1:1 Administrator Survey

The 1:1 Administrator Survey is a survey tool that collects teacher perceptions of the behaviors and characteristics of a principal leading a digital learning initiative. It is a tool that can help in the process of identifying areas for leadership improvement and professional development.

Instructions for Use

If you decide that you have a question that might be addressed with data describing your school staffs’ perceptions about teaching and learning in a 1:1 environment, consider using the Staff Survey created as part of the evaluation of the North Carolina Learning Technology Initiative (NCLTI) during the spring of 2010. The following checklist is provided to help you plan and implement your Staff Survey in a way that will maximize its value, in terms of informing school- level planning for technology use.

Planning for Survey Use

• Convene whatever team is responsible for evaluation and/or technology planning in your school.
• Clarify and come to consensus on the questions about which your school cares.
• Review the Staff Survey instrument and supporting documentation.
• Determine if the Staff Survey data will be useful in answering those questions.
• Determine who will be your school-based “Staff Surveymanager”; the person responsible for managing your Staff Survey implementation will likely be the technology facilitator and/or technician.
• Develop a way to keep track of who has—and has not—completed your Staff Survey.
• Determine how and when respondents will complete your Staff Survey.
• Communicate in advance with staff members about the purpose of the Staff Survey, how it fits into school technology or evaluation planning, and how important it is that everyone completes the instrument. Be sure that everyone understands that it is impossible to identify individual respondents among the Staff Survey data; that data are reported only at the school level; and that Staff Survey data will not be used to assign awards or sanctions to individual staff members or schools.
• Define a plan for disseminating Staff Survey findings to the entire school staff.

Managing Staff Survey Responses

• When your Staff Survey opens, implement the plan your school developed to assure a sufficiently high rate of response.
• Using the tracking system developed during the planning phase, follow up with any slow respondents, guiding them through the process if necessary.
• Note that it is possible for a respondent to submit more than one set of answers. This is generally not an issue, since few really care to complete the instrument more than once, but it should be kept in mind as a possible source of error.

Using Your Staff Survey Data

• Make appropriate inferences from your Staff Survey data. It is critical to revisit the questions being asked at this point. The Staff Survey provides a lot of data and it may be possible to be distracted by issues other than those seen as important during the planning process.
• Examine your Staff Survey findings for surprises or unanticipated findings. Note comparisons between teacher and administrator results.
• Importantly, revisit and refine the questions that Staff Survey data were expected to answer. It is not at all unusual to discover that a primary finding arising from Staff Survey data is that more data is required to really understand issues at hand.
• Consider next steps in the evaluation process. It may be necessary for example to convene groups to discuss why staff members may have responded to the Staff Survey like they did, or the planning team might examine possible changes to program implementation based on findings.
• Share your Staff Survey findings with the entire school staff. By doing so, buy-in will be encouraged, increasing the entire staff’s involvement in the evaluation process and raising the likelihood of future participation in data collection activities.