Using Google Apps for Superintendent Evaluation

Tech Leadership

An effective superintendent evaluation process is the foundation of a positive board/superintendent working relationship, yet strangely, most superintendent evaluation models lack tenets of coaching for improved performance and quality evaluation.

During a collaborative process with my seven-member school board to create a shared leadership governance model, we realized all of the district’s certified evaluation processes included formative evaluation and feedback components except one: the superintendent’s performance evaluation.

We weren’t long into this discussion before we were asking ourselves this: Why wouldn’t the board model this same process with the superintendent? This question became the driving force behind a new evaluation model for the board and the superintendent.

A Digital Application

The mission statement of the 1,000-student Sublette County School District 1 includes a commitment to providing our students with a 21st-century learning experience. In establishing a new evaluation model for the board-superintendent team, our board emphasized the need to model and apply 21st-century skills.

The model we developed focuses on establishing specific roles and responsibilities for the board and the superintendent and using technology to provide monthly performance feedback to both. Each month, the board evaluates itself and the superintendent on a portion of our respective roles and responsibilities. These monthly evaluations serve as formative feedback, and collectively they become the summative evaluation.

As superintendent, I was tasked with designing and implementing a technology-based process to collect the data, archive it and provide the results to the board in real time. As a Google Apps for Education district, I chose Google Forms and Google sites to provide both the evaluation and archiving mechanisms.

The monthly evaluations are accomplished using Google Forms, and the online forms cover a specific evaluation domain with several descriptors. Google Forms provides a useful range of rating options, but ours is a simple scale. An opportunity for board members to provide comment is also included on each form.

Board members complete the online evaluations prior to our monthly board meetings, and the information they provide self-populates the associated Google sheet. Board members are committed to full transparency in the evaluation process, and all of their ratings are time stamped. The e-mail address of the evaluator is captured — an important feature provided within Google Forms.

(A conference presentation of the district’s model can be found at http://goo.gl/ujLdlk.)

Timely Sharing

The results of the monthly evaluations are compiled on a Google sheet with tabs for each month’s evaluation and a summary tab. This document serves as the basis for the summative evaluation.

Our district uses an e-governance system to conduct board meetings, and our board members access this information through the system’s hyperlinks. I created a Google site to archive the evaluation data for the board and the superintendent over multiple years. Board members use the archive to view summative evaluations and performance over time.

Ultimately, effective evaluation leads to coaching for improvement. We believe this model marries the advantages of technology with good evaluation practice, in which the board and the superintendent receive timely, formative evaluation feedback. The board shares their self-evaluations with the public, and the superintendent has an opportunity to address concerns and present evidence of improvement at future meetings or during the summative evaluation.

Importantly, the superintendent has access to all scores and comments that are a part of the evaluation prior to the summative evaluation meeting. These factors not only yield multiple opportunities for improvement, but they also build trust — something all board-superintendent relationships can use.