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I will also use this Padlet tool in my history class...I think the timeline aspect will be an awesome way for students to organize the material.

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Nebraska Public School Advantage - The power of public education.

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The bright flame from Jessica Jackman's chemistry experiment always draws excited gasps and wide eyes, but perhaps the loudest Oohs and Aahs on this Monday morning in February came from the back of the room, where a pack of fellow Cross County teachers stood and observed.

It's a mini-culture shock for a kindergarten teacher to find themselves in a high school science lab, but don't for a second think that the experience isn't valuable. Since implementing their "Instructional Rounds" six years ago, Cross County Public Schools has discovered the purpose, and power, in perspective.

"It's so motivating to see what other teachers are doing in their classrooms, no matter what grade or subject they teach," said Macy Jones, an elementary resource teacher in the district. "I'm always so excited to see all the cool things happening in our building."

Cross County has long followed the Marzano Teaching Model, and the Instructional Rounds are an innovative byproduct of that framework. They're held three Mondays each year, in September, November and February, and, by design, allow educators to spend time learning from peers across the district. The rounds aren't mandated, but the district has more than 75-percent of its staff participating.

As word of the practice's effectiveness spreads, that number continues to rise.

"Our philosophy is that everybody's doing something great, and it doesn't matter what you teach or who you teach, you can gather strategies and learn something from anywhere at any given time," said speech pathologist Hyde Patience, who's been with Cross County for 17 years. "When I go on rounds, I love to see what classroom teachers are doing in their rooms, because if I know how my students are being instructed I can use that knowledge when I'm helping them with whatever goals they're working on."

Patience is on the Instructional Rounds committee, which is constantly evaluating feedback from participants and molding the model so that it's as beneficial as possible. ESU 7 Professional Development Coordinator Brooke Kavan has played a huge role in the program's success from the start. After using the 2016-17 year for development, Cross County rolled out the pilot program in 2017-18.

"The philosophy, which is a run-off from Marzano's high reliability schools model, is you might be doing really well most days, but what systems do you have in place that can ensure there's great teaching going on here every day?" said superintendent Brent Hollinger. "Brooke (Kavan) was very savvy with Marzano and this idea for instructional rounds. We were basically the guinea pig."

So far, the program has been a resounding success, to the point where other districts are visiting Stromsburg to see it first-hand. The rounds are always held on Mondays to avoid overlaps with study halls. During NPSA's visit, 18 observers, eight host teachers and four facilitators took part.

At the end of each round of observations, the group meets for a short debriefing session. It's comparable to an interactive book club, and the discussions are always spirited.

"The debriefing sessions are extremely important," said 4th-grade teacher Kelsey Phillips. "It allows us to talk about things that we maybe didn't notice while we were in the classroom together. There's so many things classroom management ideas we gain that we can then apply in our own classrooms."

Instructional Rounds are a worthwhile endeavor for all involved.

"I like to come back and debrief because everybody takes such different things away from the experience," said high school resource teacher Amy Rotter, who facilitated the first round. "It's refreshing to have time to collaborate with other staff members. We are all in one building, but sometimes we get busy with our routines. It's nice to be able to visit learn together."

The more you can entice teachers to lead, the better, said Hollinger. Putting peers in front of peers tends to produce positive results, and the Instructional Rounds are nothing but empowering for the Cross County staff.

"We kind of gave them the carrot and then we backed off and they had that ownership piece," Hollinger continued. "It's innovative, but it still falls under some of the basic stuff that's worked for a hundred years. When somebody feels ownership, and somebody feels that a program is theirs instead of being told to do it, then they're going to be bought in completely. Our staff has taken this and made it their own."

The culture at Cross County has been strong for a long time, but incorporating Instructional Rounds has only boosted cohesion. It's a platform that allows educators an opportunity to grow professionally together. Collaboration in the district is at an all-time high, and students are the ones reaping the rewards.

"This has helped branch our elementary to our middle school to the high school, too," said 6-12 principal Justin DeWitt. "If you have a senior English teacher down in the kindergarten room, or vice versa, it offers a variety of perspectives and opens conversations that need to happen across those buildings."

It's invigorating, too, especially in the middle of a long and cold February. This time of year, everybody could use a shot of rejuvenation. Chase Kuhnel, who teaches 9th and 10th-grade Language Arts, sees the excitement in an elementary class and can't wait to try and replicate it in her high school room. She views it as a fun challenge.

"As much as I love my students more than anything, they don't exactly always have a passion for learning English," Kuhnel laughed. "So getting to go to an elementary classroom and seeing how excited those kids still are about learning, that makes me excited to go back to class and make it more engaging for my students."

Because she holds a specialized position, Patience can feel isolated at times. She's the district's only speech pathologist, but Instructional Rounds have essentially busted down any silos at Cross County.

"This has strengthened that family-like environment here that we've always had," said Patience. "We help each other. I don't think we have one teacher out there that wouldn't step in and help someone when needed. We're just a family."

It's helped having the undivided support from the school's administration, Patience added. When the committee felt the need to incentivize participation with a free pass to leave school at 3:30, the administration gave swift approval. It's worth the dividends, which Hollinger and DeWitt see every day.

"We've got a strong staff, and we do push them to excel," said Hollinger. "I'm not just talking about Instructional Rounds, but other things we do with them, too. There's a level of expected, high-performing, bang-out-of-their-buck type culture that we've had."

Young teachers like Jones appreciate that level of accountability. It puts them in position to grow.

"They're always looking for the opportunity to push us," Jones said. "Sometimes it can be a little uncomfortable to step into a classroom or intimidating being observed, but it's great that we're being pushed out of our comfort zones to become better teachers."

What was once uncomfortable has become, over the course of five years, straightforward and downright pleasant. It's to the point where students don't turn their heads or even bat an eye when a pack of teachers slip in the door mid-lesson.

"This process has helped us work together, learn from one another, and, most importantly, trust each other," said Patience.

Instructional Rounds are smooth and easy.

Easy like a Monday morning.
They Said It! Q: What are you looking for when observing a classroom?
"When I go into a classroom, I'm looking for something that stands out that I don't do. I'm there to learn new strategies. When I see something that's different from my classroom, that's what I'm writing down."-Macy Stewart (6th and 7th-grade English and Reading)

"I always intentionally look for better ways of routine and engagement. Working with high schoolers, that can sometimes be an issue. They can sometimes lack buy-in or motivation. Routine and fresh engagement ideas always helps me."-Chase Kuhnel

"I'm always looking for different teaching strategies and engagement opportunities that I can use to make class a little bit more fun for my students."-Macy Jones

"I'm looking to see if any of my students are in the classroom, and I tend to zoom in on them. I look for strategies that are being used to connect with them, things I can modify and use with my own students, so that they're hearing the same language and doing the same kinds of activities when I have them and we're working on skills individually or in a small group."-Hyde Patience

"Being a teacher, you steal ideas from each other. That's just how it goes. We are all taught differently and we all learned in college differently, so when you combine ideas together, it's the best of both worlds."-Macy Stewart

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The Purpose in Perspective: Instructional Rounds are an all-around enriching experience for teachers at Cross County

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By Tyler Dahlgren
 
 The bright flame from Jessica Jackman's chemistry experiment always draws excited gasps and wide eyes, but perhaps the loudest Oohs and Aahs on this Monday morning in February came from the back of the room, where a pack of fellow Cross County teachers stood and observed.

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Center for Student Achievement Solutions

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Instructional Rounds can help promote a collaborative Professional Learning Community for your teachers and provide space for teachers to individually reflect on their own instructional practices. This week, we want to help you implement Instructional Rounds in your school to create a better learning environment.

Definition: What are instructional rounds?

Rather than instructional leaders being the ones responsible for observing and sharing feedback to improve teaching and learning, instructional rounds allow teachers to observe and share feedback to learn from one another through three main components:

Each of these components can be helpful on their own, but instructional rounds incorporate all three for more bite-size actionable planning and next steps.

Step by Step: How to conduct instructional rounds

Step 1: Organize a network of teachers who plan to work together over time.

It may make sense to split up teachers into networks based on the subjects they teach, their level in the organization (e.g., superintendents, principals, teachers), the grade level they teach or based on other criteria. Each network should be made up of teachers dedicated to working with one another to improve student achievement over the long term, with regular meetings. Elizabeth A. City from the Harvard Graduate School of Education suggests your networks be composed of between 8 - 30 members.

Step 2: Define some problems of practice.

Use data about your school and student performance to define these problems of practice. What are some problem areas your network would like to focus on solving? Based on student achievement data, where does your school or department tend to struggle? The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) lists some example problems of practice if you have trouble brainstorming.

Step 3: Then select a teacher whose instruction will be observed.

When you select the teacher to be observed, choose someone within the network with a proven track record of improving their students' achievement. Provide teachers in the network with the following information:

The subject, teacher and classroom that will be observed during this instructional round

The date and time the instructional round will take place

List of teachers who are invited to observe (We recommend limiting the invitation list to 3-5 teachers per session, including a well-respected lead teacher or instructional coach who leads the round.)

Copy of the lesson plan and classroom seating chart, if available

Step 4: Create a Focus Sheet for teachers who will be observing this round.

A Focus Sheet helps the observing teachers take notes on important parts of the lesson. Your Focus Sheet can list:

Relevant problems of practice to keep in mind during this observation session

Specific things to look out for, such as student engagement, teaching and learning instructional strategies, classroom management and student on and off-task behaviors

Types of notes teachers should take while observing - Teachers should be encouraged to only note what they observed during the instructional period and not to make any inferences or annotate their personal opinions only document the teacher's instructional strategies and the student's response to instruction

Step 5: Debrief, Glow, Reflect, and Grow

Once the observation session is over, teachers should debrief with each other. As you debrief, remember: We want to focus on improving student achievement, and on addressing the problems of practice listed on your Focus Sheet. Try to avoid dwelling on the negative parts of the lesson, and instead emphasize "glows" - What were the strong points of the lesson, teaching strategies, and student engagement? What specific strategies had a direct impact on student achievement?

Observing teachers should begin questions with the phrase, "I am wondering..." instead of prescribing their opinions on what should have been done differently by the observed teacher. This phrase naturally leads into a positive reflection on how lesson planning can be improved by building on instructional strategies that are already working.

Elizabeth A. City recommends including the following elements in each debriefing session:

Describe - Have observing teachers look at their notes to describe specific instructional strategies the observed teacher used in the lesson, especially related to the problems of practice.

Analyze - Find patterns in the observed teacher's instructional habits, response to the instruction, the way the classroom functioned, and students' engagement in the lesson.

Predict - Based on what was observed, have the teachers predict what students would know and be able to do, and where they may continue to have questions and need help following the lesson.

Step 6: After several observation sessions, reflect on what positive changes can be made.

Once your network has been able to observe several teachers in their classrooms, the teachers should be able to identify recurring patterns that could be contributing to the problems of practice. Brainstorm how teachers can support one another, and what supports they may need from the school or district to make significant improvements in these areas.

Outcomes: Why are instructional rounds worth the time and effort?

Instructional rounds require lots of planning and teamwork, and you may struggle to see their value. When schools implement instructional rounds with fidelity, they support a culture of excellence and equity by:

Focusing collective attention on problems of practice which are rooted in data

Promoting consistency across all classrooms, so all students receive the same quality, level of instruction, differentiation, and intervention supports needed to be successful

Offering all teachers, the opportunity to improve their lesson planning and teaching strategies

Next Steps: How to move forward from here

A vital part of this strategy is the lead teacher or instructional coach who is experienced and skilled in leading instructional rounds. CSAS has coaches and consultants who can work with your school to implement instructional rounds and other transformational practices to improve student achievement dramatically. Learn how we can support your school or district with a free consultation call.

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Guide: How to implement Instructional Rounds in your school this year

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Instructional Rounds can help promote a collaborative Professional Learning Community for your teachers and provide space for teachers to individually reflect on their own instructional practices. This week, we want to help you implement Instructional Rounds in your school to create a better learning environment.

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Instructional rounds are one of the most valuable tools that a school or district can use to enhance teachers' pedagogical skills and develop a culture of collaboration. The goal of instructional rounds isn't to provide feedback to the teacher being observed, although this is an option if the observed teacher so desires. Rather, the primary purpose is for observing teachers to compare their own instructional practices with those of the teachers they observe. The chief benefit of this approach resides in the discussion that takes place among observing teachers at the end of the observation as well as in subsequent self-reflection.

Getting Started

Every teacher should participate in instructional rounds at least once a semester. Rounds should be facilitated by a lead teacher- someone colleagues respect as an exceptional teacher and recognize as a professional. Instructional coaches commonly have these characteristics. Administrators may also lead rounds, but it's important to clarify from the outset that the purpose is not to evaluate the teachers being observed.

The observed teachers typically have either volunteered or been asked to be the subject of rounds. Ideally, selected teachers are drawn from the pool of master teachers in a building or district-those veterans with proven ability to enhance the achievement of all students in their classes. This noted, any teacher might offer his or her classroom as a venue for rounds.

Conducting Rounds

Groups conducting rounds are best kept small-from three to five teachers, not counting the lead teacher. On the scheduled observation day, teachers being observed should alert their students that several teachers will visit their classroom. They might explain that the teachers are trying to learn from one another, just as students do.

When the observing teachers arrive, they should knock at the door and then quietly move to the back of the classroom, to some spot that doesn't disrupt the flow of instruction. There they observe and take notes regarding the teacher's use of specific instructional strategies. On an individual level, teachers can watch for strategies of particular interest to them, such as how the teacher uses questioning strategies or graphic organizers. Or the observation may have a common focus. For example, for one set of rounds, a school or district might decide that everyone will examine how a teacher communicates instructional objectives to students and keeps these objectives in the forefront of students' minds throughout the lesson.

With focus areas identified, observing teachers record what they see during the 10 to 15 minutes that a round typically lasts. Observing teachers do not score teachers on a rubric. Rather, they take notes on teacher behaviors that relate to the observation focus areas. At the end of the observation, the observing team exits the classroom, making sure to thank the teacher and students.

Debriefing Rounds

After each instructional round, members of the observing team convene to reflect on their experiences. They can do this in round-robin format, with each teacher commenting on what he or she noted.

Observers should not share what they have observed in a lesson with anyone outside the group of observers.

Observers should not share comments made during the debriefing with people outside the debriefing.

Observers should not offer suggestions to observed teachers unless the observed teachers explicitly ask for feedback.

As observing teachers take turns commenting, it's helpful to use a "pluses" and "deltas" format. An observing teacher begins by noting the positive things (pluses) that he or she saw and then speculates as to what produced the positive outcome. For example, the observing teacher might postulate that the classroom appeared well-managed because the students were aware of specific routines they were to use, such as raising their hands when asking a question and quietly transitioning from one activity to another. The observing teacher might suggest that students seemed highly engaged because the teacher maintained a lively pace and used quite a bit of humor.

Next, the observer mentions some questions or concerns (deltas) that he or she has about the observed teacher's use of strategies. For example, he or she may wonder why the observed teacher stayed in front of the class the entire period instead of moving around the classroom. At this point, other observing teachers might add their thoughts, sharing their pluses and deltas. For any given observation, an observing teacher can opt not to share his or her analysis with the group.

What Teachers Can Learn

Instructional rounds end with observing teachers identifying instructional practices they'll continue to use because they saw other teachers employing them effectively, practices they currently use that they will now reexamine in light of what they observed, and practices they don't currently use but will try because they saw other teachers use them well.

For example, an observer teacher might offer the following thoughts:As a result of what I saw today, I'm going to continue calling on students randomly when I ask questions. Other teachers seem to have success with this strategy as well. However, I'm going to reconsider the types of questions I ask. I think I focus too much on recall questions and don't challenge students enough. Finally, I've got some new ideas about routines I need to implement with my students.

Revitalized!

I've found that instructional rounds stimulate excitement and energy among faculty members almost immediately. When teachers have an opportunity to observe and interact with their colleagues in a nonevaluative way regarding instruction, everyone wins.

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The Art & Science of Teaching / Making the Most of Instructional Rounds - ASCD

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Instructional rounds are one of the most valuable tools that a school or district can use to enhance teachers' pedagogical skills and develop a culture of collaboration. The goal of instructional rounds isn't to provide feedback to the teacher being observed, although this is an option if the observ

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By Bryan Rebar
Instructional Partner
Florence Middle School When you are in classrooms today, we would like for you to consider the following as we look for how our teachers are strategically maximizing student learning at every turn. ► In what ways can students tell you what they are learning and why it is important? ► What is the teacher doing to support the individual and group learning needs of her/his students? ► What evidence can you gather that shows different instructional strategies and tasks in place to meet the specific needs of students? (Such as evidence of different learning tasks in the room or evidence of classroom structures or supports that allow students to engage with the content in different ways) (See FMS's complete PoP handout here)
Last spring, sitting in the library with the principal and assistant principal, posters covering the walls, the question that begged to be asked was "Where do we go from here?" We'd hosted educators from across the state, and we were eager to see what they'd found with regard to our self-identified problem of practice (PoP) which focused on differentiated instruction.

If you're not familiar with the ABPC Instructional Round process, you can read more about it here. Basically, teams come from other schools on the same day. Each team visits three FMS classrooms, guided by our PoP. The succinct version of our PoP looked like this:

Now the day was done. The planning and preparation for our experience hosting an Instructional Round had come to fruition. Before us lay posters with post-it notes and posters with quadrants, full of data about our school and our pursuit of differentiated instruction.

Our school leadership team at Florence Middle School in Florence, Alabama holds the belief that teachers are the changemakers. So the first question, clearly, was: How can we get this data from the IR experience into the hands of our teachers so that we can continue to collectively grow our professional practices?

As we sat and discussed what to do, we knew that getting timely feedback was key to planning for future professional development. It was decided that the quadrant posters developed by the visiting teams would be shared with FMS teachers at the next faculty meeting along with a graphic organizer to help capture teacher voice.
After school teams have visited three classrooms each, they create an affinity map based on evidence gathered, focused on the school's problem of practice. When the affinity maps are completed (each team places similar types of evidence together and identifies categories), teams are merged. Ideally, if there is an even number of teams, two teams work together using a Four-Quadrant Template:
The quadrant posters

I've joined up with ABPC's Cathy Gassenheimer to put together this "skinny" on the quadrant posters, because these posters are really the essence of the feedback you get from the visiting teams.

