The Peter Principle (people in an organization tend to rise to the level of their incompetence) always seemed such a harsh concept. No one wants to be told they are incompetent. But, it is reality. The move from sales superstar to sales manager or All-star player to coach doesn’t always work out. Different skill sets are required.
And so it is with educational leadership. Some make the transition well. Those that do understand that the assignment has changed:
Allyson Apsey lays down a nuclear truth bomb in her latest post. What is the job of a building-level educational leader? It’s not instructional.
I have good news for school leaders: you do not need to be an “instructional leader”.
Principals, go ahead and let out that collective sigh. You cannot be masters of best practices and pedagogy in every content area and every grade level. It is not possible, and it is not the best use of your time and influence.
Even folks who were ace teachers will be out of their depth when observing and providing actionable feedback in unfamiliar content areas. Apsey quotes researchers Rick DuFour and Mike Mattos:
“As former social studies teachers, we were not prepared to help a Spanish teacher improve when we couldn’t understand what he/she was saying. We were ill-equipped to enhance the pedagogy of an industrial arts teacher when we were mechanically inept.”
I consider myself a bit of a word nerd and a voracious reader, and I manage to get enough practice writing to string together semi-literate thoughts in this space from time to time. But I’ll never have the depth of knowledge of content to teach English/Language Arts.
And if my job was to make high-stakes judgements about content knowledge experts teaching in that area, well, I again cede the floor to Apsey:
I would often complete a teacher observation for our evaluation system and wonder how I was going to fulfill my promise to make the observation feedback valuable for the teacher. Maybe this is why research continually finds that teacher evaluation systems have zero or very little positive impact on student achievement?
So, what is the princpal’s role in elevating teaching and learning in a building? Apsey turns to a Wallace Foundation study updated in 2021. “Principals need to be leaders of not only instruction, but of the people and the organization. We cannot be just instructional leaders, there is so much more to our work.”
Apsey offers a list of “to-dos” and “to-don’ts” beginning with:
“Have conversations with teachers about instruction, not to evaluate them or give them guidance, but to learn from them as the pedagogy experts of their students. You can also use this time to understand their strengths and goals better so you can support them in their next steps.”
“Have conversations with teachers about instruction“. Woah. That would take so much of the stress and apprehension out of the evaluation season. Less “us vs. them”, more of “all of us together”.
Here’s her list of questions to drive the conversation forward:
- What student learning are you excited about right now?
- What instructional resource is really helping your students grow?
- Tell me about an instructional fail you recently had, and what did you learn from it?
- Where do you feel really strong instructionally?
- Where are you feeling weak instructionally, and how can I support your growth?
- What is one achievement hope you have for your students between now and the end of the quarter?
My last post-eval conference went pretty much exactly like that and it was super-valuable for both of us.
Apsey’s blog post set in motion a series of questions to myself: What if I used this checklist for self introspection? I bet that would be powerhouse self-learning. What if PLCs gathered for discussion around these questions? What if they used these questions to drive professional learning?
Now seems like as good a time as any. Let’s go.
What student learning are you excited about right now?
I loved how my class of students repeating Algebra 1A leaned in to the In-N-Out Burger 100×100 activity. The goal of that type of Three-Act Math task is to create a low barrier to entry where we can engage the question with common sense and then lay the math over the top of it. For a day early in the semester there was super-high levels of engagement in Room 247. My students found out maybe they are “better at math” than they thought. Plus it helped build a foundation for our transition to a project/problem-based learning school.
What instructional resource is really helping your students grow?
I leaned heavily on Quizizz and Desmos activities during the shutdown and remote teaching, and I find as we lurch back to “normal” that these tools allow me to combine the building blocks of an effective lesson with a seamless way for students to contribute to the discussion even if it is in pixels rather than out loud. The “snapshot” feature in AB means I can anonymously do a side-by-side of student responses to highlight different pathways to a soultion or to play “spot the error”, and with Quizizz I can build my “check for understanding” questions right in to my slides.
Tell me about an instructional fail you recently had, and what did you learn from it?
Part of being a teacher who creates many of his own materials, is that sometimes they will crash and burn spectacularly. Part of being a reflective teacher is that those are learning opportunities. There’s not really one memorable flame-out, more an occasional day where a lesson just does not land right and getting student engagement is like pulling teeth. I’ve been trying to fall back on the basics (eye contact with students, wait time), and toying with using the random student selector in Quizizz.
More on this topic later.
Where do you feel really strong instructionally?
I think a couple of areas are making me really happy right now. One is relationships. I can tell by the side conversations in class and the greetings in the hallway that my students and I are in a really good place this year. Second, my background with using #MTBoS materials had eased the transition to problem-based learning. I’ve been able to take on a bit of a leadership role in my PLN with our PrBL activities. And I think we are doing well at using media as a lesson hook (more benefits of a robust online PLN). Today to intro our ratios and proportions lesson I borrowed a video piece from Business Insider magazine.
Some quality discussion ensued and the class started off understanding the concept of a scale factor.
Where are you feeling weak instructionally, and how can I support your growth?
I wish every day was like that. Reality is, I really want to be better at engaging my students in class and centering our time together around their learning and their voice. One move I made at the semester break towards that goal was rearranging the desks in my classroom, creating pods of 3-4 students. That was my go-to classroom set-up pre-pandemic, and it’s time it made its return. If they won’t talk to me, maybe they’ll talk to each other. And that’s a start.
What is one achievement hope you have for your students between now and the end of the quarter?
I hope my students get the best grades they can possibly get, can show evidence of as much learning as we can in the next three weeks before spring break, I hope my students realize how much I want them to do well, and I hope they take advantage of the opportunities thay have for quiz corrections and alternate assessments.
We’ve got the right philosophy about the evaluation process in my building. It’s about improvement and coaching and increasing student achievement. And our admins walk their talk. Post-conferences are two-way conversations where learning occurs on the part of both parties.
I wish that for all my teacher friends.
Tweaking For No Reason 
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