Build Relational Trust
Use Classroom Visits to Enable Better Decision Making
Build a Common Vision
Day 18 Action Challenge: Identify Your Biggest Insights From Classroom Visits
19 Opening the Door to New Models of Professional Learning
Celebrate Exemplary Practice in Meetings and in Writing
Share Practice-Focused Video Clips
Facilitate Instructional Rounds
Engage in Student Shadowing
Day 19 Action Challenge: Share the Highlights
20 Choosing an Instructional Focus for an Observation Cycle
Ensure Broad Relevance
Establish Observability
Confirm Strategic Impact
A Word of Caution About Instructional Strategies
Day 20 Action Challenge: Choose a Focus for Cycle Three
21 Scaling Classroom Visits Across Your School and District
Scale Within Your School
Scale Across Your Network
Day 21 Action Challenge: Scale Up Your Success
Epilogue: Building Capacity for Instructional Leadership
About the Author
Justin Baeder is director of The Principal Center, where he helps school and district administrators build capacity for instructional leadership. Prior to starting The Principal Center, Baeder served as a teacher, head teacher, and principal in Seattle Public Schools, finishing his ten-year career in Seattle as principal of Olympic View Elementary. His professional interests focus on strategic planning, goal setting, organizational learning, and productivity. Driven by the belief that leaders belong in classrooms—where the most important work is being done—he created the 21-Day Instructional Leadership Challenge (www.instructionalleadershipchallenge.com), which has helped more than ten thousand leaders from fifty countries develop the habit of getting into classrooms and having evidence-based conversations with teachers.
He has contributed to School Administrator, Principal News Magazine, Principal Magazine, Principal Navigator Magazine, and Education Week. Baeder presents regularly at state and national conferences, including the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Learning Forward, and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and he has been an invited keynote speaker at numerous state principals’ conferences in California, Pennsylvania, Washington, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Baeder is currently a doctoral candidate studying principal productivity at the University of Washington, and is a graduate of the Danforth Educational Leadership Program at the University of Washington. He holds a master’s degree in education with a focus on curriculum and instruction from Seattle University, and a bachelor’s degree in science education from Harding University.
To learn more about Baeder’s work, visit The Principal Center (www.principalcenter.com) or follow @eduleadership on Twitter.
To book Justin Baeder for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
Should school administrators visit classrooms? If you ask any education leader, you’ll undoubtedly hear enthusiastic support for the idea. As leaders, we understand intuitively that instructional leaders belong in classrooms because effective classroom visits can lead to significant improvements in teaching and learning.
Yet we know the reality is far from our ideal: it’s hard to get into classrooms on a regular basis, so the practice is far less common than we’d like. Since much of my professional work focuses on helping administrators spend more time in classrooms, I’ve made a habit of asking teachers how often they receive helpful feedback from an administrator. The answer is almost always the same: somewhere between once a year and never. When I ask administrators how much feedback they received as classroom teachers, they too report receiving either once-yearly feedback or none at all.
These reports from the field match data from a study by Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Benjamin Master (2013), who found that while principals in their study spent 12.7 percent of their time on instructional leadership activities, including 5.4 percent of the workday on classroom walkthroughs, they devoted only 0.5 percent of their time to coaching teachers. Across the span of a school year, this equates to less than ten hours—not per teacher, but total. In the same study, Grissom et al. (2013) found that informal classroom walkthroughs were the most common instructional leadership activity principals engaged in, but these walkthroughs had a negative correlation with student achievement gains, which the authors suggest is “because principals often do not use walkthroughs as part of a broader school improvement strategy” (p. 433), but rather as a means of collecting data.
Why are we failing to tap into the potential of regular classroom visits? Having tried a variety of approaches to classroom walkthroughs as a principal, I believe it’s because we don’t find our visits to classrooms to be professionally rewarding—for ourselves as leaders, or for our teachers. We may strive to provide high-quality feedback, but find that it never seems to have the impact on instruction that we hope. Deep down, we know we need to be in classrooms, but we also have doubts about whether our standard approaches to providing feedback are effective enough to justify the time and effort involved. Since there is no shortage of other work to keep leaders busy outside the classroom, it’s no wonder we don’t make much time for classroom visits.
In this book, you’ll discover an approach to instructional leadership that recognizes the importance of getting into classrooms on a daily basis, but without the drawbacks of traditional walkthrough models. I call this approach