The upper left-hand quadrant identifies patterns. Participants look for evidence that was identified more than half of the classrooms (since teams have merged into pairs, they are looking across six classrooms, so "In 4/6 classrooms...")

The upper right-hand quadrant identifies contrasts, or outliers. For example, there may have been a classroom where students were identifying their own learning targets ("1/6 classrooms....")

The bottom left-hand quadrant is devoted to predictions, using this prompt: "If I was a student at this school and did everything expected related to the PoP, I would be able to...(for example) ...identify what I was expected to learn and ask for help, if needed.")

The bottom right-hand quadrant is devoted to questions, which is the opportunity for team members to offer questions that might lead to reflection and the development of next steps at the visited school. For example, if a PoP was related to student engagement, a reflection question might be: "In what ways can you assure that when students are in small groups they are working collaboratively and not independently?" or "In what ways can teachers monitor the work of small groups when they are leading a small group simultaneously?"

We hope that gives you the big idea. Here's the final quadrant from the teams visiting FMS:

What we did next

Following our Instructional Round, we gave teachers a few days to look over the data and complete their graphic organizers. We then took time from one of our weekly collaborative meetings to share out our personal reflections and dialogue about how we can improve in the area of differentiated instruction.

As a part of this process, teachers identified resources and other areas of assistance that they felt would help them improve their practice in this area of focus. Then, during each collaborative meeting, participating teachers shared out what support they felt would benefit them the most and recorded this information onto post-its.

An important part of this process was sharing the 4-Quadrant posters with teachers to help them reflect and draw their own conclusions about the content. Any questions that arose from the 4-quadrant posters, in particular the last one (shown above), were then used as discussion prompts in the collaborative meetings.

The post-its were gathered throughout the day as we went from meeting to meeting. Then our leadership team followed up by affinity mapping the teacher responses to look for trends.

What did we learn?

Teacher voice was consistent from collaborative team to collaborative team and several categories of needed support became apparent. We also learned through the experience of hosting an instructional round that our teachers like clear expectations and that they would like more focus on content-specific professional development.

Teachers want to work together with the district to develop a working definition of differentiated instruction and to set clear targets. Teachers want to see concrete examples of what this practice looks like in the middle grades. Teachers are eager to grow their practice and want to learn about content-specific strategies to use in their classrooms. They want a way to gather and build a collection of resources that are easily accessible by their collaborative team, curating an easy-access toolkit of best practices around differentiation.

What plans are unfolding?

The summer months were spent planning with school leadership teams, continuing to gather teacher voice, growing us forward in our instructional practices. First and foremost, school administration is committed to the concept that teachers need common planning time and will carry this into the future. This common planning time allows for our teachers to collaborate and find the best-practice strategies that can be used to differentiate student learning.

We truly have a faculty that is committed to reaching all learners by growing their professional practices. It is this time for collaboration that allows for teachers come together, engage in dialogue, and develop shared beliefs and goals. The collaborative planning time will also be used to identify individual student gaps and develop a toolkit of strategies that are aligned to meet the specific needs of students - including collaboratively created exemplar lessons and lesson-plan sharing.

Just as we advocate choice for our students, we will give teachers choice as we plan professional development opportunities. We want to be able to use some of our PD time to go visit other schools that are doing these practices well, so we can see them in action.

We have also made changes to our lesson plan format for the current year. This format now allows teachers to specifically identify the differentiation strategies they are implementing and allows for teachers to anticipate reteaching opportunities. It also allows teachers to develop essential questions at various levels of Webb's Depth of Knowledge to help scaffold student learning. The lesson plan template also highlights cross-curricular and real-world connections to engage student interests.

We're left with a choice

When presented with data from instructional rounds, you are left with a choice. You can either dismiss the information and continue on your current path, or you can take the time necessary to reflect, respond, and grow your practice. Getting the data from instructional rounds into the hands of teachers and taking the time to listen to their voices are enormously helpful in the effort to make lasting positive change. The momentum created by experiences like this has a real ripple effect - it drives and improves our instructional practices, ultimately impacting student achievement.

We are looking forward to going through another instructional round process soon to further identify areas of growth and areas of opportunity. At each IR opportunity, we'll reevaluate and adjust our problem of practice to reflect the everchanging needs of our campus.
Read a post about IR by ABPC consultant Pat Johnson:
Bryan Rebar started his teaching career in Cincinnati, Ohio, teaching grades 4-7 (reading, math and science) in a school for students with Autism and other spectrum disorders. He also taught middle school science in Texas and in the Florence (AL) City Schools, where he is now the Instructional Partner at Florence Middle School. He holds a BS in Education and a Master's in Middle Childhood Education with a focus on Reading, Mathematics, and Science. "What I'm Learning from ABPC's Instructional Rounds"
Why should you care about instructional rounds?

The greatest benefits to using instructional rounds as an educational leadership tool is that you have the freedom and choice to identify a problem of practice that is relevant to the greatest needs in your school. As an educational leader, the resulting data is meaningful and can be used to drive school improvement. The power of involving your school and teacher leaders in identifying the problem of practice and then analyzing the resulting data allows for shared accountability and builds collective efficacy.

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The Ripple Effect of Instructional Rounds

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"The greatest benefits to using instructional rounds as an educational leadership tool is that you have the freedom and choice to identify a problem of practice that is relevant to the greatest needs in your school." Instructional Partner Bryan Rebar shares what it's like to have an ABPC Instruction

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Collaborative Professional Learning & Peer Feedback Protocol

Based on Dr. Robert Marzano’s “Art and Science of Teaching” and “Making the Most of Instructional Rounds”, Dr. John Hattie and Dr. Viviane Robinson’s research on Visible Learning and Collective Efficacy, Bill and Melinda Gate’s Foundation’s North Carolina New Schools Framework, PrincipaI Kevin Adams, lnstructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning” by City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel.

The goal of education is student learning. When you walk into almost any school in the United States you’ll see adults who care deeply about students, but a great amount of variability among classrooms and a great amount of difference in the effectiveness of instruction. The goal has changed and schools are being asked to do something they weren’t asked to do many years ago….educate ALL children to a high level, yet we don’t always know how to do that for every child in every class. The Instructional Rounds model of professional collaboration, developed at Harvard Graduate School of Education , was based on the medical rounds model used by doctors and surgeons for many years. Through this process, educators develop a shared practice of observing, discussing, and analyzing learning and teaching.

Even in the lowest performing schools in America, there's at least one educator in the building that has mastered the art and science of teaching and learning, a classroom where ALL children learn at a high level every day. The process of instructional rounds open the doors of classrooms across the school where all teachers can see what works and have professional dialogue about the practice of teaching and how to reach all children. This is a collaborative approach where teachers aren't evaluative, but instead are a team of experts trying to solve an educational problem.

Marzano - What are Instructional Rounds?

Instructional Rounds are a practice of collaboration among experts to examine a problem and work together for a solution. In education, teachers and administrators work together to identify and sole common problems related to teaching and learning. The instructional rounds process is a structured and collaborative way for schools and teachers to:

- diagnose learning needs for students and educators

- focus on and improve learning tasks

- develop a shared vision of high-quality teaching and learning

- foster a collaborative culture that supports learning

It's important to understand that the instructional rounds process isn't evaluative. Instructional rounds is an inquiry process and all participants should expect to learn something from working with others. Instructional Rounds are about "fixing" an ineffective teacher. Rounds are about student learning in classrooms, how we as a system produce those impacts, and how we can move closer to producing the learning we want to see for ALL children.

"The challenge is that we are asking schools to do something they have never done before - educate ALL students to high levels - and we don't know how to do that in every classroom for every child." - Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman, and Lee Teitel (Instructional Rounds in Education)

Why do instructional rounds?

Instructional rounds is working together, as a team, to solve an educational problem. Committees build collective efficacy that together we can significantly and positively impact student learning. Several reason to do instructional rounds for school-wide instructional improvements include:

- To take improvement to the next level. Cycle of continuous improvement.

- To build a common understanding of effective learning and teaching. Define and demonstrate effective learning for all students in all classrooms.

- To reduce variability. Instructional coherence and consistency across all classrooms at the school.

- To focus the work. Find a problem and work together for a solution.

- To put educators in charge of their own learning. Focus on collective efficacy. It’s really behavior modification: Tell me what to do, and I’m going to resist it, but give me time, let me do it and see the results . . . and I’ll change my behavior.

- To provide data and inform professional development. This is part of a feedback loop in a cycle of continuous improvement.

The data from instructional rounds give us a more complete picture of student learning and bluntly show whether professional development has had an impact on student performance and whether we have adequately addressed the problem of practice. Educators opt in to do instructional rounds because it’s part of professional practice to continually inform and improve their practice. This finally gives us a structure to have conversations about instructional practice.

"Traditional methods of teachers working in isolation or in silos cannot meet the rigors of the current curriculum or the high expectations currently associated with instructional improvement that accountability models require" - Doyle, 2012

The Instructional Rounds Process

Instructional rounds is a 4 step process:

(1) Problem of Practice - Create a committee and identify a problem of practice. This includes the pre-observation or and collaborative discussion about the problem at hand and the observation of practice to follow.This will involve data and be focused on students' learning.

(2) Observation of Practice - This includes the learning walks and observation of teaching and learning in classrooms. The team of observers will examine all aspects of the problem through a student-centered lense that's focused on evidence and impact.

(3) Debriefing - This is a collaborative professional dialogue about what was observed and the impact on learning. This is not evaluative, but instead collaborative about effective teaching and learning. In the debriefing, the team will discuss potential solutions to the problem of practice.

(4) Next Level of Work - This includes implementing the strategies and/or solutions the team devised for the problem of practice. This always has a student-centered focus where the school practices systemic improvement across all classrooms and can use the collaborative process for continuous improvement.

“It is clear that closed classroom doors will not help us educate students to high levels. It is also clear that what happens in classrooms matters for student learning and we can do more together than we can do individually to improve learning and teaching . . . the image of the teacher behind the closed classroom door is giving way to an image of an open door, but many educators are not sure what to look for when they open the door or what to do with what they see.” – Elizabeth City

"R esearch shows that current models of professional development call for collaborative practices where teachers are actively engaged in their own learning" - (Archibald, Coggshall, Croft, & Goe, 2011; Gibbs, 2011; Hirsh & Killion, 2 2007; Learning Forward, 2011; Loveless, 2013; Tournaki, Lyublinskaya, & Carolan, 2011).

The goal in doing instructional rounds is to help schools and teachers develop effective and powerful teaching and learning on a large scale, not just isolated pockets of good teaching in the midst of sub-par and mediocre teaching. “Will doing rounds lead to an increase in student learning? Will it raise test scores?” The short answer is: by itself, no. It’s not a single silver bullet, but it’s part of a process of continuous school-wide instructional improvement and professional collaborative learning. . The focus is on what goes on in classrooms that anchors improvement efforts in the instructional core and the complex relationships among teachers, students, and learning. The rounds process provides a key source of data and a powerful feedback loop to tell educators whether their systemic improvement efforts are actually reaching the student’s level and having an impact on learning. The collaborative process of instructional rounds creates norms for all classrooms across the school. Instructional Rounds isn't about "fixing" teachers or evaluation, instead it's about collaboration for continued improvement in teaching and learning as a professional practice to improve instruction and student achievement.

"Although social change cannot come overnight, we must always work as though it were a possibility in the morning." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

References: City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education (p. 30). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving learning and teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2010). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Teacher Librarian, 37(3), 69. DeLuca, C., Klinger, D., Pyper, J., & Woods, J. (2015). Instructional rounds as a professional learning model for systemic implementation of assessment for learning. Assessment in education: principles, policy & practice, 22(1), 122-139. Marzano, R. J. (2011). Making the most of instructional rounds. Educational leadership, 68(5), 80-82. Roegman, R., & Riehl, C. (2012). Playing doctor with education: Considerations in using medical rounds as a model for instructional rounds. Journal of School Leadership, 22(5), 922-952. Stephens, M. (2011). Ensuring instruction changes: evidence based teaching–How can lesson study inform coaching, instructional rounds and learning walks. Journal of science and mathematics education in Southeast Asia, 34(1), 111-133. Teitel, L. (2009). Improving teaching and learning through instructional rounds. Harvard Education Letter, 25(3), 1-3.

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Principal’s Playbook - Instructional Rounds - Professional Learning & Peer Feedback Protocol

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Instructional Rounds Collaborative Professional Learning & Peer Feedback Protocol

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Teachers and administrators all over are trying to figure out how to support English Learners (ELs). One of the schools that I work with, United for Success Academy (UFSA), in Oakland, CA, has launched a concerted effort in the last year to address the needs of their ELs who comprise some 90 percent of the student body.

Teachers at this middle school have engaged in professional development on a range of instructional approaches including explicit academic vocabulary instruction, the use of sentence stems, and various structures for small group discussion.

This staff has been working diligently, but it's been hard to measure the impact of their efforts. Written assessments don't give us a complete picture of what students can verbally express -- of course, the intention is that spoken language will translate into high written performance, but these are also two separate things.

Instructional Rounds

Enter Instructional Rounds: a process adapted from the medical rounds model that doctors use in hospitals. Instructional Rounds help educators look closely at what is happening in classrooms in a systematic, purposeful and focused way. Given where United for Success Academy was this winter -- well into implementation of a number of strategies to support ELs -- it seemed worth trying.

The first step in an Instructional Rounds process is determining a "problem of practice." This is often framed as a question around which a site wants to gather some data. UFSA's instructional leadership team proposed the question, "What are our students saying?" Almost all of the teachers, as well as the administrators and a site-coach, participated in the rounds that took place over three days. In small groups, teachers visited four of their colleague's classrooms for 20 minutes each, looking for evidence related to the problem of practice.

One of the most challenging aspects with Rounds is that the evidence must be observational and non-judgmental. When visiting classes, UFSA's teachers took notes on anything related to the question, "What are our students saying?" This included direct quotes from students, teacher-directions related to discussion and dialogue, and quantitative data on how many students responded to a teacher's question or engaged in a group discussion. Noted were pieces of evidence such as: "teacher asked a question and called on a student," "student glanced down at the sentence stems that were taped to his desk before responding," and "student said... ."

The Results

After visiting classrooms participants engaged in lengthy reflection and debrief protocols. They tried to make sense of the data they'd gathered without jumping to conclusions or solutions. They discovered that there were many ways that students were engaged in discussion, (whole group, small group, partner-talk) that some students demonstrated developing usage of "academic vocabulary," and that teachers were using a number of effective strategies such as, "equity sticks," sentence stems, and modeling by using academic language. Teachers felt good; they saw evidence that they were on the right track.

A Big Question Emerges

Looking at the data, one teacher posed a question that caused much reflection: Is it possible for one of our students to come to school on Monday morning and not speak for the entire week? Could they actually travel through all their classes and never speak?

Most teachers nodded their heads. One thing they'd all noticed was that there was less student-talk than they'd expected, assumed, and hoped. There were invitations to speak, some structures established, but there still wasn't as much talk as they wanted. And then as they thought about specific kids in their classes, they reflected that, yes, it was possible that some students could go for a week, or two, or maybe even a month without speaking. Teachers began to think and talk about how to address and change this.

The Research

As a school improvement coach, I've been in dozens, perhaps hundreds of classrooms where ELs predominate. Over and over I notice that kids aren't talking much. The research also says this. It seems as if every other week there's an article saying that ELs need to speak more, need structure and support and a bank of words to choose from, and more than anything, they need to speak to each other more. I often want to tell teachers, "Just let them talk!," but I know how that might be received.

Instructional Rounds was a powerful process at UFSA for teachers to get in to each other's classrooms and see what students are saying, doing, and learning. After Rounds, many teachers reflected, "We need to get our kids talking more, every single one of them." I'm excited to see what happens in the next few of months as they implement more refined strategies for ELs. And in mid-April, they'll engage in Instructional Rounds again.

Suggested resources:
Improving Teaching and Learning through Instructional Rounds Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning

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Teachers and administrators all over are trying to figure out how to support English Learners (ELs). One of the schools that I work with, United for Success Academy (UFSA), in Oakland, CA, has launched a concerted effort in the last year to address the needs of their ELs who comprise some 90 percent of the student body.

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When teachers conduct instructional rounds, they focus on why a problem of practice persists schoolwide—and on what they can do about it.

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When a boy from an affluent Georgia suburb shot six fellow students in spring 1999, a reporter labeled his actions "a desperate cry for attention" (Pilcher, 1999c). As high-profile school shootings became a seemingly regular feature of life, public discussion of school violence broadened to include expressions of compassion. Press accounts sympathetically portrayed students who, because of race, sexual orientation, appearance, or simply the awkwardness of adolescence, were tormented and excluded from the mainstream of school life.

Commentators charged that schools such as Colorado's Columbine High School ignored or encouraged "casual cruelty . . . small slights and public humiliations"-means by which favored students harassed classmates and "reinforced the rigid high school caste system" (Kogan, 1999). Calls for retribution were joined by pleas for schools to better reach out to alienated and troubled youth.

In practice, however, the policies inspired by school shootings owe little to compassion. Policymakers across the United States have earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade school security. Schools have hired armed guards, redesigned entryways, and installed motion-sensitive cameras. Some schools have mandated that backpacks be made of clear plastic; others have banned dark clothing. Columbine High School announced a policy of "zero tolerance" for "cruelty, harassment, excessive teasing, discrimination, violence, [and] intimidation" (Kenworthy, 1999). Meanwhile, in Georgia, legislators passed a measure that would expel students for bullying (Bixler &amp; Bennett, 1999). "We have zero tolerance on other things," said the bill's sponsor. "Why not zero tolerance on violent behavior?"

Officials at Columbine and other schools needed to reassure students that they were safe, and factors beyond their control, including the ready availability of guns and the threat of lawsuits, complicate administrators' work. Still, one cannot promote tolerance through a policy of zero tolerance. Any effort to draw in advance a firm line around the ambiguities of human interaction invites only arbitrariness and exclusion. Such a policy abandons the educational mission of the schools.

