Prof. Alex Bowers, Teachers College, Columbia University

Meet Alex Bowers. He is a hard-charging, energetic professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who is opening doors for school and district leaders. Those doors lead to the numbers way of knowing. Numbers that can help district leaders solve riddles like these:

  • Are students missing more days of instruction in schools where teachers are absent more often?
  • Which elementary schools are most (and least) effective at preparing their students for middle school math? Are specific teachers in those schools responsible for these outliers?

And the numbers way of knowing can shed light on questions that principals wrestle with, like these:

  • Does my high school have teachers whose grading patterns indicate they are biased? (Parents have told us they believe some female teachers are especially unfair to their boys.)
  • Which of my early elementary teachers have the greatest (or least) success in teaching reading?

What Prof. Bowers and Yilin Pan, his star post-graduate assistant, have created is an online course, “Leading with Evidence,” aimed at working professionals. It debuted this fall with 65 participants, and just launched the second instance of this course in the first week of November.

I’ve combed through all four units of this 20-hour course, and am super impressed. (Disclosure … My company is now an academic partner of Teachers College, based on the commitment Prof. Bowers and I share in the need to bring modern measurement methods, data literacy and assessment savvy to ed leaders.)

I believe their approach to this course is worth a round of applause for three reasons.

  1. The course is not about data “culture” but about how to make sense of evidence to make smarter decisions.
  2. Their approach puts scientific thinking, not just measurement, into the practice of education management.
  3. They expect that education leaders (not just teachers) have a higher need to master these skills.

This is not a correspondence course where you fly in, speed through, and leave with some silly badge. This is a serious course. It requires five hours a week of student time, over four weeks. It requires you take quizzes and pass them. It requires that participants read and write, and contribute to group discussions.

Grad students moderate discussions and evaluate written submissions. Peer conversations are encouraged, and participants are clustered by the course leaders. Yes, participants are expected to produce evidence that they’ve learned what’s been taught.

Click here to learn more. And if you enroll through School Wise Press’s K12 Measures Project, you’ll save 25 percent off the enrollment fee of $595. Follow this link to contact us, and just include the word <Evidence> in the last box on the form.