It is always useful to monitor your own progress. It allows you to evaluate and adjust as you steer a path towards your goal.

We have developed a tool that will help you identify your potential for improving your performance – it is simple and straightforward to use, allowing you to refer back to it on a regular basis.  This, along with the knowledge self-auditand the four capitals audit, can be used to determine how you are progressing and indicate what you could do next to close the gap and achieve your aspirations.

Getting started

The outcome of creating an effective knowledge managed collaborative learning community is to produce an upwards convergence in the performance of our students or staff.

Plotting the range of our performance in the way shown allows us to determine the range of knowledge – performance – we have and how it changes over time. From the former we can determine if we already have the knowledge to further improve our performance or if we are required to seek new knowledge. From the latter we can determine how successful our approach has been over time.

So, the first stage is to identify a group of staff or students who are trying to achieve the same outcome and plot their performance.

Describing the distribution

To describe this distribution we define three dimensions of performance and three categories within them.  These are listed below.

Dimension one – average performance

High – medium – low

Dimension two –  range

High – medium – low

Dimension three – progression

Improving – stalled – declining

 

Average performance

Most education systems use an average to compare performance.  As average student performance is significantly affected by external factors such as socio-economic background or prior attainment, it is important that average performance is recorded in the form of achievement which accounts for these factors, rather than attainment, which does not. Educationalists see comparisons based on achievement as fair as they place more emphasis on the role the school plays in learning.

In addition, by using this type of measure of achievement, and knowing that great teaching makes strong links between the time, place and the disposition of the learner, we can draw the conclusion that students who produce high achievement will also have received good teaching and vice versa

The range of performance

The range of performance indicates the breadth of knowledge among the staff.

The wider the range,the greater their breadth of knowledge. We can use this to gain an early indication of the potential improvement that can be gained from sharing our own knowledge.

A narrow range may indicate that improvement might best be achieved by creating or gaining new knowledge from others.

Progression over time

This is a dynamic situation.  The trajectory indicates the success of the approach used to improve performance. However, in practice the progression is rarely linear so a reasonable timeframe over several years is often required to make any substantive judgments.

A word of caution for those who at one point in time are achieving the highest performance compared with their peers but do not improve over time. For they will find that at a given point in the future if they do not improve, their performance will be the lowest.

Conclusion

By plotting your performance in this way, you can determine how much capacity you have to improve your knowledge from what you already know or if you need to seek knowledge from elsewhere. We have used this approach successfully within education with classroom teachers and leaders at all levels and organisations outside of education to kickstart them into thinking about how they can improve their performance by effective knowledge management

This tool, along with the other two we have recently used as part of an introduction to our approach to school improvement can be used to kickstart a transformation process for those who already do so. The workshop we used for this purpose will be posted in the New Year.

We would like to thank David Cotton, CEO and his team at Diverse Academies, Retford, England and Mike Dubeau, Director General and his team at the Western Quebec School Board for the warm welcome they provided over the past month.

Take care and stay safe

George