Retribution: An Ill-Advised Reaction

Plans to intensify the policing of students come despite the fact that (1) youth violence is declining, (2) school shootings remain exceedingly rare-far less common than gun violence in children's own homes, and (3) police methods failed to protect children in the very schools where attacks generated national concern. A police officer on duty at Columbine, for instance, had no impact on the crisis there. Video surveillance cameras, police dogs, and an armed sheriff's deputy could not protect students at Georgia's Heritage High School. Rather, assistant principal Cecil Brinkley convinced T. J. Solomon to put down his gun and then embraced the youth.

One hundred years ago, reformers created the juvenile court to divert troubled children from the criminal justice system into a more nurturing institution. Decades of research confirmed the effectiveness of rehabilitative approaches in preventing crime. Nevertheless, juvenile justice increasingly took on the punitive qualities of the adult prison system (Polier, 1989). Over the last decade, more and more juveniles have been tried as adults, and thousands are being sent to adult prisons, many for nonviolent offenses. The recent school shootings have merely accentuated federal, state, and local lawmaking aimed at imposing increasingly harsh punishments on young offenders.

Obstacles to structuring compassion into the fabric of the schools are not new. Throughout the 20th century, periodic panics arising out of social and political conflicts in the United States have fed images of juvenile disorder and discouraged progressive educational practices (Perlstein, in press). Meanwhile, the long-standing division of U.S. high school students into "in" groups and outsiders-hierarchically ordered cliques through which youth rehearse the social inequalities of the adult world-has discouraged a school culture of inclusiveness.

A Misdiagnosis of Cause

Unlike urban youth violence, which popular accounts portray as the reflection of inner-city norms, violence perpetrated by suburban youth is attributed to what has been called an environment that "may leave too many young people in a vacuum, cut off from both parents and other members of the community" (Scherer &amp; Coeyman, 1999). And yet, the places where high-profile school shootings have occurred are not places where youth are cut off from "traditional" or "mainstream" values. Rather, suburban violence has occurred in communities that are defined as much by their churches as by generic fast-food outlets, huge Wal-Marts, and multiplex movie theaters showing much the same fare as those in Los Angeles or New York.

Mass school shootings have occurred in places where the tensions of U.S. life express themselves with particular force and where the young are given inadequate support in finding their own way in a difficult world. Like the clichéd question that has echoed after each suburban shooting-"How could it have happened here?"-responses that ignore the social fissures of U.S. life not only deny compassion to urban youth but also misdiagnose the nature of suburban school violence.

When police and reporters interviewed students at Georgia's Heritage High School about the young man who shot six classmates, the exchanges repeated a formula set in a number of earlier shootings, in which a young man's professions of affection turned deadly when a young woman sought her freedom (Perlstein, 1998). "I heard you had broken up with your girlfriend," a friend remarked to 15-year-old T. J. Solomon right before he opened fire on his schoolmates. "Yeah, I'm real mad about it," came the reply (Schneider, 1999).

A young man reacting to a failed relationship not with sadness but with rage is so normal that authorities were unable to "suggest a motive" for the shooting, and reporters turned to the same set of clichés that had trivialized the role of misogynistic possessiveness in earlier school shootings. Solomon was "upset over a broken romance," "a Boy Scout with a broken heart," a "typical teen who grew sullen after his girlfriend recently dumped him" (Preston, 1999; Pilcher, 1999a, b, c).

Underlying Social Issues

Echoing once-popular rationales for treating domestic violence as a private matter and a crime of passion, reporters' sentimental invocations of romance obscure and trivialize the tense, asymmetrical gender relations of youth and the centrality of these relations in school life. Moreover, revelations that perpetrators of school violence were frequently baited mercilessly with accusations of being gay have exposed the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in U.S. schools-for both girls and boys. The stigmatization of girls and the imposition of narrow standards of behavior on all boys serve as a model for other forms of bias and discrimination in school.

By expressing revulsion against degraded females and males identified with them, homophobia, Margaret Smith Crocco remarks, is integral to the "system of sexualized male supremacy" perpetuated in schools (Crocco, in press). Frequently overlooked by teachers and administrators, bullying, sexual harassment, and other such activities that students use to assert power and maintain their place in the pecking order are simultaneously pervasive and invisible. Together, they constitute the normal, systematic form of student violence in schools.

Ironically, at the same time that girls are victimized at school, boys are poorly served by their privilege. They achieve far less than girls in school and get into far more trouble. As obstacles to girls' educational opportunities have diminished, U.S. ideals of masculinity-the valorization of isolation and aggression, and taboos against displaying emotions other than anger-have accentuated boys' academic and behavioral difficulties (Pollack, 1998).

The chances of creating a more just gender order in schools are promising in part because this is one case in which even the privileged would benefit from equity. Zero-tolerance policies and the preoccupation with sensational shootings poorly protect even affluent white boys from rapidly rising rates of suicide and other forms of self-inflicted violence.

Other boys are even more at risk. Whereas affluent white boys can often call on a nexus of supportive institutions if they get into trouble, the burdens of boyhood fall particularly hard on poor and minority youth, who are more likely to face punishment than nurturance. Indeed, poor and minority youth often turn to acts of violence because they have come to believe that school authorities will not protect them (Prothrow-Stith, 1991).

Preoccupation with gun violence in schools diverts attention from far more common forms of violence, such as bullying, sexual harassment, suicide, and unequal treatment.

Punishment is invariably applied inequitably.

Punishment presupposes that students understand what types of actions are not permitted, a level of understanding that many elementary and secondary students do not possess.

The sources of school violence lie in complicated, ambiguous arenas of social life, matters requiring study if students are to develop alternative behaviors and attitudes.

The Challenge for Educators

Educators can do better than the currently popular punitive approaches to school violence. To do so, they need to challenge the hierarchical division of students by curricular track, extracurricular activities, and school culture. For example, educators must acknowledge that when some students are labeled "gifted," the others are marked as "giftless"-roles having more to do with social status than with native talent or the provision of appropriate, individualized instruction.

Reconfiguring schools to diminish institutional obstacles to school safety is no easy task but has the potential to enrich the education of all. An effective school safety policy acknowledges that just as dilemmas pervade the task of creating a good society, dilemmas pervade the task of creating safe schools. In a society pulling students simultaneously in multiple directions, youth, both victims and victimizers, are necessarily conflicted. Instead of trivializing the pains and conflicts of youth or responding to difficult questions with embarrassed silence, educators should treat the issues of gender within the curriculum with the same attentiveness they bring to issues of civic duty or career. Students' effort to make sense of their own lives will necessarily illuminate fundamental aspects of the wider society. They know from their lives, if not from their studies, that they can sometimes cross social boundaries and at other moments find the same boundaries impermeable. Such efforts should not be consigned to the margins of the curriculum.

Once educators conceptualize school safety as a curricular issue rather than a disciplinary one, they can bring a plethora of well-established approaches to dealing with it. Investigations of family life and history can counter-balance lessons celebrating military history. The stories and literature of those at the margins can infuse the curriculum. Classes can study not only different voices but also the interplay of differences and commonalities. Students can wrestle with real dilemmas of human rights as they apply to children, rather than parrot "contracts" with which teachers seek to legitimize their rules of classroom behavior.

inculcating a critique of misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of bias while fostering free-wheeling inquiry;

helping students understand the world from different perspectives-male and female, heterosexual and homosexual-while also understanding that there is no one "female" or "heterosexual" way of seeing the world;

using their authority to protect the disenfranchised from hateful speech while fostering the intellectual and moral agency of each student; and

The public expressions of compassion catalyzed by the recent school shootings, together with educators' compassionate impulses, have created a rare opportunity to move school policies and practices away from retribution. Such an effort by educators will require educators to win public support. Still, educators cannot create safe schools by ignoring the tensions that characterize contemporary life in the United States. They cannot treat school safety as a technical problem of administration. They can only create an environment and an opportunity that encourage students to think critically and compassionately about the society in which they live and about their individual and collective places in it. Such an effort does far more to protect schoolchildren than do ill-conceived, counterproductive campaigns to police youth.

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Failing at Kindness: Why Fear of Violence Endangers Children

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When a boy from an affluent Georgia suburb shot six fellow students in spring 1999, a reporter labeled his actions "a desperate cry for attention" (Pilcher, 1999c). As high-profile school shootings became a seemingly regular feature of life, public discussion of school violence broadened to include expressions of compassion.

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As students enter the I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, they're greeted not with a gauntlet of metal detectors and security guards, but with cheers, hugs, and breakfast. Most are from low-income families, and prior to enrolling in the school, they were scoring so low on achievement tests (in the 1st and 2nd percentile) that former teachers wrote them off as lost causes. The unorthodox greeting is part of a comprehensive effort to create a loving environment for these students in grades 1-8-an approach that, as it turns out, reflects emerging research on school safety and supporting the needs of today's learners.

Studies show that today's learners bring many psychological and emotional burdens to school. An analysis of data for nearly 100,000 U.S. children found that 48 percent under age 17 have endured at least one adverse childhood experience (exposure to violence; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; deprivation, neglect, or social discrimination; or family discord or divorce) (Bethell et al., 2014). Such experiences can create post-traumatic stress disorder, similar to what combat soldiers often experience, and leave children less trusting, less able to focus on learning, and more prone to aggressive or violent behavior.

In addition, today's youth feel more anxious, more depressed, more detached, and less hopeful about the future than previous generations. Researcher Jean Twenge (2018) notes, for example, that individuals born after 1995 are witnessing a growing chasm between the haves and have nots in modern society and are thus feeling more anxious about the future. At the same time, today's teens spend an average of 9 hours per day in front of screens (phones, computers, and TVs); yet many studies, including Twenge's own, have found a causal link between teens' screen time and mental health issues, including increasing depression and anxiety after just one hour of screen time per day. All of this adds up to a generation of students that is, in general, more fragile, detached, and depressed than previous generations.

These same students often find themselves in schools that, as one researcher put it, have become "hardened" (Hoover, 2019), equipped with sealed doors, cameras, metal detectors, and school resource officers. Studies suggest, though, that while such measures may remove immediate threats, they do little to change students' behavior or feelings of safety.

For example, a study of a North Carolina program that added school resource officers in 471 middle schools to reduce disciplinary referrals found the officers' presence in these schools did not reduce such infractions (Anderson, 2018). Similarly, a study of random metal detector searches for weapons and drugs in two Florida districts found that it led to fewer students bringing weapons to school or selling drugs, but didn't reduce fights on campus or make students less likely to skip school out of concern for their safety (Bhatt & Davis, 2018).

In the aftermath of school shootings, shoring up the physical safety of schools makes sense-as does consistent enforcement of disciplinary codes. Yet studies suggest the most effective approaches to school safety also address students' emotional and psychological safety.

One such whole-school intervention, the Friendly Schools program, seeks to improve school climate and reduce bullying by showing students how to engage in positive social interactions, training school personnel to manage bullying behaviors effectively, and engaging families in support of the effort with take-home activities and newsletters. A rigorous study found this intervention reduced bullying behaviors as well as student depression, anxiety, and loneliness, while increasing students' positive perceptions of school safety (Cross et al., 2018).

The best approaches, therefore, appear to be multifaceted responses that focus on creating positive school cultures to support students' well-being, providing power under kids rather than asserting power over them. Creating school environments where students feel emotionally safe and valued as individuals not only helps with mental health issues and preventing violence and bullying, but also supports better student achievement. A study of New York City high schools (Davis & Warner, 2018), for example, found that students' perception of school climate affects academic achievement more than socioeconomic characteristics.

Such is the case with the I Promise School, where students, who are called the "Chosen Ones," are making significant strides in learning-4th graders moved from the second percentile in mathematics achievement last year to the 30th this year.

Yes, the school (a regular public school) has an important benefactor, basketball star LeBron James (Green, 2019). Its walls are bedecked with his posters and inspirational quotes from James, and he has funded a fully stocked food pantry. Yet its principal, Brandi Davis, notes that the sense of safety, security, and support her school provides students is something money can't buy. "It doesn't take money to build relationships," she notes. "It doesn't take money for you to teach students how to love."

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Research Matters / Beyond Locks and Drills

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As students enter the I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, they're greeted not with a gauntlet of metal detectors and security guards, but with cheers, hugs, and breakfast. Most are from low-income families, and prior to enrolling in the school, they were scoring so low on achievement tests (in the 1st and 2nd percentile) that former teachers wrote them off as lost causes.

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While it is often cited that home-based factors are, on average, the most significant influence on student achievement (Hanushek, 2016), research also confirms that high-quality teaching can supersede the adverse effects associated with lower parent education, less reading material in the home, and limited access to medical care, especially for students living with economic instability (Wenglinsky, 2002). We should allow nothing to get in the way of providing students with the high-quality teaching they need to succeed.

To be sure, teaching quality may vary within a school. But when teachers have time and support to collaborate on instructional topics-such as examining assessment data and student work or planning instruction with specific students in mind-they tend to make stronger instructional decisions and improve their practice faster (Ronfeldt, 2007). Further, effective collaboration among teachers makes it possible for each of their students to benefit from the expertise, experience, and diverse perspectives within the teaching team.

In schools that serve students living with economic instability, however, teachers' collaborative instructional planning time is too often hijacked by urgent problems related to students' basic needs. This ultimately does these students a disservice. Students living in poverty already experience enough forms of systemic inequity, as they are more likely to attend schools with inadequate per-pupil spending, outdated instructional resources, or a lack of highly qualified and experienced teachers. School leaders committed to equity must identify family support personnel and foster their partnerships with teachers so that students' nonacademic needs can be met without diverting teachers' attention from instruction.

High-quality teaching and learning begin with the relationships that teachers build with students. The information about students and their families that teachers strategically gather in informal and formal ways throughout the school year allows them to design instruction that makes learning relevant to students' lives and helps them get ready for rigor.

In the process of building their knowledge of students, however, teachers may learn about adverse conditions in their students' home lives-such as food insecurity, housing instability, and health concerns-that work against the students' readiness to learn. Kids can't learn when they are concerned about whether they have somewhere safe to sleep that night, and teachers can't teach while concerned about their students' well-being. It's excruciating to see these conditions and not address them. But when teachers take on challenging responsibilities that lie beyond their professional purview, they deplete the time and attention needed for the work that is uniquely theirs: Putting their specialized knowledge to work to help students become more powerful learners. This is where the inequity lies: Students who have the greatest need for teachers' attention to be focused on teaching and learning often have teachers who are taking on tasks beyond their sphere of primary professional influence.

As the pandemic has waxed and waned over the past few years, it has provided an up-close look at the conditions students must manage at home. Many schools have responded by hiring family liaisons, home-school coordinators, or social workers, or by assigning family support responsibilities to existing noninstructional personnel.

These individuals often do have the time, training, and information about community resources required to support families, but they do not always have the relevant information and family relationships that teachers have. School leaders need to foster partnership routines that ensure the family concerns uncovered by teachers can be met with support from these colleagues, without diverting teachers' instructional attention.

To make sure family support personnel form partnerships with teachers that keep instruction at the center, school leaders must address three common challenges.

When teachers have been trusted with sensitive information about families' economic instability, they may feel reluctant to share this information. Family members, likewise, may feel hesitant, or even betrayed, if information they've shared in confidence reaches new ears.

However, if family support personnel can spend time in classrooms; join in team meetings where students and student work are discussed; or collaborate with teachers in planning for family-engagement activities like classroom open houses or family recipe swaps, this can help facilitate stronger school-family partnerships. It can help close any gaps families may feel between their primary point of contact-the teacher-and the support personnel prepared to offer resources that can help their home lives.

Time is also a factor with facilitating partnerships. In the time it takes for teachers to track down the right person to adequately address a family's needs, it's often easier to do it themselves. Further, the needs of families living in poverty are often urgent, which creates increased pressure to secure a timely response. Going through a third person can feel like an inefficient game of telephone.

School and district leaders can help establish communication routines that support efficient connections with the right personnel and effective exchanges with timely feedback loops so teachers know someone is working on a solution and can check for status updates when necessary.

Teachers are in a service position. When they have a child who is suffering in front of them every day, the stakes feel high. If they do not have confidence that family support providers can meet their student's needs, they may feel a need to take the supporting role on themselves.

This tendency can be diminished when school leaders elevate the services and success stories of family support personnel. They might make time in staff meetings or space in newsletters for family support personnel to shine. Educating the faculty about the resources at their disposal or sharing success stories of families who are in a better place because of these supports will help build trust between teachers and these support staff.

In schools where students arrive ready to learn each day, teachers can focus their time on the types of instructional activities that make them and their students smarter. Kids can't learn when their stomachs ache with hunger, and teachers can't teach when their hearts ache for their students. Schools need family support personnel to help with students' non-instructional needs. While many school leaders invested in this type of support during the pandemic, they should bolster that investment and safeguard instructional equity by supporting teachers and support personnel to play complementary roles, ensuring every student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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While it is often cited that home-based factors are, on average, the most significant influence on student achievement (Hanushek, 2016), research also confirms that high-quality teaching can supersede the adverse effects associated with lower parent education, less reading material in the home, and limited access to medical care, especially for students living with economic instability (Wenglinsky, 2002).

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Eric Schaps has been a contributor to Educational Leadership.Learn More

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Building a strong sense of community in schools is both important and doable.

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Leading schools is a tough job. Momentous responsibilities coupled with unpredictable challenges fuel frequent turnover. That's why it behooves districts to prioritize ongoing support and development for principals and other school leadership roles, regardless of what stage of the leadership continuum individuals are in.

In their session, Cunningham-Morris and Pajardo focused on the ASCD Leadership Development Framework, first developed in 2008 and applied in their book alongside their own tools and reflection practices. The research-based framework identifies the core characteristics, knowledge, and skills of effective instructional leadership to support leader growth at the school and district level.

"The use of this framework is not just for principals-it's for [every educator's] leadership growth," said Cunningham-Morris. "Too often we focus on what our deficits are as a profession. Instead, we should focus on what our strengths are and how we use them to uplift the areas of challenge that we have."

Good leadership starts with educators' own learning about how they can develop as leaders, Cunningham-Morris and Pajardo told the audience. The ASCD framework for strong leadership development at every stage is oriented around four important roles that leaders play. These roles can provide clear targets to current and future leaders, as well as those who support them, for actions that will most support instructional leadership, they said.

