The Visiting Committee Experience

Dear Visiting Team Member,

     

Thank you for saying "Yes," to the Commission's request of you to volunteer for a visiting team to a school seeking to be recognized as an accredited school in the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. We sincerely appreciate your commitment of time, talent and energy to this process.

 

Like all good volunteer work, the reward for our efforts is most often intrinsic. At the same time the demands are many. To make this process successful, we need you to accept the demands and work cooperatively to produce a solid evaluation result. It is most important that each team member read all the materials beforehand and outline his or her own plan of action to get the job done. Most educators who participate on a visiting team come home tired but professionally fulfilled, knowing that what they have accomplished over the three and one half days will benefit kids and teachers and establish worthwhile, productive school improvement practices.

 

This information is a quick way to give you a sense of what to expect as a member of a NEASC visiting team. Please read it carefully, and, if you have any concerns, contact the Commission office. A more comprehensive instruction as well as the visit's logistics will be presented by the team chairperson during your orientation meeting at the school. 

 

Your lodging and meals will be arranged by the school, and you will be reimbursed for your mileage - so keep track.  If it is possible to bring a laptop with you, it will greatly enhance your visit.

 

The Commission on Public Elementary and Middle Schools looks forward to your continuing involvement in the regional peer review process. 

                                                                           David L. Flynn,

                                                                           Director of the Commission

Sunday - Generally, you will be asked to report to the hotel at which you will be staying sometime before noon.  This will vary from team to team.  You will check in, attend an orientation session conducted by the team chair and have a light lunch. About two o'clock you will be given a tour of the school, meet and interview some faculty, parents and kids and attend one or two subcommittee meetings.  Dinner will follow after which the team will meet again until about 10:00 PM.

Monday/Tuesday - You will be up early for breakfast and off to the school to meet the faculty and kids. Most of the day and after school will be spent visiting classrooms, meeting with subcommittees, writing parts of your reports and meeting with other team members. Lunch will be served at school. You will head back to the hotel in the late afternoon, relax, eat and then meet again as a team until about 10:00 PM.

Wednesday - After breakfast, you will check out and head for school once again. Much of the day is spent meeting as a team and completing the various reports. Recommendations are made by the team to be used by the Commission when it meets to consider the accreditation status of the school. The chair and the team meet with the faculty at the end of the day for a brief overview of the team's work, and then you can head home. 

Writing Time - The schedule is pretty full, but you will also need to spend unscheduled time writing your report.  That gets squeezed in between meetings and meals, so be prepared to use your time productively and efficiently. 

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When the chair of the team gets your name and your Visiting Committee Member Questionnaire, he/she will begin to make team assignments for work responsibility. The task of the visiting team is to determine how well the school meets the NEASC Standards. One of the sources of evidence is the school's self study.   The chair, therefore, usually, breaks up the workload by assigning one of two Standard reports to each team member.  Sometimes you can be surprised at the assignments and wonder if you have any expertise in the area. The expertise required is the experience of a solid professional educator.  

 

The school will mail you the self study and your first task is to read it and look carefully at the NEASC Standards.   Then begin to mark up those sections for which you are responsible.  The self study is a narrative in which the faculty describes how it meets the Standards and references materials to back up their statements.  Your job is to read it, note how they identify strengths and needs, and jot down your questions and concerns.  You are a friendly investigator and part of your job is to find evidence verifying what the school has submitted on paper. 

 

Strategize how you will obtain the evidence to prove your conclusions.  What questions will you ask?  Whom will you ask?  What don't you understand?  Do you need more information?  You will have to write a report in which you will use that evidence to explain how well the school meets the standards.  So read the material before you arrive and make your plan.  

 

Your chair will be more specific about the "hows" of the visit. Please know that it is rare that you would run into anything you haven't seen or experienced in your professional career.

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Writing the reports is vital to the success of the evaluation visit. The final report, an accumulation of everyone's individual work is the document for school improvement which the school will use after the team has left. 

Therefore, all the pieces, although individually produced, must flow from and relate to one another. Your chair will give you specific instructions as to how he/she wants the final product to look like, but there are some basics which you ought to know beforehand.

 

Observations and Conclusions: This section asks the reporter to present the "collective insights and judgments" gathered as he/she and other team members interview different persons within the educational community and observe the learning and social activities of a school in action.  It provides the answers to your own questions: "What did you tell us in the self study, and what did we actually see?"  It gives the team member the chance to tell it like it is or at least what it seems to be. There should be backup or evidence for everything written, and it must be discussed with the full team before finalizing it. 

 

Observations and Conclusions:  This section identifies the strengths and needs in a particular Standard area and backs them up with evidence.  The Observations and Conclusions section is not the place to prescribe a solution.  That is the school's job at a later time.  The Observations and Conclusions section is, rather, somewhat open-ended - presenting the insights for the school to look at and digest.  They should not be a series of "bullet statements", but, rather, a clearly written narrative of what the team member saw and took into consideration. The paragraphs should relate to the standard indicators, be comprehensive and flow together. 

The Observations and Conclusions section does not stand alone.  The Commendations and Recommendations which follow should be referenced in and flow from it.    

Commendations : The Commendations should be clear and concise statements acknowledging something that deserves commendation. They should be referenced in the Observations and Conclusions section. The writer should commend a thing (use a noun) e.g. a program, a process, an attitude, a skill. The writer should not, under normal circumstances, commend an individual person. The reporter should not explain why the Commendation is being made. That should already be clear in the Observations and Conclusions.  Keep it simple, and avoid the trivial.

Recommendations: The Recommendations should also be referenced in the Observations and Conclusions section. In the case of Recommendations, the team member should recommend an action (use a verb) e.g. plan, develop, extend, design, redesign. The Recommendation should not be prescriptive. It is not the job of the team to solve the problem but to identify it. The school will develop the plan to resolve it. As stated above, don't explain the Recommendation - just state it. Keep it simple, clear, and avoid the trivial.

 

Finally, and most importantly, remember that the report is designed to help the school, not hurt it. Sensitivity, honesty and pride are the main ingredients.