Anne Prozan is the Manager for Leadership Growth and Development in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). In her role in OUSD, Anne manages the evaluation system, supports professional development for leaders, and supports principal supervisors. Anne and her colleagues decided to use the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) in order to provide non-evaluative feedback for principals. Since CALL measures school-wide leadership and provides formative feedback to school leaders, the tool was a good fit for OUSD’s principal evaluation system. As explained below, the CALL Team worked with Anne to ensure the tool met the needs of the school leaders and district leaders in OUSD.

While the CALL instrument is certainly comprehensive in nature, there were still some areas the survey did not cover that Anne and her colleagues had prioritized in their evaluation system. Therefore, the CALL Team applied the CALL approach to survey design and inquiry and worked collaboratively with OUSD to develop unique, task-based survey items around “Relational Trust.” Once the OUSD CALL survey was developed, the implementation process began by training principals and principal supervisors, which the CALL Team did in collaboration with Anne and her colleagues. After the survey was administered, principals and their supervisors met to debrief the results and determine action steps that included meeting with school leadership teams and staff. At the district level, Anne and the principal supervisors reviewed overall data to identify trends across networks and the district in order to determine the appropriate support needed for principals.

The CALL System provided non-evaluative feedback for OUSD principals to use in order to create “Focus Goals” and action plans for school improvement. The OUSD approach to evaluation has been to focus on “growth and development rather than punitive and transactional outcomes,” according to Anne. The use of CALL reinforced this goal for evaluation. And, as Anne explains, “Although results were not part of the evaluation, the process required principal supervisors to model how to obtain and use feedback to grow, in the same way we want principals to create leadership goals using an inquiry process for their evaluation.”