1. Principal as Visionary: This role is all about how a leader collaboratively creates a vision and aligns practices, processes, and programs to the realization of that vision. This includes articulating, communicating, and leading the collaborative implementation and ongoing revision of the school's mission and vision; and aligning and basing all decisions, practices, policies, and resources (e.g., human capital, time, budgetary, and facilities) on the school's mission and vision.

2. Principal as Instructional Leader: This role focuses on providing differentiated feedback, supervision, and evaluation of staff; building both collective and individual capacity through professional learning communities, coaching, and supervision; and aligning research-based practices to instruction.

3. Principal as Engager: In this role, leaders embody an "unwavering commitment" to the whole child, said Pajardo, strengthening social-emotional learning and wellness. They engage all stakeholders, including the business community and caregivers, around supporting that mission.

4. Principal as Learner and Collaborator: In this role, leaders purposefully tend to the professional learning of both themselves and their staff, such as facilitating job-embedded PD, nurturing distributed leadership, and modeling reflective practices.

There are two pathways of support for utilizing the framework and imbuing these qualities, Cunningham-Morris told the audience. The first is individual professional growth and chances to apply that learning in real life, where leaders create their own plans and execute them to bolster the practices, structures, and processes essential for their development in each of the four roles.

The second is a systems-level pathway for leadership-applying the framework's content to district-wide approaches like development programs and district succession planning. This approach focuses on developing aspiring leaders, matching principals' skills to their assignments, and planning transitions during leadership changes.

Such visibility around leadership positions gives aspiring leaders a more accurate picture of what the job requires.

"We know that the more reflective you are, the more effective you are," said Cunningham-Morris, stressing the practice of ongoing self-reflection as a helpful piece of utilizing the framework. If leaders don't take the time to ask themselves questions, "they'll end up making the same mistakes over and over."

The presenters suggested continuously reflecting on three questions: Where am I now? Where am I going? How am I going to get there?

One way to guide reflection is to think about it as a cycle to revisit, Cunningham-Morris and Pajardo said. Each area of reflection includes questions to ponder (see fig. 1).

Source: Hall, P. A., Cunningham-Morris, A., Childs-Bowen, D., Pajardo, P., & Simeral, A. A. (2016). The principal influence: A framework for developing leadership capacity in principals. ASCD.

For example, "the ability to accurately assess" refers to how well leaders can assess their own leadership actions: What's the evidence that the decisions I'm making and the actions I'm taking are actually impacting students, staff, and community?

When Pajardo became a principal, she told attendees, she "had to have focus groups with staff regularly to get feedback on how [her] actions were impacting them," she said. "I can't just assume; I need to ask."

The leadership pipeline is going to look different depending on each district's context. The authors ended the session by reminding educators that they don't have to start this work from scratch-there are framework tools and PD resources schools can adapt to develop a well-rounded leadership pipeline that grows and tends to leaders in all areas of the district.

"Choice is the key to differentiation," said Cunningham-Morris. "It's not one-size-fits-all. People are growing in different areas, have different needs, and can choose how they want to move forward with their leadership plans."

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School Leadership Development? There's a Framework for That - ASCD

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Leading schools is a tough job. Momentous responsibilities coupled with unpredictable challenges fuel frequent turnover. That's why it behooves districts to prioritize ongoing support and development for principals and other school leadership roles, regardless of what stage of the leadership continu

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This post is excerpted from the March 2018 issue of English Journal. For this issue, editors Julie Gorlewski and David Gorlewski invited three current leaders-Jocelyn Chadwick, Leigh Patel, and Ken Lindblom-to respond to a series of questions in order to offer a broader perspective on the concept of leadership in education.
EJ: What does "leadership in education" mean to you?
Jocelyn A. Chadwick: As Carol Gilligan asserts, leadership at times requires a negotiative discourse. At other times, it is linear, objective, and singular with leaders needing to stand alone, if necessary, for ethical reasons. Effective leadership is always understanding and probing the audience to inform oneself. Leadership is tapping into human resources to provide the highest level of service.

Leadership is not believing your own press; and leadership is never forgetting the why and the ethics of the mission and all those individuals-teachers and students-who have placed their trust in you.

Leigh Patel: First and foremost, leadership in education must marshal a humble stewardship of learning. At this moment, we are flush with well-paid leaders in education who have much to say about innovation but precious little to say about learning, and even less to say about the population-level patterns of denied access to education.

Leadership in education must be able to reckon with the legacies and the shortcomings of Eurocentric frames of human development that are individualistic and exist for the purpose of achievement and domination.

In kind, it must also know of epistemologies that aren't simply counter to Eurocentric empire, but are grounded in what came before, . . . and what is possible when we prioritize relation and connectivity over achievement and certificates.

If an educational leader does not know what kind of learning took place in Noir Marron communities, then I believe they, minimally, have much to learn about learning and its steady relationship to freedom. I think it is difficult to be an education leader who has only learned about one narrow form of being on this planet.

Ken Lindblom: Leadership in education means always keeping the learning of the students as the only goal. Keeping that front and center will always keep an education leader focused on the right things.

Of course, that means doing everything necessary to support students and teachers. It means ensuring that teachers have everything they need to do their jobs well.

It means keeping up on the latest knowledge in teaching, content, and organizational theory. It means motivating and educating. It means keeping unproductive, even hostile, external forces at bay, and it means supporting societal change that will increase all students' learning. It means advocating externally and internally for student learning.

It means doing everything necessary to ensure all students have all they need (e.g., food, quiet space, safety) to be able to learn at their best. It means providing a professional context that allows-and obligates-teachers to do what they know is best for their students' learning, allowing them to ignore, if needed, anything that could impede student learning.

We have a "bottom line" in education: it is student learning-and standardized exams don't reflect student learning well enough to be reliable measures on their own.

Jocelyn A. Chadwick is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and author of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. Ken Lindblom is an associate professor of English and dean of the School of Professional Development at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York.

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What Does Leadership in Education Mean to You? - NCTE

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This post is excerpted from the March 2018 issue of English Journal. For this issue, editors Julie Gorlewski and David Gorlewski invited three current leaders-Jocelyn Chadwick, Leigh Patel, and Ken Lindblom-to respond to a series of questions in order to offer a broader perspective on the concept of leadership in education.

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Abstract

Perspective 1:

Teachers are well-intentioned, hard-working people who care about students.

Perspective 2:

It's not about information.

Perspective 3:

Everyone has their own vision of success.

Perspective 4:

Resistance makes perfect sense to the person

who's resisting.

Perspective 5:

Every situation is best approached by listening first.

Here's how principals, coaches, and other leaders can sustain the vitality they bring to the job.

Credit: This content is subject to copyright.

Abstract

Perspective 1:

Teachers are well-intentioned, hard-working people who care about students.

Perspective 2:

It's not about information.

Perspective 3:

Everyone has their own vision of success.

Perspective 4:

Resistance makes perfect sense to the person

who's resisting.

Perspective 5:

Every situation is best approached by listening first.

New school leaders typically start out full of enthusiasm. They're going to make a difference by bringing about changes that benefit students. They'll support teacher growth while creating an environment of collegiality and success. They'll lead by sharing helpful information, data, and practices. They are energized!

And then, sometime in their first year, these new leaders often find themselves disappointed, exhausted, and full of self-doubt. Their efforts have been met with apathy or resistance. Their initiatives have encountered unexpected obstacles. They thought they were well-liked professionals, but sometimes they feel like they are amateurs, imposters, or monsters.

When new principals, coaches, curriculum developers, special education consultants, or others in schoolwide leadership positions find themselves in these situations, they often redouble their efforts. They send more e-mails, provide more explanations at staff meetings, work longer days, and attempt to prove their qualifications by showing extreme competence in all they do. But these efforts often merely dig the new school leader deeper into exhaustion and despair, like a driver who tries to get the car out of mud or snow by pressing harder on the accelerator and as a result mires the car more deeply. What's needed is not harder work, but a shift in perspectives.

Here are five perspectives that helped me when I was an elementary school principal, a reading program coordinator, and a literacy coach. I have shared these perspectives in workshops, conference presentations, and publications and I find they have been helpful to other educators around the world. Reflecting on these five shifts can make all the difference in the success of school leaders, old and new.

Perspective 1:

Teachers are well-intentioned, hard-working people who care about students.

This first perspective often seems obvious to everyone who works in schools. They think, "Of course teachers are good people." However, on further reflection, school leaders sometimes find that their everyday thoughts and actions don't always reflect this belief.

New school leaders sometimes spend their energies sorting out which teachers are the hard-working ones, the doers, the ones who care about students-and which teachers aren't. They make a mental list of the teachers who appear innovative, the teachers who seem old-fashioned, the younger teachers (whom they assume will be more energetic), the veteran teachers (whom they assume are stuck in their ways), the teachers who need help, the teachers who don't seem to care, and so on. This mental sorting often reflects opinions based on superficial interactions and a lot of judging.

Although school leaders may assume that these inner thoughts are not evident to others, that's often not the case. School leaders may hint at their thoughts by subtly implying dissatisfaction-for instance, saying "We have a lot of work to do to bring the curriculum to life in every math classroom at school"-or by subconscious body language, such as a shift of the shoulders or a crossing of the legs when a particular teacher is voicing an opinion.

As humans, we're hardwired to sense danger, which in the modern world may mean a supervisor's lack of trust in one's work or a colleague's intention to reshape our practices even though she doesn't fully understand the context of our work. Typically, teachers and others in such situations don't articulate their concerns explicitly; in fact, they may not even be consciously aware of them. Rather, they experience a general sense of mistrust or dissatisfaction with the school leader, which often spirals into low morale and dysfunction in the entire school.

The concept of "giving an A" (Zander & Zander, 2002) can be helpful to new school leaders. With this perspective, one approaches all people with the assumption that they deserve a grade of A. For school leaders, this means that all teachers and other staff are considered A-quality teachers, teaching assistants, specialists, custodians, and so forth. If certain employees are not performing at their best, these leaders assume it's because something has gotten in the way of the employees' success, not because they are poor-quality employees. The leader's job, then, is to help people figure out what's getting in the way and remove those obstacles so that everyone's innate " A-ness" shines through.

Perspective 2:

It's not about information.

New school leaders are often eager learners who take graduate courses, attend professional conferences, and read extensively in their field. That's excellent. But as a result of their own learning, new school leaders are sometimes eager to share their knowledge with others, under the assumption that if others understand what the leader understands, everyone will be onboard with the leader's ideas. To their disappointment, these leaders often find their well-intentioned information-sharing rejected or ignored.

At play here is the phenomenon-recognized by researchers in fields such as cognitive science, linguistics, and political science-that people's beliefs will often supersede information that contradicts those beliefs (Dossey, 2016). So when school leaders share information that teachers are not ready to believe, the information is often ignored or contradicted. Worse, the purveyor of such information may be labeled as a know-it-all or pushy.

When school leaders understand the limits of information, they start with beliefs and values. They do so by focusing on a passion that virtually every teacher shares: the well-being and success of students. By focusing on the teachers' care for their students, leaders start with what drives most teachers to pay attention and to open up to others' ideas. Then, savvy leaders enact a problem-solving cycle that enables teachers to explore any challenges preventing their students' successes and identify what they-the teachers-want to learn to implement the strategies they believe will help (Toll, 2017). Teachers are less likely to reject new information that contradicts their beliefs when they have control over what they learn and how they learn it (Calvert, 2016).

Perspective 3:

Everyone has their own vision of success.

Some preparation programs encourage leaders to develop a vision for their school or their program and then find ways to get others to "buy into" that vision. In other words, the leader's task is to market his or her ideas to others.

Such an approach is problematic for several reasons. First, it puts the decision-making power entirely in the domain of the school leader. Second, it assumes that the school leader knows what is best for every teacher and every situation in the school. And third, it fails to recognize that most people don't like to be "sold" anything; people want to feel that they are making choices in their own lives. It is no wonder, then, that school leaders who announce their vision or their great new idea often meet resistance.

Sam Chaltain (2009) asserted that a leader's job is to find the school's vision, not to create one. In other words, savvy leaders pay close attention to what's happening in the school and then guide the staff in developing a vision that reflects the priorities and passions of those who work and learn there.

In addition, school leaders may want to catch themselves when they ask questions that begin, "How can I get teachers to ... " As soon as the word get shows up in relation to others, wise leaders will realize that they are trying to persuade or control people in an effort to reach their own goals. At best, such an effort would require a sales job; at its worst, it would require a battle. Instead of pursuing their interest in "getting" someone to do something, leaders might rework their interest to consider how they can collaborate with others around the topic or problem at hand, so together teachers and leaders can develop a plan that's owned by all.

Perspective 4:

Resistance makes perfect sense to the person

who's resisting.

When new school leaders encounter resistance to a great idea, they often find themselves mentally criticizing the people who oppose it. These leaders conclude that those who are resisting are unwilling to change, lack a strong work ethic, or have misplaced priorities.

It might be more productive for school leaders to think about times when they've resisted others' ideas-for instance, times when they told their child he could not have a begged-for toy (or tattoo!); or when they told their physician that a particular treatment was not for them; or when they told their spouse that it was not the right year to take a big vacation. When people think about why they've resisted others' ideas, they usually realize that their reasons were good ones. For instance, parents say no to children to keep them safe, patients select treatments that will best fit their individual needs and approach to health, and spouses want to be good stewards of the family budget.

Similarly, when teachers resist the ideas or initiatives of new school leaders, their reasons make perfect sense to them. For instance, these teachers might have worked hard to develop their current practices and view these practices as best for students. They might believe that a proposed change would be too demanding on their time, or they might think that a new idea reverses the trajectory of school programs of the past few years. When school leaders understand resistance from this perspective, they avoid judging teachers negatively. Instead, they tune in to better understand what teachers are thinking. This process has the potential to create a productive dialogue, enabling teachers and leaders to approach problem solving and planning together to address school needs.

Perspective 5:

Every situation is best approached by listening first.

New school leaders sometimes respond to challenging situations by immediately focusing on what they need to say or do. After all, they were hired to take the lead. Sometimes, too, they're insecure about how they're viewed by others and want to be sure they're seen as knowledgeable and decisive. Thus, they step up to the challenge and declare what should happen next.

This quick response may lead to a solution, but it's just as likely to backfire. Difficult situations require discernment, which takes time. Often, new school leaders don't fully understand the multiple dimensions of what's happening and the history of how the school has addressed similar situations before. In addition, some staff members may have valuable information, practices, or beliefs related to the situation, but a quick-acting school leader is likely to miss these resources.

It's wiser to listen and learn first. When leaders tune in to others, they understand challenges more completely, and as a result they'll be more likely to come up with productive solutions-or even better, to solicit further involvement by others. Solutions are nearly always better when leaders have help in choosing a path, and those who were involved in developing a plan are more likely to be enthusiastic about implementing it.

In fact, this fifth perspective summarizes the key idea behind the previous four: Tune in, and be inclusive. Remain open to others; value their knowledge, skills, and beliefs. The irony is that leaders who do less of the work themselves are often viewed as more effective. Such leaders are likely to face less resistance and indifference because they've learned how to involve many people in shaping the work of the school.

References

Chaltain, S. (2009). American schools: The art of creating a democratic learning community. Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield.

Dossey, L. (2016). Compasses, craziness, and the thieves of reasons: How thinking goes wrong. Explore, 12(5), 295-301.

Toll, C. A. (2017). A problem-solving model for literacy coaching practice. The Reading Teacher, 70(4), 413-421.

Zander, B., & Zander, R. S. (2002). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. New York: Penguin.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

Let us help you put your vision into action.

ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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Five Perspectives for Leadership Success - ASCD

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Abstract Perspective 1: Teachers are well-intentioned, hard-working people who care about students. Perspective 2: It's not about information. Perspective 3: Everyone has their own vision of success. Perspective 4: Resistance makes perfect sense to the person who's resisting. Perspective 5: Every situation is best approached by listening first.

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For school leaders, the last two years changed everything. Leading during a pandemic has required a level of agility and flexibility unlike anything most school administrators have ever encountered. More important, it has required strategic thinking and decision making with little to no guidance or previous experience to draw on.

As the superintendent of Selma City Schools in Alabama, I am used to helping my district adapt to challenges. When I first arrived in 2017, taking over in an area where most students face economic disadvantages, the district had low graduation rates and students struggled to keep up academically. We improved in all academic-achievement areas with a lot of hard work and openness to change, using a five-year strategic plan created by a team of teachers, families, community members, and elected officials. We focused on goals in four areas: teaching and learning; culture, climate and community; leadership, management, and governance; and facilities and technology. At the time, our plan seemed bold.

Then COVID-19 hit. Our district's needs changed as we moved through lockdown and remote teaching and back to in-person classrooms this year. I knew we needed to adapt-and we needed to figure out ways to be resilient, optimistic, and embrace joy where we could find it.

This was no easy task. We have made mistakes and started over. But one of the most pivotal lessons I've learned over this time has been the importance of continuing to help every student and staff member embrace change with an open mind. While the most successful strategies will look different for every district, I'd like to share the steps we took during this crisis and the distributed leadership required to make them happen, in hopes that these kinds of adaptive practices will spread.

Don't Be Afraid to Pivot

If a long-term plan is in place, it can be a challenge to think about adjusting. When we began the 2020-2021 year remotely, a project team consisting of teachers, administrators, students, and community members had created our "Return to Excellence" reopening plan that included a safety roadmap for schools, including cleaning protocols, testing, social distancing guidelines, and, later, vaccine clinics. We updated this plan often-sometimes weekly-but it became clear to me and my team, as we saw the many issues our students faced, that our efforts would need to reimagine more than reopening if we were to return to our pre-pandemic progress levels. Our needs were greater than what the original strategic plan and our reopening plan called for, and funding from the federal CARES Act provided resources to improve what we offered. During a cabinet meeting in early 2021, we decided to relaunch our entire plan, which was originally supposed to be active through 2023.

A major impetus for this switch was a shooting incident in spring 2021 on the second day of in-person learning. One student fired a gun into the lunchroom of our high school after a fight. Though no one was hurt, the teachers and students were shaken. We were already grappling with almost two years of learning disruptions and concerns around mental health and wellness, and now we had additional safety concerns to address. As a result, the new strategic plan, which runs from 2021-2024, includes far more whole-child support and restorative practices than the original plan did. Over several months, we reestablished our project teams for the original four areas and added a fifth area: safety and wellness.

