I'm the Project Manager for School Accountability for Learning and Teaching. In our state that is known as SALT - we use the acronym freely - we run a system of pure visits, or professional visits, that are about a week long. In the visits, teams of teachers and administrators - either school or district, but we hope one of each - go out to a school for either 4 or 5 days, do a relatively rigorous investigation of the school in that period of time looking at evidence about learning, about teaching, and about how well the structure of the school supports the learning and teaching that's going on in the school, then we write a report. The report, interestingly enough, is written by the team as a whole. They sit down in front of a projector and write from the beginning of the week to the end and begin to craft what we call conclusions, so that on Friday - the last day of the visit - they arrive at a set of conclusions in these 3 areas: 3 to 5 conclusions about learning and teaching. I mean, 3 to 5 conclusions about learning; 3 to 5 about teaching and 3 to 5 about the school that the team agrees to in every conclusion. So, it's a long and thorough process of investigation, evidence collection, debate, that arrives in a final consensus that's written in a fairly short report to the school. Once that happens then the school improvement team and the Principal are faced with all the issues and problems of implementing - or at least reading the report - and implementing the parts of the report that they think are worthwhile and have merit. The report is not prescriptive: that is it does not tell the school what to do. It is persuasive and it's intended to reflect on the school on a powerful way, so that the school itself can make decisions about what it needs to change and how it needs to change in order to improve learning.