupts classes and after-school tutorials by announcing aloud the conclusion of lesson before their completion and by erupting in to occasional fits of anger wherein she accuses Ms. Lora of hating her. She is “a volatile amalgam of intelligence and impatience.”

Douglas, on the other hand, has been held back multiple times and doesn’t let his classmates forget that he is older and bigger than the rest of them. He struggles constantly with his class work, and his frustrations boil over into outbursts and occasional violence. The resulting suspensions and lost time in class only compound his learning difficulties.

Ms. Lora develops a set of solutions that help Tanya remain focused in many circumstances, including designing additional work for her to do that is above grade level, a fact that Tanya holds as a point of pride. But managing Douglas’s disruptive, moody, and sometimes violent behavior is a constant challenge. Her first steps involve identifying the signs of an impending outburst and moving quickly to distract and diffuse him before he gets carried away. She also works out a system of calming activities Douglas is allowed to pursue on his own, such as listening to class just outside the door but away from other students and taking unsolicited bathroom breaks to grab a few moments alone. Eventually, her approaches get even more creative—as when she reminds Douglas during one of his angry fits that he has decided to block the classroom door by lying down next to a rat hole. The methods also get more involved—she eventually forges a deal wherein he is not allowed to play in basketball team games unless he maintains good behavior.

Upon first reflection, the ability to deploy both agile and strategic responses to student behavior problems seems a difficult skill to master and apply on a daily basis. On the other hand, it seems that learning a proven toolkit of responses to disruptive student behavior and then practicing them carefully will facilitate a set of productive instincts. As well, the Ms. Lora’s narrative suggests that collecting data—evening simple daily record keeping—can assist teachers in eliminating ineffective strategies and honing approaches that help unsettled students remain focused and able to learn. Some of that record keeping is part of widely used management strategies, like the color-coded, clothes-pin-powered behavior charts on the walls of all the Blair classrooms.

While each student may respond differently to various classroom management strategies, differentiated instruction is an even more complex necessity. After teaching Tanya in summer school, Ms. Lora tells her on the first day of the new school year that she didn’t think the summer work was challenging enough. Playing to Tanya’s self-confidence, Ms. Lora says that she has prepared fifth and even sixth grade work for her to tackle. “So sometimes I’m going to give you different assignments from the rest of the class so that you are really learning as much as you can,” she says. Likewise, in order to help another student, Roberto, go from having virtually no functional writing ability in English to passing the grade-level writing exam, she sends thick packets of extra homework in his backpack with instructions for his parents on how to check it.

Differentiated instruction like this is something I can readily identify as a necessary strategy, but I don’t feel well equipped at the moment to realize it. Given the time and energy to design all this extra work, where does the inspiration and content come from? It seems vitally important to maintain a constant vigilance for new material to share with students and to implement a flexible system for organizing, generating, and recycling all those ideas, writing prompts, and worksheets. At the very least, I know I’ll be ready to handle the cataloging portion, as I’ve spent the better part of the last four years experimenting with system after system for sorting, managing, and retrieving policy reports, blog posts, and scientific articles. Gathering and filing ideas for worksheets should come easily enough.

In addition to mastering the daily work of managing a classroom of students and producing reams of original activities, Ms. Lora went on to revive the dormant Spelling Bee at Blair. This was a feat that genuinely surprised me, though part of the surprise is wrapped up in the suspense of reading about Tanya’s meteoric rise to the Huston Regional Spelling Bee. Though Ms. Lora is in her second year when she takes on the mission, the school already let the tradition languish and despite her energetic first attempt, the first attempt is a flop. Undaunted, she comes back during her third year and builds momentum for a sensational Bee that culminates in a packed cafeteria of ecstatic onlookers.

As amazed as I am by Ms. Lora’s results, I could see myself attempting something equally quixotic, as I have worked with motivated children in enrichment programs outside the classroom before and seen the significant boost it can provide in terms of confidence and academic advantages. Moreover, it’s undeniably fun to help students indulge their intellectual drive—whether through spelling bees, debate teams, chess clubs, or drama productions.

Homework.

…and not a minute too soon. I was about to use a Borders coupon to buy Teaching As Leadership, having been led to believe that the org wouldn’t spring for the 4000+ copies they’ll need for all the incoming corps members. Pleased they rustled up that money.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.