Educators and administrators were understandably preoccupied with understanding where students were academically. But our community discussed how we could not limit our focus to academic data. Learning recovery would mean nothing without considering social-emotional learning, mental health, and overall wellness from a holistic standpoint.

So, in addition to an academic support team with instructional coaches, reading and math specialists, and a virtual learning specialist, we now have an SEL coordinator, mental health coordinator, and social workers. Classroom teachers get a read on SEL with perception surveys given to students at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, which ask questions around whether students feel connected or valued at school, whether they have a trusted adult at their school, and if they need help with specific home concerns.

Last summer, I also led a Safe Community Alliance group that included the police chief, mayor, and leaders from the Selma Center for Non-Violence. Together, we hosted healing circles at our high school and a local church over the summer for all those who were impacted by the school shooting. There is a lot of gang violence and infighting that affects our community, so the goal was to talk through people's needs and traumas and find common ground and better ways to communicate-and ways to move forward together without violence. Our district-level team contracted an additional therapist to address anger management and did a thorough audit to improve consistency related to mental health supports.

The advantage of having a living, breathing plan means that it can change as a district's needs change.

Involve All Stakeholders

Never underestimate the power of including staff, parents, caregivers, and community members in the planning and execution of a districtwide strategy. I always advise beginning with understanding the needs of your community-and the only way to do that is listen. At first, the work started small: Each of the five areas of our plan had a team lead who met with the district's strategic planning director. From Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses to detailed data reviews, the teams reviewed previous goals and strategies and made recommendations for adapting them to our new reality.

Then we gathered feedback from everyone and showed them what we proposed, to see if it met their needs. I met virtually with small groups of students in what I called "Chat and Chew" sessions, where scholars shared their insights with me on clubs and activities they wanted, improving school lunch, and dress code policies before the school made official decisions. We also held a strategic planning summit using Facebook Live and shared a link to a survey document where families, teachers, staff, and leaders could give input on proposed goals.

Understanding what implementation looks like to all stakeholders is a critical part of the strategic-planning process. The community should know what your focal points are and have opportunities to share what you may have missed. You need concrete steps and monitoring to track progress. We use a score-monitoring system to make sure that how we're spending resources aligns to our plan.

For example, our families explained that we needed more transportation options and access to technology resources. As a result of that feedback, the project team purchased new buses; added kitchen, cafeteria, and bathroom renovations; and pushed up our timeline to start a virtual academy for students who want to work more independently.

While communication was more challenging than ever during the pandemic, a social media hashtag #TeamSelmaConnected provided information to reassure families and caregivers that our main goal was to keep everyone safe. We held virtual parent sessions (sometimes twice a day) on Facebook Live, which we also posted on our YouTube channel. These covered topics like testing and vaccination sites and sports updates, as well as developments on our district's COVID dashboard, which allowed us full public transparency around schools' transmission rates.

It also helps when leaders communicate personally, rather than having faceless messaging. I do so using a weekly local newspaper column and a weekly podcast called "Talk Sup't."

To make sure families had a way to communicate with us about students' needs, which can change daily, our academic support team established a hotline we call "Handle with Care." All families now have one cell phone number they can text that team members monitor. If they need to let teachers know that their child is struggling, had a tough night, or has a family situation unfolding, families can text their child's name to that hotline (no details required) so that teachers know the student's learning may be affected the next day, or simply so they don't jump to conclusions if a scholar is falling asleep in class or acting out. The more ways families have to let the district know what they think and need, the better.

Prioritize Supporting Teachers

Big changes can be especially stressful for teachers and staff, so it's vital that district administrators stay in frequent, transparent contact about what's happening and give opportunities for teachers to weigh in on changes. Principals attended district leadership meetings, and teacher advisory groups provided insights about what they were seeing in the classroom. To mitigate stress during virtual learning, we created breakout rooms with comedy, yoga, Zumba, and karaoke, and we used a wheel-of-fortune app to give away door prizes. Now that we are in-person, all schools have added self-care rooms to replace teachers' lounges, with massage chairs, calming scents, and music donated by community partners. We have wellness teams who share weekly tips. We have also partnered with community organizations to provide catered lunches and special treats to say thank you.

Stress prevention is just as important as stress relief. To help with academic recovery, our schools have added math coaches after seeing students needed extra supports in that subject, as well as a director of elementary education and literacy and a coordinator for virtual and nontraditional learning. Given the national teacher shortage and low employee morale, our leadership, management, and governance project team created a program where employees can earn financial stipends of up to $3,000 for work time outside their contract, and the team is working to boost the district's leadership pipeline through an Aspiring Leaders Academy. We've also been hiring interventionists-often retired teachers or those who want to work part-time-so that burned out teachers have more staffing support.

One of my leadership lessons of this past year was to stay in the moment. Multitasking is a myth, yet during the hardest part of the pandemic, I would have two Zooms and a phone call going at the same time. Now, I try to practice what I preach in terms of self-care-putting the phone down, making eye contact and asking others how they're doing, following up if I promise information to someone, being mindful of how I'm being received and what others need.

Find Moments of Joy

Over the last two years, choosing joy-one of Team Selma's core values-was a non-negotiable for me as a leader, even through the most tumultuous event of my career. This meant modeling resilience while also giving team members space to know that it was OK not to be OK. Joy and optimism are not about pretending that everything is great and aren't a substitute for a strategy. They're not about looking at life through rose colored glasses, but about remembering there are better days ahead.

As one way to communicate my mindset, I send a daily email I call "Morning Joy" to team members, the board of education, and many other Team Selma supporters, with encouraging quotes, funny cat memes, and specific information about self-care, health, and mindfulness. I rarely leave a school without a teacher chasing me down and saying, "I was going through something, and your email really made a difference." In every meeting, I start by asking participants to tell me something good that's happening in their school or personal life right now (what we call a "Team Selma" moment). You're not looking for big wins-you're looking to impact one individual however you can.

When I walk into a building or board room, I know we don't have constant joy by any stretch of the imagination. Early on, when we launched the strategic plan and discussed our core values, I heard someone say, "She can't give me joy." That's true, but I am trying to share mine. Some people appreciate it and need it and others can take it or leave it. But teachers deserve to work in a school system where safety and joy are intentionally lifted up.

There is no magic formula for being adaptive to change. Intentional but flexible strategic planning, robust communication, and making the daily decision to choose joy have worked for me as a leader. Education will never be the same. Leaders must be realistic and willing to adapt to our changing world.

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Leadership Through Crisis: A Framework for Choosing Joy

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For school leaders, the last two years changed everything. Leading during a pandemic has required a level of agility and flexibility unlike anything most school administrators have ever encountered. More important, it has required strategic thinking and decision making with little to no guidance or previous experience to draw on.

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The education community has recently focused a great deal of attention on the need to attract and retain highly qualified educators to serve in school administrative roles. A primary reason is the alarming shortage of qualified administrators available to fill current and foreseeable school principal openings. These shortages largely exist for specific positions, such as the high school principalship or the district superintendency, or in specific geographic locations, such as remote rural areas or challenging urban communities (Forsyth &amp; Smith, 2002; Pounder, Galvin, &amp; Shepherd, 2003). But a general trend is clear: Educators across the board increasingly see the role of the school administrator as being more challenging and less desirable than the job is worth (Lindle, 2004; Pounder &amp; Merrill, 2001).

Systematically addressing a number of key issues can contribute to a stronger pipeline of effective school administrators. Attracting and retaining competent and caring school leaders requires a network of support in which school districts, professional administrator associations, principal academies, and university educational leadership programs collaborate to establish a career-long approach to administrator development.

Tapping the Talent

Tapping leadership talent is a more potent recruitment strategy than the familiar "shotgun" approach. Rather than recruiting leadership talent through broadly targeted mailings, visits, or calls to educators, acting school principals should purposefully identify those teachers or other educators who have clearly demonstrated leadership talent and encourage them to participate in selected leadership activities or administrator orientation programs.

The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) currently uses this strategy in its leadership preparation and development program. The Board has found that schools and school districts are more likely to grant aspiring leaders access to school data and to activities required by their professional preparation program when the schools have previously identified these staff members-or "tapped" them-as having strong leadership potential. The tapping process can be as informal as encouraging a teacher to enter a school administration certification program. At other times, it can be more structured, involving meetings that acquaint teachers with administrative responsibilities and preparation programs.

We offer one caution about tapping strategies, however. Incumbent administrators may identify as future leaders only those educators whose profiles, values, and behaviors resemble their own. Personnel selection research has demonstrated that we tend to search for candidates who are like ourselves (Pounder &amp; Young, 1996). To encourage the selection of potentially strong leaders whose ethnicity, values, or behaviors may vary from the norm, other education professionals-such as teachers, school counselors, and university professors-should participate in the tapping process.

Encourage those teachers who demonstrate leadership potential to chair standing committees or special task forces or to coordinate grade-, department-, or school-level initiatives.

Directly involve aspiring leaders in whole-school planning to give them a broader picture of the many considerations involved in schoolwide efforts.

Assign aspiring leaders to work closely with diverse student populations, to monitor and analyze these students' learning outcomes, and to report their findings to relevant school and parent groups.

Provide opportunities for teachers to understand the larger community context by working with school-parent-community groups and related outreach efforts.

Hone teachers' instructional leadership skills by assigning peer supervision responsibilities.

Involve teacher leaders in the collection, analysis, and reporting of typical school data that address such accountability issues as school effectiveness or equity of student access and outcomes.

Include teachers on school leadership teams.

School-based leadership experiences like these help aspiring leaders understand and apply theory and research typically emphasized in formal university preparation programs. Schools that offer such experiences can become true leadership learning laboratories (Crow &amp; Southworth, 2003).

Strengthening Field Experiences

Most formal administrator preparation programs are based in state-approved or nationally accredited university educational leadership departments, although alternative providers are increasingly emerging. Most of these programs lead to a state administrator license. Programs generally include a combination of knowledge development and skill development, but these two aspects of administrator preparation programs are often only loosely connected or coordinated.

This disconnect between theory and practice largely results from having too few "administrative field laboratories" in which students can both apply their leadership and organizational knowledge and build their administrative skills. Teacher preparation institutions often establish relationships with K-12 schools to create professional development schools whose mission is to serve the school's students while preparing a cadre of preservice teachers, developing the school's inservice teachers, and engaging in joint inquiry projects. To practice their craft in local K-12 schools, however, aspiring administrators may require adjustments or accommodations that go far beyond the needs of a given student, teacher, or classroom.

The Complexities of the School-Based Setting

To design field assignments that candidates can complete within complex schoolwide environments and that effectively link to administrative knowledge development, university faculty need the permission and coordination of appropriate K-12 school and district personnel. The participating school must agree to or negotiate the nature of the projects and a host of related practical issues-for example, the length of the project; the permission or cooperation of various entities, such as the school site council, the faculty, the teachers' union, the principal, the district superintendent, the school board, and students' parents; ethical principles that might constrain the project; and ways of managing the assignment or project that will not unduly interfere with other school processes.

In addition, because administrative candidates are typically full-time educators working in a variety of schools while attending a preparation program in the evenings or on weekends, university faculty often work with a different K-12 school for each administrative candidate in the program. Also, administrative candidates often tackle their projects or assignments after school hours because they often teach during the day.

Establish school-university partnerships between administrative preparation program faculty and K-12 school personnel who are jointly committed both to administrator preparation and to establishing tighter links between knowledge development and skill development in field-based activities.

Require administrative candidates to conduct group assignments or projects in a common K-12 school so that only one field site is required for several students.

Establish field assignments that can be repeated-that is, institutionalized-over several semesters or years to avoid recurring start-up costs.

Internships

Although most administrator preparation programs require an internship experience, many of these internships are too short and too lacking in responsibility to adequately prepare candidates for their initial job assignments. To counteract this tendency, some universities-such as the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Utah, and Brigham Young University-have successfully negotiated with local and regional school districts to provide full-year, full-time paid internships as acting assistant principals. We realize that relatively few school districts have the fiscal means to do this, however.

It is the responsibility of the education administration profession at large, rather than of individual school districts or preparation program faculty members, to establish ways to provide realistic, high-quality internship experiences. A good approach is for school districts, administrator preparation programs, administrator professional associations, principal academies, and state offices of education to jointly tackle the problem of inadequate administrative internships within their regions or states. This professional network should also educate policymakers and education foundations about the need for high-quality administrative internship opportunities.

Redefining the Role of the Assistant Principal

Individuals often move into the principalship by one of two routes: either directly from teaching or through the position of assistant principal. Moving from teacher to principal tends to occur primarily in elementary schools or in smaller school districts. In secondary schools or in larger districts, the route more often passes through the assistant principalship.

It used to be that the assistant principalship served as an apprenticeship for the role of principal, providing preparation for the responsibilities, pace, and scope of the position. Over time, however, the role has become more narrowly focused. In many schools, the assistant principal is mainly responsible for student discipline. Although assistant principals may be responsible for some teacher evaluation, they often have minimal instructional leadership responsibility. Moreover, the major adjustment that assistant principals make in some schools is to form alliances with administrators and drop alliances with teachers. Such distancing negatively influences their instructional leadership role (Marshall, 1985).

To transform the assistant principalship into a more comprehensive training ground for aspiring principals, schools should focus on promoting shared leadership and redesigning the role of the assistant principal.

When principals create leadership teams, they share leadership responsibilities, model a distributed approach to leadership, and contribute to a professional learning community. Leadership teams often include grade-level leaders, department chairs, team leaders, and others with informal leadership responsibilities. Usually 8-10 people are on a team.

Sharing leadership responsibilities expands the new assistant principal's understanding of the scope of his or her own role beyond student management to include instructional monitoring, supervision, accountability, community relationships, resource allocation, and other administrative responsibilities. Experience on a leadership team also creates a nonheroic image of the role of the principal because a number of people are responsible for school leadership. Finally, a leadership team creates a kind of professional learning community that makes the principal's role public and enables the assistant principal to benefit from behind-the-scenes leadership experiences.

A Role Redesign

Redesigning the position of assistant principal to expand instructional leadership responsibilities can help develop and support a pipeline of quality school leaders. Schools can make the role far more attractive by involving assistant principals in supervising and evaluating teachers and in monitoring and supporting teaching processes and learning outcomes. Assistant principals might be responsible for analyzing student test scores or other student outcomes or for conducting professional development sessions for teachers.

Assistant principals tend to find their role more meaningful when they are responsible for creating learning environments that enhance student achievement and help close the achievement gap. Louisiana is one of the few states that actually give assistant principals the title and corresponding responsibilities of Assistant Principal for Instruction as opposed to the title of Assistant Principal for Discipline, which is common in many secondary schools.

Larger schools can create grade-level principal positions rather than assistant principal positions. Grade-level or subschool principals work under the supervision of the principal but have overall administrative responsibility for one or more specific grade levels within the school. In this model, which is prevalent in Virginia's Fairfax County School District, beginning principals have a more comprehensive array of administrative responsibilities as they work under the supervision and mentorship of an experienced principal.

Most training in university preparation programs focuses on the role of the principal rather than on that of the assistant principal. Consequently, the training that assistant principals receive-in instructional leadership, for example-may not be relevant to the demands of their new positions. Redesigning the role of assistant principal to include instructional leadership responsibilities will increase the potency and relevance of preparation programs.

Districts, professional associations, academies, and universities can cooperate in providing professional development for principals and assistant principals and for larger leadership teams. This professional development can focus on team building, group dynamics, and other skills that facilitate shared instructional leadership responsibility.

De-Stressing the Role of Principal

The increasing intensity and complexity of the principal's role make it harder for schools to attract new administrators and retain midcareer principals. Research suggests that administrator candidates like the more altruistic aspects of the job, such as improving schools and making a difference in students' lives. They are discouraged, however, by the amount of work required and by its toll on their personal lives (Pounder &amp; Merrill, 2001). Principals also report high levels of stress (Lindle, 2004).

Schools need to reconceptualize and redesign the role of principal so that more candidates enter the job and sustain their commitment over time. One strategy is to more fully embrace and implement the concept of distributed leadership in school administrative work. The range of administrative and supervisory responsibilities in complex schools is far too great for one person to effectively manage.

To implement new leadership models, schools and districts must do away with outdated or ineffective roles. For example, district administrators who encourage change but at the same time hold veteran principals solely accountable for school leadership send a conflicting message. School board and community members must come to expect shared leadership and representation by multiple administrative team members rather than by the principal alone. The principal should not be seen as the only appropriate symbol of school leadership at school academic and extracurricular events.

Veteran principals who experience this role change in midcareer often tackle issues of self-esteem (Crow &amp; Matthews, 1998). Moving from heroic leadership to distributed leadership roles may involve a shift in the principal's sense of self-confidence and competence. Midcareer principals may also experience difficulty relinquishing some authority and responsibility. Districts, universities, principal academies, and professional associations can provide resources, such as support groups and peer mentors, to help veteran school leaders deal with new leadership models.

Strengthening the Pipeline

The issues and strategies that we have presented here are not the only considerations in developing a strong pipeline of administrators. They have, however, received far too little attention. To be effective, these strategies require the systemic coordination and resources of the entire professional education community. Developing and sustaining a robust pipeline of competent and caring administrators is everyone's responsibility.

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Sustaining the Pipeline of School Administrators

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The education community has recently focused a great deal of attention on the need to attract and retain highly qualified educators to serve in school administrative roles. A primary reason is the alarming shortage of qualified administrators available to fill current and foreseeable school principal openings.

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Over the past few months, the McCormick Center has been discussing the concept of whole leadership . While I encourage you to read through the whole series, one article in the series stuck out to me in particular, Administrative Leadership: What Is It? Why Is It Important? by Teri Talan.

This article was really interesting to me-especially when I dusted off my old center director hat and thought about how much CLASS would have benefited me when I managed a large hospital-based center, or multiple sites for a private, for-profit center. I started thinking about how CLASS could relate to administrative leadership, and the parallels formed in my mind.

Many of us find ourselves in a leadership position with little preparation or experience that can build and sustain a program. I was a teacher and found myself promoted to the director position, and when I got there I had a lot to learn! How could CLASS have helped me all those years ago? The tool would have given me a way to provide real feedback to my staff-feedback that was relevant, realistic, and measurable. It reminds me of the importance of an emotionally supportive relationship, organized structure, and thoughtful and intentional conversations with my staff-to truly build their practice.

