Today’s post is a practical one (and there’s an audio version, too!).
It’s the middle of fall and we’ve been at the 2024-25 school year for a few months. As a leader, by this point you have some sense of what’s working and what’s not — yet you may not have had the time or space to reflect and act upon that information.
In this post, we’ll take a look at three instructional leadership systems and consider how to reflect upon current practice and make a plan to strengthen these systems for the purpose of improving teacher practice and student outcomes. Per James Clear, “you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” By investing in improving our systems, we put ourselves — and our teams — on the path to achieving ambitious and important goals.
System 1: System for Planning for Instruction with Teachers
As school leaders, we need a plan for our planning meetings! In the absence of one, critical time that should be held sacred for collaborative inquiry can easily get eaten up by logistics. Furthermore, sometimes our planning meeting agendas are so overstuffed that we miss the forest for the trees. Leaders looking to re-set their systems for planning for instruction with teachers might try the following:
Re-establish the time and place for logistical information sharing and decision-making — so that it happens outside of instructional planning meetings.
Re-focus planning meetings on what’s most important – “the intellectual work of making meaning of the text for yourself” (I wrote about this a bit more here for EdWeek!)
Try this:
To prep for your next planning meeting, radically simplify the agenda. Have teachers come having read the text from an upcoming lesson and/or completing the task that students will encounter. Focus the meeting on putting teachers in the learners’ seat, making meaning of the text/task. Have teachers leave with exemplar responses that reflect deep understanding of the text/task.
System 2: System for Studying Student Work and Data
Educators spend tons of time collecting and looking at data — but all that effort rarely leads to improvements in teaching and learning. Too often, there’s way too much lag time between when an assessment is given and when it’s analyzed, resulting in analysis that lacks relevance and/or next steps that have no real way of being applied in upcoming lessons. Furthermore, too often analysis focuses on what students got right or wrong with little reflection upon why students performed the way they did and how the work tells us about our own practice. To re-set your routines around studying student work and data, start small: rather than waiting for the next big round of interim assessments, identify a set of student work from an upcoming lesson that your leadership and/or teacher team can study. Then, re-focus analysis on a powerful key question: what does the work tell us about student understanding and adult practice?
Try This:
Gather a set of student work from across several classrooms and use the key questions below to guide reflection:
What do you notice about student understanding?
Where do we see evidence of student understanding?
Where do we see evidence of struggle or misunderstanding?
What does the work reflect about adult practice?
How might the work give us insight into adult expectations?
How might the work give us insight into changes we can make to adult practice to improve student understanding?
System 3: System for Observing Instruction
Observation systems are often driven more by compliance-focused evaluation systems or done in a check-the-box fashion focused primarily on coverage. The output of spending time in classrooms can wind up being unfocused — more of a laundry list than a strategic approach to building teacher capacity. To re-set your routines for observing instruction, first identify observation priorities connected to school-wide goals; use these priorities to determine who will you observe and why. When you enter a classroom, do so with a clearly defined purpose – know whether you’re going in to diagnose (i.e. gather more information to better understand the state of instruction) or to build capacity (i.e. use your observations to support the teacher in improving).
Try This:
Do a self-check before you enter classrooms to observe:
What school-wide goal or priority does this observation connect to?
What’s my purpose in engaging in this observation?
How will I ensure that the next steps coming out of this observation either help me:
Deepen my diagnosis of a classroom or school trend, or
Enable me to provide a teacher meaningful feedback that improves their practice
As you reflect upon your own practice, which of your systems need a refresh? And how might you work with your leadership team to consider refreshing these systems school-wide?
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