Recently, I have found myself reflecting a lot on a conversation I had with a head of an international school earlier this academic year. My role was to provide ideas on ways to respond to the feedback of a college counseling audit that had been recently concluded as part of an accreditation review, and, as such, I shared a host of suggestions and ideas for how to address the variety of points of positive, constructive criticism provided. However, the head was determined to focus on just one idea, a perfect panacea; it was his clear hope to focus on just one solution, to embrace it fully, and to move on. I persisted with sharing ideas with the hope of exploring with him which ideas we might select and employ while he wanted me to identify which single one would be most effective. This disconnect reflects a phenomenon I have seen time and time again throughout my career in college counseling: the underestimation of the complexity of college counseling metrics and their controlling mechanisms. 

Firstly, a bad metaphor to emphasize my perspective… What I have found is that while college counseling is much more akin to a jet airliner, many folks often persist in seeing it more like a fixed gear bicycle. The difference in complexity between what actually is and what many want to see is profound in many cases. So, while some hope to find that college counseling is a matter of simply adjusting one variable to improve one performance indicator, the reality is that there are an incredibly diverse array of variables that can impact a wide host of indicators. (And none of this is even to address that many indicators do not necessarily reflect that which some might think!) To push the bad jet metaphor, while some want the false bicycle of college counseling to be merely a function of how hard you pedal, the reality is that the altitude, thrust, lift, and drag of the airplane of college counseling (not to mention the internal factors of temperature, compression, humidity, etc) confound those basic conceptualizations. It is essential to see this complexity and all the various levers when seeking to adjust outcomes or indicators.

Secondly, as with so many features of education, so many of the levers that we might identify as being available to trigger changes within a college counseling office or program are entirely dependent upon the school culture. This is to say that there are not necessarily universal levers that definitely lead to improvement in certain desirable outcomes. School culture determines values, and those values are reflected in so much that goes on in a school as well as within college counseling offices. 

Each of these two points leads back to the scenario at the outset of this piece in regards to the head of school. What he was looking for was a lever, but what I advocate for is a dashboard. He was looking for a single outcome to manipulate through the modification of a single attribute, a single lever to pull. Instead, I advocate for a series of metrics and data points -- what some might call leading and trailing indicators -- that would comprise a dashboard that collectively reflects the health and success of the college counseling program. In adhering to a dashboard approach, it would be my contention that the dashboard would suggest certain investigations that might lead to recommending certain modifications. 

More on levers, dashboards, indicators, and metrics soon!