Additionally, I could have used the data from observations to see where my staff was the strongest during the day and planned my staffing patterns-and other supports-around this information. Would things go smoother if I had an extra staff person help with meals and routines so the teachers had less stress and more opportunity to interact positively? Would providing some resources around open-ended play build my staff's regard for the children's perspective?

I could have used CLASS data to show my funders that using the power of CLASS actually can change the outcomes for children, while helping teachers find ways to enhance their interactions and find the joy in teaching again. That investment in high quality care can benefit us all!

Both types of leadership, operational and strategic, really do fit together, and they also speak to the CLASS construct and the data-driven opportunities for growth

I'd be really interested in hearing your thoughts on Teri's insightful post below!

Administrative Leadership: What Is It? Why Is It Important?
by Teri Talan READ MORE FROM THE WHOLE LEADERSHIP BLOG SERIES
APRIL 4, 2016

Reading over the series of blog posts and comments on Whole Leadership , I am struck by the level of engagement the discussion has evoked. Clearly, deconstructing program leadership and exploring leadership essentials are topics that resonate. However, I am taking the discussion in a new direction-a consideration of administrative leadership. My hope is that this aspect or domain of Whole Leadership can be equally thought-provoking.
Administrative leadership is about orchestrating tasks (and often includes mobilizing people) to develop and sustain an early childhood organization. Successful administrative leaders are able to establish systems that protect and sustain essential operational functions to meet the needs of children and families. There are at least two important aspects of administrative leadership-operational leadership and strategic leadership. Operational leadership is accomplished through activities like hiring and supporting staff, overseeing budgets, and maintaining a positive workplace climate. Strategic leadership involves guiding the direction of an early childhood organization with the future in mind. Strategic leaders clarify purpose, inspire individuals to pursue a shared vision, and ensure that goals and outcomes are attained.
My colleague, Mike Abel offered this description of administrative leadership in an earlier post :

I really like this description for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it clear that orchestrating the work of teaching and learning, mobilizing staff to achieve child and program outcomes, and establishing systems to effectively run a healthy, thriving organization are indeed leadership functions. In our field of early care and education, these responsibilities are typically characterized as management functions and are less valued than leadership functions. Instead of thinking of this important work as management (and therefore less important than leadership), let's claim it for what it really is-administrative leadership.

Second, the above description of administrative leadership includes both operational and strategic leadership dimensions. One of the responders to an earlier post asked about advocacy and where it fits in the Whole Leadership framework. I believe that advocacy is a part of strategic leadership. In my experience, effective administrative leaders engage in advocacy because they are future oriented; they want to have influence on external conditions that impact their programs, not just react to them.
Dr. Teri Talan is the Michael W. Louis Chair and Interim Executive Director of the McCormick Center at National Louis University. She promotes action by state and national policymakers on early childhood workforce, leadership development, and program administration issues.
Finally, I believe that pedagogical and administrative leadership are like the double strands that form the DNA helix. They are in a constant relationship to each other, separate but connected. The most qualified teachers cannot be effective in their work with children and families if their work environments (including supervisor support, opportunities for professional growth, decision making, collegiality, rewards and recognition, role clarity, task orientation, innovativeness, and physical environment) do not adequately support them. Administrative leadership is important because without it, pedagogical leadership cannot be sustained and children and families will be poorly-served.

Let us know your thoughts on administrative leadership. Do you agree that this is the right term? Is there a critical connection that needs further exploration between administrative leadership and instructional or pedagogical leadership? I am hoping you are provoked!

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Administrative Leadership: What Is It? Why Is It Important? And How Does It Connect to CLASS?

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Over the past few months, the McCormick Center has been discussing the concept of whole leadership . While I encourage you to read through the whole series, one article in the series stuck out to me in particular, Administrative Leadership: What Is It? Why Is It Important? by Teri Talan.

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The ISTE Standards provide the competencies for learning, teaching and leading in the digital age, providing a comprehensive roadmap for the effective use of technology in schools worldwide. Grounded in learning science research and based on practitioner experience, the ISTE Standards ensure that using technology for learning can create high-impact, sustainable, scalable and equitable learning experiences for all learners.

For over 20 years the standards have been used, researched and updated to continuously reflect the latest research-based best practices that define success in using technology to learn, teach, lead and coach. The standards have been adopted in all 50 U.S. states and many countries throughout the world. Aligned to UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goals, the standards are available in eight languages.

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The ISTE Standards are a framework for students, educators, administrators, coaches and computer science educators to rethink education and create innovative learning environments. The standards are helping re-engineer schools and classrooms worldwide for digital age learning.

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Collaborating to Improve Instruction: Instructional Rounds

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Instructional Rounds at Jacob Hiatt Magnet School

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We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse that.
-Roald Dahl

My first ten years of teaching I participated in some amazing learning opportunities and some not so memorable. I recall the opening of school training where the teachers came to school four days before the students and two of the four days were the dreaded "required" training. We all knew we had to participate, but we also knew that the time spent was not going to impact our instruction on opening day. Most of us spent the time planning what we were going to do once they finally gave us our classroom keys.

However, not all of the professional learning I participated in was cringe-worthy. I loved learning new strategies and sharing ideas with my peers. Professional learning that challenged me and let me experience mathematics was my absolute favorite. However, I only had a few opportunities to participate in this type of professional learning. I had to find time outside the school day to attend workshops or meet with peers or share ideas with the teacher who I had the privilege of sharing a classroom with. Those conversations were meaningful and I was able to apply that knowledge immediately in my own practice.

In 2002, our district embraced a Professional Learning Community culture and at the time, I didn't realize that I was embarking on a journey of truly understanding high-quality professional learning and experiencing job-embedded professional learning.

When we first started, it took time to learn how to work as an effective collaborative team. It took time learning from one another as we made sense of the standards, designed common assessments, and worked to collectively respond to student learning.

Think about your own professional learning and answer these questions:

How did the experience make a connection between work and student learning?

How did the experience ensure professional learning was focused on quality instruction and improved mathematical understanding?

How did it create continual learning opportunities for learning, practice, reflection, and refinement?

How did it grow you as a teacher and a colleague on a team?

What were you able to immediately and routinely embed in your work as an educator?

Research says that professional learning should be ongoing and interactive (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). Here's the challenge: TIME! Now, as a mathematics coach and consultant, when I ask teachers to reflect on their biggest challenges regarding teaching and learning, the number one complaint is time. Bad news - we cannot add more time to the day. However, the good news is that we can create opportunities within our limited time to ensure that we are engaging in continual learning. In honor of #teacherlove and Teacher Appreciation week, here are some ideas to give the Gift of Time to promote meaningful collaboration and continual professional learning.

TIME to watch colleagues teach
This year I have coordinated several instructional rounds and the collaborative teams have raved about being able to see each other teach. We start with three focus instructional questions (Example). The team members can either go observe each other during their planning period or the principal has provided substitute coverage. At the end of the rounds, we debrief and share the evidence observed that supports the instructional questions and opportunities for growth. Even though our observation is focused on three questions, every teacher has learned more than just the three focus areas and the teams can implement the new ideas immediately and ask for feedback from their peers as they try new ideas.

TIME to focus on student work
Most of teacher time spent on student work is the quick surface-level review of the work to score it or mark it complete. However, when using intentional mathematical tasks, student work can be a tremendous vehicle for teacher learning. Use looking at student work protocols to focus the conversations and have teachers look for the misconceptions and level of understanding. This conversation informs the choices of instructional practices and teams can share their strategies to promote deeper levels of understanding.

TIME to Plan
I'm not talking about surface-level planning. For example, "I am on 7.1 today and will be at 7.4 by Friday." I mean focused conversations on the mathematical thinking behind the lesson, having already collectively determined the need for the lesson after making sense of the standards students must learn in the unit. Have collaborative teams share the mathematical "ah-ha" for the lesson - that moment when a light bulb of understanding shines for a student. Teams can share mathematical tasks and have conversations about why the task is the "absolute best" task that will elicit specific evidence of thinking that you and your collaborative team desire. I have seen teams have common planning time built into their weekly schedule or they are given one day every quarter to engage with their peers around planning and student work.

These Gifts of Time are examples of job-embedded professional learning, focused on student learning, and have strong connections between mathematics teaching and learning. They provide protocols and routines for continual learning by teachers on collaborative teams.

Sound off: What are other ways you have been given the gift of time to learn and grow as an educator with immediate classroom applications? I'd love to hear from you...
References:
Darling-Hammond, L., Chung Wei, R., Andree, A., & Richardson, N. (2009). Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad. Oxford, OH: National Staff Development Council.

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We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse that. -Roald Dahl My first ten years of teaching I participated in some amazing ...

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Preparing for Instructional Rounds Video

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Educators

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The ISTE Educator Standards challenge educators to deepen their practice, empower students and rethink traditional approaches to education.

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Tools for Effective Principal Leadership - Vision
by Broadcast Educational Media Commission
https://youtu.be/rFSVAM2cHzs

I chose this photo because it shows people all in and working together. The three administrators in the video had different view points but what I took most from them was that everyone has to collaborate for the best outcome.

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Resiliency in the face of Aversity Assignment

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Resiliency in the face of Aversity Assignment

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Instructional vs. School and Community leadership

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If managed well, these teams can help teachers innovate in the classroom and improve student outcomes.

Bob Daemmrich / Alamy Stock Photo

Many teachers work to guide students to take academic risks that will help them learn. Can schools apply that idea to teacher learning as well?

The answer may be found in the collaboration achieved in professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs-which harness "an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve"-are a common and proven practice to promote teacher collaboration that increases student achievement.

However, it is possible to fall into collaborative work that stifles innovation. This can happen, for example, if PLCs focus too heavily on common assessments and a common understanding of what students are learning, leading to common everything-students getting the same lesson plan in each class. I've heard administrators use the term "common experience" when setting expectations for teaching and learning. That strikes me as going too far.

Although this is grounded in wanting to ensure student success through consistency, it can stifle innovation, and one of the purposes of a PLC is to try out new strategies. The PLC is designed for teacher learning, and thus the team must balance risk taking and teacher autonomy with shared expectations for student learning. It's important that teachers in a team have that clear understanding of purpose so that everyone feels safe to take risks.

A learning team constantly engages in a cycle of learning: analyzing data, setting goals, and learning individually and collaboratively, as well as implementing and adjusting practices to meet the needs of all learners. This process allows teachers to try new teaching practices and discover what's working and what isn't.

Determining Common Learning and Assessments

In PLCs, the fundamental questions teachers explore are: "What do we want students to learn?" and "How will we know if they have learned it?" These questions are foundational to any PLC, as they require teachers to come to a common understanding of the learning as well as common assessments that check for understanding.

PLC make this happen by prioritizing standards using specific criteria and then unpacking those standards, analyzing the nouns and verbs in the standards to understand which skills and concepts students will need to learn in order to be successful. Teachers identify what is hard to teach and what is hard to learn in the standards so that they can anticipate interventions and extensions.

It's important to note that parts of this process call for tight alignment between teachers and don't allow for the creativity and autonomy teachers may be used to. In order to achieve success for students, we do need some common practices. However, by agreeing as a team on what should be tightly aligned, we can set the stage for teacher autonomy and exploration of the art of teaching and instructional practice.

Making Space for Innovation

A PLC is constantly trying out new strategies to improve student learning, so individuals within the team must be given space to innovate. This is where the PLC should be only loosely aligned.

Teachers can never know what teaching works best for their students unless they are given the freedom to try out new strategies. PLCs can make this happen by having teachers collect evidence from common assessments and using data protocols to determine which strategies were most effective.

Ensuring That Teams Work Effectively

Sam Kaner coined the term Groan Zone to describe the space between a problem being posed and a solution being reached, and he described the divergent and convergent thinking that occurs there. Sometimes teachers in a PLC are afraid to engage in conflict or explore different ideas, worrying that even productive conflict signals that one is "not a team player." Conversely, teachers may feel pressured to get work done and feel they don't have time to spend in conflict.

But productive conflict can allow us to build better ideas and stronger teams, and PLCs should embrace productive conflict and create a space for it in order to innovate. PLCs can make this happen with clear norms as well as protocols to ensure that all voices are heard and that it is safe to engage in this conflict. It's also helpful to make sure the projected outcome of a meeting is clear: Are we "generating ideas" or "making a decision"? This clarity can make space for open conversation.

PLCs need strong facilitators in order to engage in conversations that promote learning, risk taking, and innovation. However, the facilitators or leaders of those teams may be torn between advocating for ideas and managing the complex process of moving the team forward. This can lead to situations where team members have a facilitator who is strongly advocating for an idea rather than allowing for all voices to be heard, and team members may not feel safe to speak up or take risks. If facilitators need to advocate, they should select someone else to facilitate, in order to continue to balance advocacy for new ideas against team consensus and integration.

I recommend clear decision-making process like the Gradients of Agreement structure, which allows for decision making that honors the Groan Zone and divergent thinking while still moving toward convergent thinking and consensus decision-making.

PLCs are the lifeblood of innovation and risk taking in school. When structured well, they can be teams that constantly learn together and work to discover what is best for students.

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If managed well, these teams can help teachers innovate in the classroom and improve student outcomes.

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Rethinking high school means rethinking leadership. Preparing students with the skills they'll need to succeed after graduating -like collaboration, original thinking, and lifelong learning-takes creativity and commitment to bold change. School leaders create the conditions under which this change is possible. As Sean McClung, XQ's head of school success, explains, "School leaders are doing change management with a lot of people in a complex organization, community, with a lot of stakeholders."

What does it mean to be an effective leader in this context? What traits do leaders need to empower their communities to reach their full potential? Drawing from our XQ Design Principles-pillars for rethinking what high school can be-as well as examples of leaders from XQ schools, we came up with these six characteristics that highly effective school leadership tends to share.

1. School leaders need to be passionate with an ambitious vision for what high school can be.

High schools succeed when every member of the community-from students, to staff, to community partners-is united in a strong mission and culture. The best school leaders serve as the keepers of that shared mission. These leaders embody an infectious passion, coherently articulate the school's goals, and keep everyone focused on what matters most: serving students.

That's not easy in school systems, which can be notoriously bureaucratic. But McClung explains, "The best leaders are passionate, driven, and committed. They can exist in a system of limits, complexity, oversight, and compliance, and constantly see beyond it and look for ways to do amazing work."

This passion and drive are especially critical when a school's bold mission goes against the grain of traditional school practices. Trace Pickering, executive director and co-founder of Iowa BIG, an XQ school in Cedar Rapids, IA, learned this first-hand. Iowa BIG's design is wildly ambitious: instead of learning through traditional classes and subjects, students learn through doing by taking on "initiatives" proposed by community partners.

For Pickering, part of sustaining this mission means serving as a keeper of the vision as doubts and challenges arise. "People wonder if the kids are 'really learning,'" explains Pickering. "Of course, they assume that 'learning' is passing a test or temporarily memorizing the periodic table or the timeline for World War II." Instead, at Iowa BIG, students learn through a competency-based approach: students progress through content based on their mastery of core, clearly defined skills, and knowledge, rather than time spent in seats. Competency-based education emphasizes actual student learning, shifting focus from more superficial measures like memorization or seat-time.

In moments of doubt, Pickering refocuses the narrative and champions the school's approach. He points to the success of Iowa BIG in terms of increased student engagement and rearticulates the core mission of the school to transform learning. This approach has paid off. By sticking to its ambitious mission, Iowa BIG is changing the game for students: the school is a national model for transformative, student-centered education.

2. School leaders need to be asset-minded.

Part of being a great leader is bringing out the greatness in others. It is about sharing power and leadership to empower others to be their best. Highly effective school leaders see the strengths in the people around them and create opportunities for those strengths to flourish.

You can see this successful asset-mindedness in how school leaders support and empower teachers and staff. Highly effective leaders practice distributed leadership: instead of merely delegating tasks to teachers, leaders give teachers real power and ownership over crucial aspects of the school, like professional development or teacher mentoring.

Effective school leaders also extend this concept of leadership to students. To support youth voice and choice, school leaders empower students as stakeholders and changemakers in the school community.

Case in point: Elizabethton High School, an XQ school in Elizabethton, TN. When Elizabethton High received American Rescue Plan funding, school leaders sent out a survey to gather student input on how to invest the funds. The students wanted to expand their involvement. Students Maggie Cole and Morgan Guinn requested a meeting with their school principal and the district superintendent to discuss the rationale for students' funding priorities.

Elizabethton school leaders embraced this opportunity for student perspective and power. They worked closely with Cole and Guinn to talk about how the district's budget functions, and how the students' ideas could be implemented. Ultimately, almost all student suggestions were adopted-including significant investment in mental health resources.

This project is a concrete example of how Elizabethton's leaders upheld the mission of the school: to empower students as changemakers in their community. "This project was important because it speaks to our core values," explains assistant principal Sheri Nelson. "It's our goal to teach our students to be self-advocates, to be communicators. That's the best way for us to meet their needs, so they can be successful in high school and beyond."

3. School leaders should be accessible and engaged with the day-to-day work of the school.

When school leaders are present in the classroom, students take note. By making classroom visits and taking an interest in what students are doing, leaders demonstrate to students that their work matters. This promotes meaningful, engaged learning, where students feel seen and valued as learners.

Mary Ryerse, XQ's managing director for school success, explains, "Young people need to see leaders working together to encourage learning. It's not just about, 'How did your choir performance or your basketball game go?' It's also, 'What project are you working on meaningfully?'"

"Once they've established a relationship, the questions or engagement points with young people can be directly around their learning," she adds. "Don't underestimate the power of one or two reflective comments."

The significance of these connections extends to the leaders as well. Chris Terrill, executive director at Crosstown High-an XQ school in Memphis, TN-shows what engagement with students looks like in action in a mutually caring school environment. When Terrill discovered that he suffered from high cholesterol, he took his problem straight to students. In collaboration with a partner from a local college of nursing, students created a video with a plan for Terrill to lower his cholesterol. The plan worked-Terrill's health improved-and students also got to apply competencies to a project with meaningful results.
This example speaks to a larger culture at Crosstown, where students consistently connect their learning to real-world challenges. By getting involved in a student project, Terrill demonstrated to students how much their knowledge and learning can help others while also expanding their own knowledge.

