It helped build community and a sense of common purpose and shared responsibility. And it produced substantial and useful information about student work and the possibilities for improvement. The tuning protocol is widely used within and between Essential schools-as a means of developing more effective exhibitions and assessments, as a way of developing common standards, and as a means to gather and reflect on ideas for revising classroom practice. Kammer describes, for example, how the staff of a restructuring school uses the same steps to get feedback from a panel of teachers from another school. In most instances, the protocol's ritual of presentation and response works to mitigate the defensiveness people typically feel when they present work for public critique.
Participants take turns in timed segments and eschew direct response.
The tuning protocol can prove especially useful in loaded situations where poor communication is a problem, school people say. Typically, its users pose an important question they hope to answer by a close look at actual work-whether the school needs a new policy on spelling, for example, or how to incorporate writing across the curriculum. In California, the state Restructuring Initiative has taken the ritual one step further, using it to reflect on change at the system level. The tuning protocol has proved equally useful in giving shape to conversations among parents and community members about the content and quality of student work. And both University Heights and Central Park East Secondary School use it to obtain feedback from outside visitors on their graduation requirements and academic programs.