So these days, I finish my lesson, and I turn on my voice recorder, and I usually say something like …

 We blew through the quick-draw speaking quiz a lot faster than I had expected, and I think perhaps I wasn’t ready to make good use of the remaining 15 minutes.  Need to look at expanding my pocket list.  [A list of words and phrases that I keep in my pocket and use for impromptu moments when I want to throw the kids off balance and boost their responsiveness.]  Nakamura seems really to have come around.  If I give him the time he needs to formulate a response, he steps up.  Sato is marked triple-F, and should instead be a Tripple-C….

… and then I enter a series of numbers:

• VIBE 76
• EMPOWERMENT 72
• IMPACT 86
• VALUE PROPOSITION 88

These are my self-assessment criteria. These days, it’s pretty easy for me to ramble off a somewhat meaningful string of words that captures the essence of what happened in the room, but if I am able to assign those four numbers without staring off into space too much, that tells me a lot about how with-it I am on that day. I can’t control all the variables that contribute to whether each of those four data points creeps upwards or downwards. What I can control is me and the effectiveness of the decisions that I make, and to make the best decisions, I need a systematic method for assessing the decisions that I have made thus far. For years, I struggled to get some perspective on my own teaching.  And then as a manager, I struggled to figure out why even my best teachers seemed to lack self-awareness. As a foreign teacher in Japan, you can’t go a day without somebody describing you as “a great teacher.”  You can’t take two steps without kids giggling and waving and high-fiving.  You reach the end of the year and the school still wants to continue with you, and you can’t imagine why. You are just one more passive spectator of yourself; ipso facto, you are a clown....  UNLESS you can develop a systematic approach to assessing yourself. If today was a good day, do you care what part you played in that? How is what made today a good day different from what made yesterday a good day? Is what worked today going to work tomorrow? And if you were to somehow to make tomorrow a better day, do you even know what that might entail?  Or will you just assume that what worked today will do just fine for tomorrow? The key is to develop a few solid criteria that you are going to isolate and track from student to student and day to day.  These are a little like when a doctor asks “how does it hurt on a scale of 1 to 10.”  It’s not that 8 has some unchanging in-the-eyes-of-God meaning.  The point is that you can begin to get some quantifiable grasp of your changing perceptions by gathering multiple entries over time.  To give you some idea of what that might look like, I’ll discuss the four criteria that I use…. VIBE – This is the criterion that I have been using the longest, so I will describe it in a bit more detail than the others.  VIBE is the extent to which the room is pulling in the same direction as you, and given an extent to which the students have developed expectations, the extent to which you are satisfying or exceeding those expectations.  Below 50, the energy in the room is trending away from you.  There is an element in the room that is so disruptive that unless you change the dynamics of what is going on, your control of the activity in the room is going to continue to get away from you.  Below 30, the room is a place of physical peril.  My work at the struggling charter school in Nashville, Tennessee, was like this at times.  At the Nashville school, I scored myself above 50, for VIBE, whenever I had most of the kids humoring me.  Above 70 (which I never reached in Nashville, but which is often possible with an agreeable group of Japanese teenagers) there really isn’t anybody pulling against you, and there is a vague general sense in the room that it’s worth their while to be there.  If you are teaching Japanese junior high school classes of forty kids, and you are consistently in the high 70s, you’re not doing that bad.  Above 80, the students come with expectations of some sort, and you are satisfying some of those expectations.  Above 90, you are blowing away expectations.  If you are calibrated right, it should be impossible to constantly score yourself above 90 on VIBE because each time you surpass expectations, expectations rise. These are OF COURSE arbitrary and subjective judgments you are making.  The point is, over time, to look back and notice trends in what you have perceived and judge those against the tangible facts of what went on – the materials you chose, where you put different kids in the room, the kind of time you spent on certain actions that you were taking. EMPOWERMENT – This measures the extent to which you can say that the students are moving towards developing independent learning skills.  Over 90, means the students see you as a resource, make progress on their own, and are justifiably confident that they know better than you do about what the right point of focus is for them at any given moment.  Justifiably is an important qualifier here -- simply wanting you not to bother them doesn’t constitute empowerment.  I have seen many teachers make the mistake of giving students "free study time," thinking that this, per se, constitutes student-centered teaching.  No.  Below 70, they require your guidance to make any kind of meaningful progress.   Below 50, they have trouble seeing English learning as being worth their while. IMPACT – What is the scope of what you are doing?  Are you pushing a rock up a hill, 60?  Are you creating meaningful moments, however, still feeling that you are mostly reacting in the moment, 70?  Do you have course objectives that match your sense of the students’ Zone of Proximal Development, and can you feel that you are deliberately moving towards those objectives, 80?  Are you permanently changing lives, 90? VALUE PROPOSITION – What exactly are you selling?  The students are investing time and energy in you – where they could invest their time and energy elsewhere.  You score over 90, if you are connecting with the students in a way that no one else could do.  You score in the 70s if you are doing things that a Japanese English teacher could probably do as well or better.   If you are using a new textbook, you need to invest time in evaluating what its value is, how best to use it. If you are using an interactive white board for the first time, you need to make sure that you really understand its capabilities. The most vital piece of equipment that you have in the room with you is you.  A human being is a powerful, intricate, and ever evolving piece of machinery.  Knowing how you works, and knowing how best to use you, should take vastly more time than any other aspect of your professional development. Even the best clowns are self-aware.