Roland
Barth incisively observed, “[T]he relationships among the educators in a
school define all relationships within that school's culture. Teachers and
administrators demonstrate all too well a capacity to either enrich or diminish
one another's lives and thereby enrich or diminish their schools.”

Amen.
But for schools with room to improve (i.e. every single one), what does a
culture shift toward better relationships look like? Tinkering
or wholesale reform? Human knots? Happy hours? Clique-busting in the lounge? Collaborative
planning periods? All of the above and more?

This weekend I
tore through a compelling new book, The
Checklist Manifesto by
Atul Gawande, which gave me another idea. Gawande is a Harvard-based surgeon,
writer of two previous award-winning bestsellers, MacArthur Genius Grant
Recipient, leader of the World Health Organization Save Surgery Saves Lives
program, and all-around world-beater. The subtitle of the book “How to Get
Things Right” caught my attention. If Dr. Gawande wanted to tell a teacher
perpetually seeking to get things right how to do it, I was in.

Of course, the
book claims up front that checklists are useful. But why? What makes a good
checklist? Can teachers use this? (I think so.)

Gawande offers a
handful of well-chosen case studies in operating rooms, construction sites,
airplane cockpits, venture capitalist brains, and high-end restaurant kitchens
illustrating the consistency and collaboration that using a checklist can
provide. When an operating team huddles before a surgery to run through a safe
surgery checklist, the risk of complications decreased sharply. For starters,
each team member introduces himself by name (a nonstandard practice in a great
many operating rooms), a practice that removes much of the reticence of many
nurses to call out doctors when they observe mistakes in progress. Running
through the standard procedure for running lines into a patient drops the line
infection rate from occasional to zero. 
The nurses may have prepared lines many times, but in the heat of the
moment, important little things can be forgotten— unless there is a check in
place.

The Checklist
Manifesto moves like a
Malcolm Gladwell book. (Bestseller-machine Gladwell even appears on the back
cover for an enthusiastic blurb.) It’s a good read. Gawande suggests
convincingly that it’s too much for a surgeon, or a builder, or a pilot (or, we
can extrapolate, a teacher) to hold in one’s mind every little thing that needs
taking care of in all contingencies. We forget things, we re-shuffle our
priorities, we respond to emergencies. Without a check— coming from a checklist
or a colleague— things can get unnecessarily fouled up. As we pursue excellence
in our craft, this cost-free (if initially annoying) option warrants
consideration.

Good checklists
are crafted on the ground and are constantly evolving. They should not take
more than a minute to run through. Five to nine essential items. Clear and
concise.

Perhaps most
importantly, checklists require collaborators to talk to each other. This is
where they can be of real use in schools, where too often each classroom
becomes its own island. A functioning classroom has so many moving parts that
the opportunities to use checklists with students and colleagues are vast.

I can see the adoption in schools of non-threatening, teamwork-oriented, locally-created checklists
leading to better relationships among educators and better outputs for
students. Roland Barth would like it.