Feedback case study

  "We are very confident that ELFI will result in being a very useful multi source feedback survey instrument to assist educational leaders maximize their potential"  

 

  

Australian Principals Centre - Education
Being a Principal in an educational institution can be an isolating experience. There are many stakeholder needs to be met on an ongoing basis and the Principal’s own professional development can lose focus. Most Principals would attest that there is no shortage of performance feedback, even at times unsolicited! The real challenge is to gain balanced, objective feedback on behaviours that are key to effective educational leadership.

ELFI has been designed to allow Principals and aspirant Principals to gain unfiltered feedback from a range of sources. Full Circle Feedback was engaged by the Australian Principals Centre in to undertake the collaborative task of designing a 360-degree feedback survey instrument. The design process was as follows:

Review of the Literature: A scan of the international literature identified critical behaviours for educational leaders. There were eight subscales determined:
  • Strategic Leadership
  • Change Management
  • Relationships
  • Communication Skills
  • People management
  • Self Management
  • People Development
  • Results Focus Action
Research 360 degree feedback: Full Circle Feedback has a strong background in implementing 360-degree feedback processes for leaders in a wide range of industries, including education. For the ELFI project this experience was used to determine behaviours suitable for a multi source feedback measurement process.

Draft of a straw model survey: A survey was drafted and reviewed initially by Maryanne Mooney, Director of Full Circle Feedback and Nick Thornton, CEO and Andrew Jackson, Project Director of Australian Principals Centre (APC). The purpose of this step was to draft a survey with as high face validity as possible. Consultation Process A Survey Design group was convened of acknowledged leading Principals from all sectors in the education industry. There were nine redrafts of the survey instrument based on feedback from this group.

Pilot: A group of 25 Principals participated in a pilot process. Each Principal was briefed and selected a representative feedback team of parents, peers, staff, other stakeholders, self and manager. All raters were invited to complete the web based survey in an anonymous, confidential fashion. The group then came together to receive their individual results and to review the group results. Feedback from the pilot group was extremely positive in regard to the usefulness of ELFI for their professional development

Psychometric Analysis: ELFI is currently being evaluated by Dr Kelvin Lai of the Australian Council of Educational Research (ACER). The survey will be refined on the basis of this analysis and a second pilot group of 100 Principals will undertake ELFI V2 in October 2004. It is currently being trialled in Hong Kong and we will seek international use in the future.At this early stage ELFI is shaping up as a robust survey instrument with a reliability rating as high as 0.955 for one subscale.

We are confident that ELFI will result in being a very useful multi source feedback survey instrument to assist educational leaders to maximize their potential.