4. School leaders should be innovative-not constrained by the status quo.

The best school leaders can translate big-picture goals to day-to-day reality, to ask: what structures need to change to transform learning and ensure student success? The most entrenched aspects of high school are often logistical. Highly effective leaders consider all elements of time, space, and technology when evaluating what needs to change to serve students. Decisions are then made that align with the school's unified mission and culture.

Ryerse explains, "It all starts with a strong culture and clarity of a vision by the leader, and a willingness and tenacity in making sure that vision is realized in the day-to-day operations of the school. Strong leaders are willing to ask: do our beliefs show up in how we run our school-everything from the master calendar, to extracurriculars, to staffing and hiring?"

This vision must include everyone involved in the school community. One crucial example: how can a school most effectively use time to support teacher collaboration? Christopher Hanks, principal at Grand Rapids Public Museum School-an XQ school in Grand Rapids, MI- offers a framework for how to use time to support collaboration, with suggestions like:

Identify the purpose or need, and clearly communicate tasks, timelines, and deliverables

Create a schedule that supports the work

Communicate with teachers, incorporating teachers' insights into their own workflows and capacities, and expressing the constraints and imperatives you're facing

This example shows that by innovating the structure of the day, leaders can maximize a school's existing resources-in this case, the talents of teachers.

5. School leaders should be collaborative.

Learning does not take place in a vacuum. We've learned that some of the most powerful opportunities for student learning lie outside of school walls. Highly effective leadership recognizes how students can benefit from connecting with local businesses and resources, and build community partnerships into the structure of the school, thereby setting their students up for success.

At a structural level, leaders facilitate effective community collaborations through:

Aligning partnerships with the school's mission, culture, and values

Seeking out partnerships that support students' particular needs and learning goals

Ensuring partnerships are mutually beneficial for both students and the community

Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS)-an XQ school in Indianapolis, IN-embodies how school leadership can build collaboration into the core design of high school. PPHS was founded to serve as an engine of social mobility, increasing the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds attending Purdue University each year. To do this, school leaders partnered with Purdue University, designing a curriculum aligned to Purdue University's academic standards, and creating opportunities for students to pursue dual enrollment while in high school.

Leaders also built a school model that incorporates rigorous, mutually beneficial community partnerships into the curriculum. Students at PPHS learn through interdisciplinary project cycles designed by teachers and community partners. During each cycle, students address authentic challenges, researching, designing, and prototyping ideas to present to their industry partner-like partnering with the Indianapolis Zoo to increase conservation efforts. Through this model, students get the chance to build real-world skills and experience, and partners benefit from students' work and creativity.

6. School leaders need to be relational-they should commit to building trust and connection at all levels of the school.

Learning is all about relationships, and that includes school leaders. Great leaders intentionally make themselves accessible to teachers and students, modeling caring, trusting relationships.

They take this ethos-that every student should feel known and supported by adults at school-and imbed it within the school's design. XQ's McClung explains, "You have to figure out how to multiply the number of quality interactions between different adults, mentors, and role models in the community. How you design that, and how you deploy the people on your team, has a big impact on the kinds of relationships that young people are going to have in the school."

Círculos -an XQ school in Santa Ana, CA-is a prime example. In a district where 80 percent of students are English Language Learners and 100 percent of students participate in the free and reduced lunch program, Círculos' mission is to provide students with the social capital and connections they'll need to be successful after graduation.

Círculos' leaders do this by investing in relationships at a structural level. Círculos students participate in daily circles, where they have an opportunity to share their goals, successes, and challenges. These circles provide opportunities for students to form meaningful connections with peers and with staff, and to feel personally seen and known as both students and people. Círculos leaders also expand this idea of circles to involve the community outside of school, connecting students with mentors and community leaders across the city.

School founder Jessica Salcedo explained how these structures support relationships. "Our school is all about making connections," she says."We do that through circles, our signature pedagogy. Circles provide an intentional space for all students to be seen and heard-to develop their voices and identity in relationship to each other, their community, and their learning."

Salcedo's emphasis on connections and community illustrates the core of effective leadership: to facilitate relationships that support learning, and to empower everyone to be their best. While no two leaders are exactly alike, all effective leaders put their communities first-creating the conditions for their schools to thrive.

To read more about how to make these connections as a school leader, check out our deep dives into XQ Design Principles and see our XQ Learner Outcomes.

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Six Characteristics of Highly Effective School Leadership | Rethink Together

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Rethinking high school means rethinking leadership. Preparing students with the skills they'll need to succeed after graduating-like collaboration, original thinking, and lifelong learning-takes creativity and...

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Here is the presentation

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Eric showed up every day, but that was it. He wanted to be left alone. Unfortunately, that wasn't my jam as his teacher. I believed in kids enough to push them. Pushing Eric, though-however private and polite-sometimes proved nudgy enough to inspire his use of "special" words to let me know what he thought of me. Eric was not subtle.

I didn't know him well, this sophomore in my history class. Honestly, I hadn't tried to know him. I just knew he wasn't complying. I worried more about securing Eric's compliance than about understanding the heavy burdens he might be carrying. I knew my content. I knew my capacity and the urgency of the work. I needed Eric to bend, and he didn't. I resented that, and so resented him.

I resented him for walking into my Malcolm X lesson and marrying his head to the desk. The school bell didn't move him. Neither did my enthusiastic welcome, nor my effort to create curiosity ("Here's one of the most misunderstood voices of American history"). Eric's head stayed down.

My jumpstart was on the projector screen. Prior Knowledge Check: List up to five facts or ideas you already know about Malcolm X and write three questions you want answered about the man. Eric didn't stir. Worse, almost nobody did. Some students collapsed on their desks. Others jumped onto phones or resumed their hallway talks. We were only minutes in, but the lesson was already dead.

In hindsight, I understand why Eric and others dismissed my jumpstart.

The Engagement Equation

Lesson activities have a shot to generate real engagement if two conditions exist: (1) Success is reachable, and (2) the incentive attached to engagement is worthwhile. Here's the equation:

Successability x Worthwhileability = High Engagement

So where did I fall short? First, successability was low for my prompt. It did not require prior knowledge, but it favored students who had some. It gave the impression that some awareness of Malcolm X should be there, enough to generate questions. Surely there were kids who thought, Another thing I don't know. So even on this task for which there were no correct answers, the feeling of success might only be realized by those with existing knowledge or curiosities. If students knew and wondered nothing of the man, then what was the point?

Second, worthwhileability was low. Many of my students, like Eric, were present-oriented kids. By contrast, I was future-oriented. "This will help you later" was a justification I could always vibe with. As a kid, I routinely envisioned my life years down the road. I thought about college and career options at a young age. Some of my students were just like me, but many were not. They focused on the now. Their motivations drew energy from more immediate incentives.

I imagine there are different reasons for present-mindedness. Surely trauma might be a factor. I recall a sophomore once recounting all his murdered friends. He told me with perfect seriousness, "I won't make it to 18, Prather." (He did, thankfully.) Super smart kid: a quick study, thoughtful, strategic, and reflective. But essays and projects took time, which he didn't think he had, so he declined the work he was ready for. Many present-oriented kids, fortunately, are not touched by such traumas. They just happen to be wired around the currentness of life. Either way, as incentives go, "This will help later" doesn't cut it.

So my jumpstart didn't cut it, not for present-oriented kids like Eric. Against Instagram, gossip, and sleep, all of which met very current needs, my prior-knowledge check felt inconsequential. It didn't pull kids in, so most turned aside. With no spark, I couldn't ignite the rest of the lesson.

There weren't many wins that day. I went home, crashed into comfort food, and began watching reruns of the crime drama The Wire. I listened to Detective Bunk Moreland accuse a well-known "Robin Hood" named Omar Little of murdering a state's witness. Omar, who robbed drug dealers for a living and dispersed their treasure through the community, denied involvement. He insisted he never perpetrated anything against law-abiding citizens, and he lectured that Detective Bunk seemed willing to pin a crime on Omar not because the charge was justified but because it was convenient. "A man's got to have a code," Omar said.

The statement struck me. What would students think of this idea, that people live by codes, that they must live by codes? Would they agree? Would they want to talk about their codes? Would there be interest? Could codes carry us into a new study ... of, say, Malcolm X?

Cracking the Code

At the next class meeting I pressed PLAY as soon as the bell rang. The scene projected onto my whiteboard. Students settled quickly, hearing Omar and sensing this was not a normal history video. "A man's got to have a code."

I gave my new jumpstart instructions:

I don't know that I've ever seen tighter engagement than I observed during that jumpstart. Pens blazing, phones away, heads bowed. "What's your code?" was winning against Instagram, gossip, and sleep. After seven minutes, the room spoke: "More time, Prather!"

One student was finished: Eric. He handed me two single-spaced pages of writing. Two full pages in seven minutes! "Read this after class," he said. So I did. It was two deeply personal pages about the lack of loyalty in Eric's life and the danger of counting on people. His code was clear: Trust no one.

There were so many compelling pieces. Some students kept their work to themselves, some invited me to read later, and some volunteered to share. I listened and tried to learn as students spoke. So much courage. So much power.

Before too long I transitioned to Malcolm X. I outlined our purpose: Malcolm X was both loved and feared. Why? What was his code? You've identified yours. Can you identify his? Do you connect with his? What would he say about yours? I explained that his final speech would be our main source of information, so we were looking to construct the Malcolm X Code of February 1965. We started with a short biographical video before diving into text.

My previous invitation to explore a leader through speech analysis had not held attention, but this code approach did. Students seemed to find the concept interesting. There was worthwhileability. Perhaps the exploration of someone else's life rules, and the implicit opportunity to reflect more on their own, led students to feel this lesson was worthwhile.

I also think the lesson felt doable to students, that its challenges were surmountable. For one thing, in "What's his code?", students understood what I was asking. They had already made personal sense of the question through the jumpstart, so they knew how to think about it. Second, a biographical video clip functioned as an anticipatory scaffold. Seeing snippets of Malcolm X's life triggered some gut-hunches about his perspective and opinions. By the time they dove into the speech, students had already framed some first thoughts-confidence seeds-about Malcolm X's code.

Malcolm X's final speech was long. Chunking it into short, spaced-out segments made it more manageable. Even still, handing it off and saying "Annotate!" would have been too much. The students needed a model of expert thinking. They needed to hear each other's thoughts bounce around. They needed access to their teacher for additional support. I planned my instruction to respond to these needs. In annotating, we gradually shifted from teacher-modelled thinking to whole-class thinking and then to solo- or partnered-thinking. I made myself available for additional guided practice after students began annotating by themselves. A handful joined me, including Eric. With just a bit of facilitation, he was all in. Nearly all the students were-they drew inferences, questioned, and made personal connections. They arrived at some common takes of Malcolm X's code: Think for yourself; don't believe everything you hear. Speak so others take you seriously. Stand up and defend yourself; don't get pushed around.

I think the success of the jumpstart propelled students into higher domains of critical thinking and greater depth of knowledge. By the end of the week, they were transferring the code concept from individual to institution, evaluating a piece of our school's code from the perspective of 1965 Malcolm X. Students were asked to write a persuasive essay, differentiated according to student readiness, about how Malcolm X would've viewed the school's motto. I wanted them to express their ideas clearly without worrying about essay structure or transitions. Some students had no such anxieties. Their writing skills were well developed, and they were ready to exhibit clear thinking without the aid of organizational scaffolds. Others, like Eric, were emerging writers not yet ready to build an essay from start to finish. For them a guided-essay diagram provided sentence stems that cleared a space for the thinking they needed to share.

Many of my students wrote wonderful essays explaining how Malcolm X might have evaluated our instructional focus, and they concluded with personal assessments of that evaluation, implicitly tying back into their personal life codes. But others chose not to engage in the essay assessment. They were academically ready for this task, but they chose to let it be. I don't know all the reasons why: a lot of life can happen between class meetings, on buses, after school, and over weekends. A student may be ready to tackle a hard thing one day but lack the emotional space to receive or engage in it the next. And I myself made mistakes in my teaching-misses that sit with me still today, four years later.

But I also sit with this: Eric passed that essay assessment. He had not attempted a single one all year. This one, though, he passed. Barely, perhaps; but sometimes we go miles and miles just for that barely.

"Decoding" the Truths

What truths jump out as I reflect on this lesson?

First, not every student comes with prior knowledge of the content, but every student does come with knowledge prior to the content. Teachers must create opportunities for students to share their existing knowledge. This is part of the curricular flexibility of differentiated instruction. DI-focused teachers understand the pressures of jam-packed courses, but they also understand student engagement. They know students will invest more deeply when they feel present in the content or components of the lesson.

Second, teachers can leverage student perspectives to improve teaching practices. When we listen to kids, we come to know them better. Knowing them changes our pedagogy, sometimes in small but mighty ways. Reading about the lack of loyalty in Eric's life, I realized he saw the world through distrustful eyes: No one has my back. For the remainder of our short time together, I looked for ways to communicate, "I've got you," and then back it up.

Third, we need to think about worthwhileability and successability all the time. Are my essential questions worthwhile? Are they relevant to my students' lives? Are they even essential, or are they merely content-specific unit questions? "How do you multiply two fractions," for instance, is not an essential question. One that is: "Which matters more, the process or result?" Students can tackle this essential question in every academic discipline, but they can also explore it in the hallways of their own lives. I witnessed an amazing discussion once about the unwritten rules of fighting. The students sounded like they had just read Machiavelli, arguing over who had more honor: the "winning" fighter who disregarded the socially accepted rules of combat, or the "loser" who respected those rules. Process or result? True essential questions are personally worthwhile and broadly applicable. They captivate and carry students into content. They form a bridge between the familiar (how is this process/result question relevant to me?) and the strange (what does it have to do with multiplying fractions?).

If worthwhileability gets students to run the lesson race ("Alright, you've got my attention"), then successability equips them to leap the hurdles ("I made it over the first one, I can make it over the next"). In planning we should ask, "What are my students ready for as they approach the next challenge in the lesson?", recognizing that different students may need different supports. If the hurdles are way too high (or way too low, for that matter) then the race becomes disrespectful. We have to think about our materials, modeling, and methods as instruments of student progression. Can I manipulate this text, this essay prompt, this test item, this discussion protocol? Can I scaffold it down for students who need support? Can I intensify it up for those ready to stretch? And how do I know when they're ready? This kind of reflection drives differentiation. If we just press forward from task to task, unreflective about the impact of our instruction, or inconsiderate of student needs and readiness, then we risk turning our lessons into breeding grounds for struggle (the bad kind) and demoralization.

Lessons That Matter

At the end of the day, great teaching is loving. We love students well when we embrace them-when we strive to know them, hear their stories, accept their experiences, and begin to understand their eyes on the world.

I learned hard truths about Eric through his eyes. Understanding how he saw people made me a better teacher for him. Did Eric completely transform? Not at all. The weight of his life got in the way. A lot. But Eric and I related differently for the rest of that year. I was able to engage him more. I knew better how to protect his dignity in the classroom. I knew the importance of having his back in a world where no one was loyal.

Students get to decide when and how to invite us in. We need to accept the invitations. Embracing kids-understanding and accepting them-makes possible a more compassionate pedagogy, one that nourishes and guards more authentically.

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What Malcolm X, The Wire, and my students' lives taught me about creating lessons that matter.

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Being an adaptive leader means knowing when to shift your old ways of thinking and embrace new best practices.

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The pandemic has put a strain on group work. What can educators learn from the business world about effective collaboration practices?

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Abstract

Abandoning Low-Value Practices

It's Your Turn

Reducing or replacing "low-value" practices gives educators more time to spend on what matters.

Credit: jiunn / shuttterstock

Abstract

Abandoning Low-Value Practices

It's Your Turn

In her wildly popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo shows us that clutter gets in the way of living our best and most authentic lives. However, what we all need to understand is that it's not just our personal lives where organizing, and decluttering are important. Our professional lives need to be sorted out as well.

Whether we are talking about reducing the number of assessments our students take or the amount of homework given in the classroom, identifying content and strategies that will be more impactful, or replacing initiatives at the school and district level that are harmful to student learning (like zero-tolerance policies), there is no better time than now to focus on the process of de-implementation. For too long, teachers and leaders have experienced outsized workloads, and the related anxiety and stress is taking its toll.

In a 2020 study of school principals, for example, working conditions-including an untenable workload-were cited as one of the biggest contributing factors to leadership turnover (Levin et al., 2020). COVID-19 only compounded the already high levels of burnout experienced among teachers, social workers, school psychologists, and building and district leaders. In an Education Week article (Will, 2021), 78 percent of teachers reported being more stressed in the fall of 2021 than they had been in the fall of 2020, before vaccines were made available. Study after study, in country after country, finds that stress, anxiety, and unmanageable workloads are growing issues in schools-and they're leading to a mass exodus. Much of this increased workload may be contributed to new programs and initiatives schools take on from year to year, but we often contribute to our increased workload by engaging in actions that just don't work.

One way to alleviate, or at least minimize educators' workload, is to evaluate which activities and initiatives are impactful and reduce or replace the ones that no longer serve us or our students well. This process is referred to as de-implementation, and teachers, leaders, policymakers, and all education stakeholders need to engage in de-implementation conversations.

Abandoning Low-Value Practices

Bodegom-Vos et al. (2017) define de-implementation as the process of "abandoning existing low-value practices." In my experience, people sometimes mistake the word "abandoning" as merely getting rid of something, but abandoning may also mean replacing ineffective practices with practices that can be much more impactful.

De-implementation research originated in the medical field, where healthcare initiatives that wasted resources or delivered no benefit to patients were replaced. De-implementation research then expanded to the field of school psychology where researchers looked at practices that also wasted resources or were even harmful to students. McKay et al. (2018) define de-implementation in an education context as "the discontinuation of interventions that should no longer be provided."

But what is a "low-value practice" and which interventions should "no longer be provided?" Farmer et al. (2018) suggest that low-value practices are those practices that:

1. have not been shown to be effective and impactful,

2. are less effective or impactful than another available practice,

One of the key areas in school psychology that Farmer and his team have suggested de-implementing, or in this case partially reducing, is the discrepancy model , which is used in some schools to determine if a student qualifies for special education services.

Abandoning low-value practices means having robust conversations where teachers and leaders develop a common understanding around words such as effective and impactful. For example, if you're a principal who requires teachers to hand in their lesson plan books every three weeks out of compliance (or habit), but you often don't have time to look at them all, perhaps the requirement needs to go away.

