USC core course presentations: ACCOUNTABILITY GROUP

• 14 week course
• Students design project
• Sequence:
  • Types of accountability
  • Analyzing key problems of practice (e.g., NCLB, equity & access in higher ed.)
  • Learning, assessment, and accountability (e.g., national and state legislation)
  • How to hold teachers accountable - teachers and higher education
  • Leadership accountability
  • Linking equity, diversity, and accountability
• Goals:
  • Understand what accountability really is
    • develop a measure, understand consequences and impacts
  • Understand research and apply it
• Clark & Estes used as core text
  • analyzing the gap
• Content:
  • Understand how current policy and law impacts student learning, accountability
  • Apply research through student project
  • Identify the problem, describe, and define it
  • Identify the indicators that this is a problem
  • Understand state accountability
  • Are we holding ourselves accountable?
  • If there was no accountability, what would happen?
• Moving away from lecture, using problem based learning
• Students in cohort of 25; all take the same core courses
  • Can't get lost through the tracks, able to graduate more students by providing support for the group
• Grades:
  • 10% attendance and participation
  • 20% reflective reviews - based on synthesis of articles read for class and other readings
  • 70% term project
    1. Identify a problem of practice; who is responsible? Why is it a problem of practice? Written in APA style for practice (3 pgs.)
    2. Performance indicators - why is this a problem, what are the barriers, motivation, lack of knowledge?
    3. Solve the problem - propose solutions, what in the research will enable us to solve the problem?
    4. Power Point presentation on the problem
• Students are asked questions based on readings, such as "why are we here?"; "in the context of urban education, what is the root cause of the problems?"
• Design process - teams of faculty apply research into practice; reflect on practice
• Structure - gap analysis project; rubrics provide feedback
• Gap analysis - 3 causal factors:
  • employee knowledge and skills
  • employee motivation
  • organizational culture and politics
• Problem Identification:
  • Analyzing through the lens of Clark & Estes
  • What is the source of the problem?
  • Addressing wide diversity; how to meet the needs of all students
  • How to know when students have learned?
• Underlying theme: connecting accountability to urban education
• Using feedback from the students: how the courses are meeting their needs
• Use the feedback to adjust courses, readings
• Students believe the gap analysis approach is helpful
• Simulations
  • Students bring in examples of the kinds of problems of practice they have
  • Role play used
  • Challenge the teachers who want to maintain the status quo
• How to track student (enrolled in the EdD) learning in terms of students' (enrolled in schools in the area) learning in districts and in schools? (Q from Illinois-Chicago)
  • Leadership capacity building and support
  • Cohort model will support them
  • Have opportunity to stay in touch with faculty
  • Not to the point yet where they are tracking impact on districts or students
  • A thematic dissertation group is looking at leaders in PA, but they are not there yet as an institution
• How do you get past the stage of helping students understand the problems? (Q from the group)
  • At USC, provide examples of the problems on the first night that represent core problems of practice to educators
  • This is especially helpful for students who are not in education (may be in higher ed but serving as a librarian)
  • Sometimes students come up with problems that are too large for them to design a strategy that they can
  • Problems may re-occur across courses because they are germane to urban education
  • Try to use problems that have come up in past years as examples, so that they are situated in similar contexts
• How are students held accountable? (what if they don't have the skill set for doctoral work?) - question from the group
  • Cohort model
  • Modeling by faculty
  • Articles in classes
  • Doctoral Support Center - students can turn their papers in before class
• Are you focusing just on national/external accountability, or on developing students' accountability; an internal accountability plan that captures processes and products?
  • In courses students learn how to conduct gap analysis through a variety of lenses
  • For example, in the leadership course, students are able to go to schools and take a look at the problems and the leaders who are grappling with them
• Richard Elmer articles - about building internal accountability in the system first so that we can respond responsibly to information resulting from external accountability