Review your records, such as walkthrough logs or your calendar, and determine how much time you typically spend in classrooms. The following questions may help you in your assessment.
If you don’t have access to clear records, it’s perfectly fine to estimate, but be honest with yourself and answer as many of these questions as possible. Because we tend to overestimate our time in classrooms and underestimate our tendency to avoid certain teachers, I’ve worded the questions in several different ways to help you determine your baseline accurately. We tend to recall our best days and extrapolate them to the rest of the year, so if you visited five classrooms one day in October, good for you—but is this typical behavior comparable to other days of the year? Ensure that you are honest in your responses.
Acknowledging your current practice is the first step. Don’t exaggerate, but don’t berate yourself, either. If your baseline is zero, you’ve no doubt been doing other important work to lead your school. And you’ve come to the right place to help you improve your instructional leadership.
2
Following the High-Performance Instructional Leadership Model
What can you do to maximize your impact on teacher practice when you visit classrooms? Most instructional leaders conduct mandatory formal observations and make an effort to visit classrooms more often, but these visits often seem limited in value—especially prearranged formal observations, which Marshall (2013) describes, in his experience as a principal, as “dog-and-pony shows—contrived, unrepresentative, nervous-making lessons solely for my benefit” (p. 60). Given all the other pressures we face, if classroom visits don’t provide considerable benefits for both instructional leaders and teachers, there is simply no incentive to make time for visits on a consistent basis.
To ensure that our time in classrooms has a positive impact on student learning and is professionally rewarding for everyone involved, the high-performance instructional leadership model consists of classroom visits that are:
I drew these characteristics from existing models and practices in our profession (see chapter 3 for detailed comparisons), but here they form a unique approach designed to give teachers and instructional leaders the greatest possible benefits from classroom visits. In this chapter, we explore each of these criteria in a bit more depth. I will also discuss the concept of a shared instructional framework—expectations shared between teachers and instructional leaders that collectively define professional practice and performance for teachers at a school—and encourage leaders to identify their own instructional frameworks.
Make Frequent Visits
If we want to see meaningful results from our time in classrooms, it’s only logical that we commit to an adequate dose for our efforts. Kim Marshall (2013) notes that administrators are not present for 99.9 percent of the instruction that takes place in classrooms, yet are responsible for obtaining enough information to evaluate teachers fairly. In sampling terms, visiting a classroom only once or twice per year gives an administrator a very limited perspective on a teacher’s practice. Grissom et al. (2013) found that time spent coaching teachers is associated with higher student achievement in mathematics. Yet, they also found that, on average, only 0.5 percent of principals’ time was devoted to coaching teachers, which can be expected to produce student learning gains of less than 0.05 percent of a standard deviation—far too small a difference to notice. We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.
We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.
How often is often enough? It depends on the nature of your role and the number of teachers you supervise. A two-week rotation—visiting every teacher you supervise every other week—strikes a balance between frequency and practicality for most school-based administrators who are responsible for evaluating teachers. If you visit 10 percent of your teachers daily in a 180-day school year, you’ll reach everyone approximately eighteen times, not including formal observations or other types of visits to classrooms. Depending on how many teachers you supervise, this will typically require two to four visits per day. If you’re part of an administrative team that shares evaluation responsibilities, plan to visit only the teachers you supervise.
However, if you supervise an especially large number of teachers, or if you’re not in a school-based administrative role, it may not be feasible to establish a two-week rotation. Instead, focus on a daily target of three visits, or a weekly target of fifteen visits. On the other hand, if you’re a coach providing intensive support to a group of five new teachers, your visit frequency will be higher. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll treat three visits per day as a standard target throughout this book.
Make Brief Visits
In order to form a sustainable habit, it’s essential to keep your classroom visits brief. Frequent visits become virtually impossible to sustain if they swell to thirty minutes or more. As the length of a visit increases,