These conversations can help elevate the voices of teachers, which often increases their motivation and sense of agency. Although the de-implementation process may require heavy lifting in the beginning, it can help contribute to a positive school culture in the long-term.

1. What Can You Partially Reduce?

A partial reduction is exactly what it sounds like-eliminating the fluff-and it can be extremely beneficial. When I work with instructional leadership teams, they typically seek out efficiencies in two areas: checking email and attending meetings. Email sounds like such an anticlimactic place to begin a partial reduction, but the reality is that so many of us are tied to our phones and feel like we have to check our email every hour on the hour. This can take us away from more impactful work at school like co-planning with others or taking time to reflect on a lesson as a teacher or formal observation as a school leader. Plus, when we engage in this constant checking of email at home, we're being robbed of quality time with our family and friends.

One of the easiest actions educators can take when it comes to email is to set up an automated response. For example, this response might notify others that you will check email once in the morning, once around noon, and once in the late afternoon before you go home to disconnect and spend time with your family. In my work, I have met countless teachers and leaders who are beginning to engage in this practice.

A second area of partial reduction is meetings, which have been a thorn in the side of teams I work with all around the world. Leaders and educators confide that they meet several times a week, but many times those meetings don't amount to new learning. They also take staff away from more impactful work like lesson planning and engaging in walkthroughs or learning walks. I have had directors at the district office level confess that they feel the pressure to add agenda items to K-12 administration meetings because they feel they need to say more.

If people are going to make the effort to meet, then they need to feel that the meeting is worthwhile. Questions to ask before a meeting are:

What are our success criteria for the meeting? Meaning, what will we be learning together during the meeting, and what tangible goals are being met by meeting?

How will this meeting lead to a deeper understanding of a challenge we are facing or a goal we are trying to achieve?

Does this meeting inspire dialogue among the participants, or is this meeting merely a convening in which one person does all of the talking, and everyone else has to sit and listen?

If most meetings are not a venue where people can answer the above questions in a positive way, then perhaps it's a time to partially reduce the number of meetings being held.

These two examples-email and meetings-are what I refer to as informal de-implementation methods because they do not require a formal process to enact. Other examples of things teachers and leaders are partially reducing is that of making students take weekly assessments that do not inform teaching practices or decreasing the amount of time they spend afterschool. The second option for schools, to replace something altogether, is an example of what I refer to as a formal method of de-implementation, because it will take some planning.

One of the easiest actions educators can take when it comes to email is to set up an automated response.

2. What Can You Replace?

Replacing ineffective practices often seems to send a mixed message to educators when it comes to de-implementation. People often believe de-implementation is about getting rid of stuff, but the reality is that de-implementation is about no longer engaging in actions that aren't impactful. After all, Farmer provides criteria that suggests we need not engage in actions that may cause harm, but in certain cases those actions that cause harm do need to be replaced with something more effective.

Consider these two examples. The first is a school district that is transitioning from traditional grading to standards-based grading. Grading, as we all know, is a complicated and heated topic of discussion in schools. Over the years, more and more schools have been transitioning to standards-based grading to create more consistent and equitable grading practices.

The second example is discipline, which is being looked at in a whole new way in many schools. More and more schools are replacing zero-tolerance policies with more equitable and responsive discipline approaches such as restorative justice, because zero-tolerance policies often cause students harm.

In most cases, standards-based grading and restorative justice are implemented to replace practices that have not been shown to be effective or impactful. In the short term, this is where de-implementation will take some formal work, but the long-term payoff is that teachers and leaders will then engage in practices that are less harmful to students and will create a more inclusive climate with a deeper focus on learning. Plus, there are some immediate efficiencies: When teachers give fewer assessments, for example, less time is spent on testing and grading, which means more time can go to collaborative student work. Similarly, if students are no longer sent out of the classroom for minor offenses (e.g., I have seen students sent down to the office for talking in class or not having their homework completed), they won't miss out on important content and learning, which means less documentation and makeup work.

Through this formal de-implementation process, teachers and leaders engage in discussions that will create a common language and a common understanding around the true meaning of discipline, assessment, and grading, and there is no downside to that.

In both aforementioned cases, a formal de-implementation process is necessary, because grading and discipline have an impact on every child in the school community, and changes in these areas often require a committee to work on because both grading and discipline are so embedded in the culture of the school.

To engage in a formal de-implementation process, PLC's, instructional leadership teams, and district leadership teams may want to use one or more of the following tools:

Program logic model: Logic models can help teams do their best thinking when it comes to planning out a theory of action around grading or discipline: gather research, plan activities, commit to a timetable, and define the ultimate impact their replacement action would have on students.

De-implementation checklist: This checklist allows teacher or leadership teams to do their best thinking around whether the de-implementation is warranted, whether a partial reduction or replacement is needed (based on evidence gathered), and what the team's next steps should be (e.g., engaging in empathy interviews with students to understand how an initiative has impacted them in the past). In the case of formal de-implementation, the checklist can act as an important conversation tool. (See my book for a full de-implementation checklist).

Pacing chart: Pacing charts help teams understand how long the de-implementation may take, but they also help staff meet important milestones in the replacement of ineffective practices. When we think of an example like standards-based grading, we might begin the de-implementation process by engaging in backwards planning by developing our ultimate goal with grading, and plan backwards from there.

These tools in the de-implementation process are meant to help develop clarity around the process, and more clarity usually leads to a better understanding and less anxiety.

It's Your Turn

We know that levels of burnout and anxiety in schools are high, and morale is low. Much of this is out of our hands, but we have to set aside time to vet the actions and programs that we can change. De-implementation is about allowing teachers and leaders to take back some control in their classrooms and schools-to feel heard -and to define together what is truly worth their time. When we declutter our practices, abandon those that don't serve us or our students well, and focus on what works, we begin to remember why we entered into education in the first place-to impact student learning.

References

Bodegom-Vos, L. V., Davidoff, F., & Marang-van de Mheen, P. J. (2017). Implementation and de- implementation: Two sides of the same coin? BMJ quality & safety, 26(6), pp. 495-501.

DeWitt, P. (2021). Collective leader efficacy: Strengthening instructional leadership teams. Corwin Press/Learning Forward.

Farmer, R. L., Zaheer, I., Duhon, G. J., & Ghazal, S. (2021). Reducing low-value practices a functional-contextual consideration to aid in de-implementation efforts.  Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 36(2):153-165.

Levin, S., Scott, C., Yang, M., Leung, M., Leung-Gagné, M., & Bradley, K. (2020). Supporting a strong, stable principal workforce: What matters and what can be done. NASSP and the Learning Policy Institute.

McKay, V. R., Morshed, A. B., Brownson, R.C., Proctor, E. K., & Prusaczyk, B. (2018, September). Letting go: Conceptualizing intervention de-implementation in public health and social service settings. American Journal of Community Psychology, 62(1-2), pp. 189-202.

Will, M. (2021, June 15). Teachers are more likely to experience depression symptoms than other adults. Education Week.

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How De-Implementation Can Curb Educator Burnout - ASCD

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Abstract Abandoning Low-Value Practices It's Your Turn Reducing or replacing "low-value" practices gives educators more time to spend on what matters. Credit: jiunn / shuttterstock Abstract Abandoning Low-Value Practices It's Your Turn In her wildly popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo shows us that clutter gets in the way of living our best and most authentic lives.

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Vol. 80

No. 6

Abstract

Change #1: Leaders Must Accelerate the Pace of Change

Change #2: Move from Buy-in to Evidence-Based Commitment

Change #3: Move from Fragmentation to Focus

Moving with a Sense of Urgency

School leaders need to break with 5-year plans, "buy-in," and other hidebound conventions on implementing change.

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Credit: Z_WEI / iSTOCK

Abstract

Change #1: Leaders Must Accelerate the Pace of Change

Change #2: Move from Buy-in to Evidence-Based Commitment

Change #3: Move from Fragmentation to Focus

Moving with a Sense of Urgency

It is time for a change in change leadership. In this time when the world of schooling is finding its way after the pandemic's height, when schools need urgent change, many education systems remain stuck in the five-year time horizon of strategic plans. While schools face crises, too many leaders remain paralyzed by the notion that change is impossible without buy-in from everyone involved.

Implementing needed changes at a too-careful, too-slow pace isn't the only problem: Many schools are trying to push too many changes simultaneously. So at a time when teachers and administrators need focus, schools are inundated with initiative fatigue. For example, in reviewing more than 2,000 school plans, we've found schools with dozens of priorities and districts with more than 100-but schools with the greatest gains in achievement consistently had six or fewer priorities.

What's needed for effective change leadership has changed since the pioneering work of John Kotter, a leading thinker in this area, in the 1980s. We believe it's essential for leaders at every level to re-evaluate their previous notions of change leadership-and their own strategies. In particular, they need to embrace the reality that significant change within a school can happen more quickly-within 100 days, we contend-when leaders stop focusing on "buy-in" or too many initiatives. Observing and consulting in schools in the last few years, we've seen that when leaders recognize three new realities about how to promote change in schools, increased student achievement results.

Change #1: Leaders Must Accelerate the Pace of Change

In contrast to the traditional claim that change takes five to seven years, the evidence is that great things can be done in 100 days (Reeves & Eaker, 2019). That's a single semester in most schools. The writing of the United States Constitution, Handel's Messiah, and Dostoyevsky's The Gambler all happened in fewer than 100 days. Perhaps more significantly, so did the major policy and legislative actions Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. We've seen schools reduce (by more than 80 percent) the rate at which students fail courses; dramatically improve attendance and behavior; and increase student engagement-within 100 days.

When people accept the "five to seven years" claim, it can be an excuse for institutional lethargy-and our children suffer for it. Imagine that you are a parent of a 1st grade student and a school leader tells you, "We have this great reading program that helps struggling early readers-but it will be five to seven years before it's implemented." Or imagine that you're teaching students who clearly show serious learning gaps associated with school closures and remote learning in recent years (Anderson, 2022), and you hear someone tout great intervention initiatives to help your students catch up-but add that it will take years to successfully implement them.

Leaders need to take decisive action and say without equivocation, 'This is what we will accomplish in the next 100 days.'

We often argue our point to school, district, and state-level leaders through this comparison: Imagine the school is on fire and children are in the building. Do you really need to have another meeting or study to decide whether to evacuate the building? Leaders need to take decisive action and say without equivocation, "This is what we will accomplish in the next 100 days."

We have seen practical examples of the 100-day action plan. For instance, we worked with a high school in San Bernardino, California, where the failure rate for some courses in math, science, and English language arts was 50 percent. After teachers made two fundamental changes, starting around 2016, the failure rate for these courses declined dramatically within one semester-to less than 10 percent or, in some cases, zero.

First, teachers stopped using the electronic grading system built into their school's learning management system for course grades. This system, like most, automatically assigned grades on a zero to 100-point scale and used the average of each student's points to determine their final course grade. Teachers couldn't override that grading system while using this LMS. Eventually, with encouragement-and seeing more students of the teachers who switched grading methods both pass courses and learn key material-all teachers assumed their own professional responsibility to evaluate students based on their performance on state standards. Neither standards nor assessments changed. Teacher expectations didn't change. The fundamental change in assessment terms was to displace the toxic practice of the average to determine final grades.

Second, teachers stopped the traditional policy of assigning homework and made time for students to practice and reinforce learning in class. They rejected the fantasy that homework completion rates are a reflection of student character or achievement, rather than of how conducive to schoolwork the home environment is, and how some kids have more external responsibilities-like sibling care-than others. As one teacher said, the shift to in-class practice was "not grade inflation, it was work inflation. Students were working harder-they just got the work done in class."

Change #2: Move from Buy-in to Evidence-Based Commitment

One of the most persistent myths in change leadership is the assumption that buy-in from all staff members is essential before initiating change. Given the pervasive learning gaps associated with the global pandemic, there is a genuine crisis in schools. The resulting lack of skills and knowledge is leading to some of the lowest student achievement in two decades. For instance, on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one-third of 4th and 8th grade students were reading on grade level, and the results were even more dismal in mathematics. The high number of students experiencing struggle and failure is a time bomb that will soon explode into higher school-dropout rates if education leaders fail to take decisive steps to address the underlying learning gaps.

We often ask school leaders this simple question: How is your schedule and time allocation different today than it was in 2019, before the pandemic? In the vast majority of schools we've visited in the past year, we hear that these things haven't changed; we often run into a brick wall of denial. Even though many students are far behind in reading and math, the amount of instruction and instructional support they receive today is often no different than before the pandemic. There seems to be pervasive magical thinking that teachers should just provide grade-level instruction and a miracle will happen. This is scant comfort to the 3rd grade teacher with students who don't know how to hold a pencil and are struggling with letter sounds, or to the middle school math teacher whose students cannot perform basic mathematical operations. With each additional year of denying the need to make significant adjustments in schools, we believe these problems will compound.

In conversations with school leaders, we continue to hear that implementing effective interventions is impossible without teacher buy-in. But the old model of change that depends upon buy-in has failed education leaders because it's based on the premise that "belief precedes behavior," when the latest psychological evidence reveals that "behavior precedes belief" (Milkman, 2021). This means that people should first implement a new practice, then observe the results-only then will they support the practice. Even in the face of evidence of learning loss and student failures, some people will always be initially unwilling to change. When we hear assurances from a leader that she or he has buy-in from all staff, we know one of two things is true: Either the leader is not asking for true change, or discussions about the proposed change are happening out of the leader's earshot.

Leaders must stop waiting for buy-in and giving resisters veto power over essential changes that will have lifetime impacts on students. Principals don't ask for buy-in on cafeteria hygiene or bus safety, because our students' lives depend on our commitment to safe food and transportation. Student success in school is also a health and safety issue: Students who fail in school usually face a lifetime of poverty, unemployment, excessive medical care costs, and increased involvement in the criminal justice system (National Dropout Prevention Center, n.d.).

Simple changes like the ones made by the San Bernardino high school can have an immediate positive impact on student learning. Again, schools that have made just these two changes (adopting standards-based grading and eliminating traditional homework policies) have achieved dramatic reductions in their failure rates. The reason for their success was that teachers and administrators, in a short period of time, saw their colleagues implement new practices and achieve positive results. That's changing belief through behavior. Yet many school leaders continue to tolerate toxic grading practices, inequitable homework policies, and other methods of operating that get in the way of learning (especially post-pandemic)-often because some faculty cling to familiar practices. While leaders are waiting for buy-in, a generation of students will be lost.

We aren't recommending unbridled autocracy, but rather a commitment to evidence-based change. Rather than asking for buy-in, we counsel leaders to ask teachers to undertake a "fair experiment," proposing, for instance, "Let's see what happens when, for a set period, we have students practice in class rather than at home-or when we double the amount of time allocated to math instruction." When the set period ends, leaders must share the evidence of how-or if-achievement changed. Only then should they seek buy-in, assuming positive change happens (which is likely if previous research has backed the change). External evidence isn't enough; leaders must produce local evidence of impact. That can only happen when leaders get the sequence right-implement the change, gather evidence of impact, then ask for buy-in.

Change #3: Move from Fragmentation to Focus

A common cause of failures of promising reforms, especially in education, is that leaders try to do too many things at once. With the recent flood of federal dollars, it is not unusual to see new curricula, new technology, new training, and multiple interventions all implemented at the same time. Sometimes the pendulum swings from multiple changes to no change and back again. Initiative fatigue, combined with poorly communicated changes, insufficient support, and unnecessary complexity, undermines even the most logically sound change efforts (Guskey, 2021).

No matter how much people believe in their multi-tasking prowess, the neuroscience is clear: Humans do not multi-task, but switch between tasks, at a terrible cost to their cognition and sound decision making (Hari, 2022). The literature is consistent that neither individuals nor organizations can effectively monitor and implement more than six priorities at once. When we attempt to scatter our attention among dozens of priorities-and doesn't this describe the latest strategic plan in your system?-we burn leaders to a cinder and fail to implement even the best initiatives well (Daisley, 2022).

Exceptional gains can happen in 100 days, if leaders adopt the appropriate sense of urgency and abandon myths that stand in the way of effective change.

Moving with a Sense of Urgency

Exceptional gains can happen in 100 days, if leaders adopt the appropriate sense of urgency and abandon myths that stand in the way of effective change. With 100-day leadership cycles, schools will not wait for next year's test scores to celebrate wins-and teachers can make mid-course corrections if needed. As schools face staff shortages, teacher burn-out, learning loss, and unremitting criticism from many sectors of society, our stakeholders and colleagues need to regain confidence that leaders can step up and drive change effectively.

Asking stakeholders to wait years for evidence of impact and imploring teachers for buy-in without taking action will likely breed cynicism or even contempt. We know how to make effective change in schools, and we can do it in 100 days.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ Do you think real change tends to take too long in schools? If so, why do you think that happens?

➛ Do you agree that gaining teacher buy-in is an ineffective change management approach? Why or why not?

➛ What steps could you take to accelerate improvement in your school or district?

The Learning Leader

School improvement starts with strong leadership. In the fully updated second edition of his book, Douglas Reeves helps leaders reimagine the role they play in school improvement, leverage their existing strengths, and reset their priorities to achieve success.

References

Anderson, J. (2022, April 20). Harvard EdCast: The COVID Catch-up Challenge.

Daisley, B. (2022). Eat sleep work repeat: 30 hacks for bringing joy to your job. HarperCollins Publishers.

Guskey, T. (2021). Learning from failures: Lessons from unsuccessful grading reform initiatives. NASSP Bulletin, 105(3), 1-9.

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can't pay attention-And how to think deeply again. Crown Business.

Milkman, K. (2021). How to change: The science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Penguin Publishing Group.

National Assessment of Educational Progress. (2022). NAEP reading assessment results, Grades 4 & 8 and NAEP math assessment results, Grades 4 & 8. Author.

Reeves, D., & Eaker, R. (2019). 100 day leaders: Turning short-term wins into long-term success in schools. Solution Tree Press.

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Max, a 13-year-old growing up in a single-parent family, often loses his temper and has a history of impulsivity, as well as a past psychiatric hospitalization for threatening to harm his sister. He has frequent outbursts when he’s redirected at school, such as from one activity to another. The assi