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Following the High-Performance Instructional Leadership Model

What can you do to maximize your impact on teacher practice when you visit classrooms? Most instructional leaders conduct mandatory formal observations and make an effort to visit classrooms more often, but these visits often seem limited in value—especially prearranged formal observations, which Marshall (2013) describes, in his experience as a principal, as “dog-and-pony shows—contrived, unrepresentative, nervous-making lessons solely for my benefit” (p. 60). Given all the other pressures we face, if classroom visits don’t provide considerable benefits for both instructional leaders and teachers, there is simply no incentive to make time for visits on a consistent basis.

To ensure that our time in classrooms has a positive impact on student learning and is professionally rewarding for everyone involved, the high-performance instructional leadership model consists of classroom visits that are:

Frequent—Approximately eighteen biweekly visits per teacher per year

Brief—Around five to fifteen minutes

Substantive—More than just making an appearance

Open ended—Focused on the teacher’s instructional decision making, not just narrow data collection

Evidence based—Centered on what actually happens in the classroom

Criterion referenced—Linked to a shared set of standards or expectations

Conversation oriented—Designed to lead to rich, engaging conversations between teachers and instructional leaders

I drew these characteristics from existing models and practices in our profession (see chapter 3 for detailed comparisons), but here they form a unique approach designed to give teachers and instructional leaders the greatest possible benefits from classroom visits. In this chapter, we explore each of these criteria in a bit more depth. I will also discuss the concept of a shared instructional framework—expectations shared between teachers and instructional leaders that collectively define professional practice and performance for teachers at a school—and encourage leaders to identify their own instructional frameworks.

Make Frequent Visits

If we want to see meaningful results from our time in classrooms, it’s only logical that we commit to an adequate dose for our efforts. Kim Marshall (2013) notes that administrators are not present for 99.9 percent of the instruction that takes place in classrooms, yet are responsible for obtaining enough information to evaluate teachers fairly. In sampling terms, visiting a classroom only once or twice per year gives an administrator a very limited perspective on a teacher’s practice. Grissom et al. (2013) found that time spent coaching teachers is associated with higher student achievement in mathematics. Yet, they also found that, on average, only 0.5 percent of principals’ time was devoted to coaching teachers, which can be expected to produce student learning gains of less than 0.05 percent of a standard deviation—far too small a difference to notice. We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.

We must visit teachers frequently if we want to have a noticeable impact on their practice.

How often is often enough? It depends on the nature of your role and the number of teachers you supervise. A two-week rotation—visiting every teacher you supervise every other week—strikes a balance between frequency and practicality for most school-based administrators who are responsible for evaluating teachers. If you visit 10 percent of your teachers daily in a 180-day school year, you’ll reach everyone approximately eighteen times, not including formal observations or other types of visits to classrooms. Depending on how many teachers you supervise, this will typically require two to four visits per day. If you’re part of an administrative team that shares evaluation responsibilities, plan to visit only the teachers you supervise.

However, if you supervise an especially large number of teachers, or if you’re not in a school-based administrative role, it may not be feasible to establish a two-week rotation. Instead, focus on a daily target of three visits, or a weekly target of fifteen visits. On the other hand, if you’re a coach providing intensive support to a group of five new teachers, your visit frequency will be higher. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll treat three visits per day as a standard target throughout this book.

Make Brief Visits

In order to form a sustainable habit, it’s essential to keep your classroom visits brief. Frequent visits become virtually impossible to sustain if they swell to thirty minutes or more. As the length of a visit increases, the chance of scheduling conflicts and interruptions multiplies dramatically. Additionally, school schedules often break down into five- or even one-minute increments, creating awkward blocks of time. Fitting half-hour or longer visits into a schedule full of passing periods, recesses, and lunch periods is a formidable challenge. The odds you’d be able to stay in a classroom for most of a lesson without interruption, three times a day, every day, are slim indeed.

The solution is to keep your visits brief enough to be practical, but long enough to be meaningful. A one- to three-minute visit may be long enough to make an appearance, but it’s not long enough to provide you with the information you’ll need to have a substantive conversation with the teacher. For most visits, five to fifteen minutes tends to be the sweet spot, with rapidly diminishing returns beyond the fifteen-minute mark. Marshall (2013) notes that “After five or ten minutes, the amount of new information levels off and then gradually declines for the remainder of the period” (p. 66). I have sometimes found it worthwhile to stay a bit longer to see the conclusion of an activity, but it usually takes less than ten minutes to see enough to fuel a substantive conversation. If you arrive during a time that won’t lead to a useful conversation—say, because students are taking a test—you can stay a bit longer or come back later, but as a rule of thumb, ten minutes is a reasonable goal to strive for.

Make Substantive Visits

For a classroom visit to make a difference in your leadership and in the teacher’s practice, it must focus on significant issues of teaching and learning. However, you will need to develop relationships with teachers before this will be possible. You’ll want to initiate your first cycle of visits in a nonthreatening manner that builds trust, and this may mean that conversations in your first cycle are less substantive than you’d like. After your initial round of visits to classrooms, though, you’ll be able to delve deeper in these conversations so you can gain insight into teachers’ decision making and strengthen your understanding of teacher and student needs.

One caution is in order: the imperative to make our visits substantive doesn’t mean we always need to provide suggestions for improvement. In fact, making suggestions to teachers following brief visits is often counterproductive (Danielson, 2015). Rather than striving to “fix” teachers’ lessons by pointing out minor opportunities for improvement, our focus should be on discussing—verbally and in writing—the dynamics at work in the classroom, with reference to a shared set of expectations, such as a curriculum guide or teacher evaluation rubric. Through this dialogue, we stand a much better chance of having a positive impact on students.

Make Open-Ended Visits

These visits to classrooms should result in learning for both the teacher and the instructional leader, but I didn’t design them to produce a rating of the teacher or the lesson. While every educator has a personal understanding of what a good lesson should look like, the reality is that a single visit doesn’t provide enough information for a sound evaluation of the lesson’s overall effectiveness. As the instructional leader and teacher talk about what happened in the lesson—in a brief conversation or perhaps via email later—the focus should be on whether the lesson was effective in achieving the teacher’s aims, which may be more complex than a visitor can ascertain during one visit. This requires that the instructional leader observe with an open mind and treat the teacher as the expert (Danielson, 2015).

Too often, supervisors march into classrooms, clipboards in hand, and rate elements such as lesson design, instructional strategies, student grouping, student engagement, and countless other aspects of teaching without attending to the essential question of whether the lesson accomplishes what the teacher intends. This leads to frustration and resistance from teachers who may be genuinely interested in feedback—if they have a say in what they’d like feedback on. If we enter each classroom with an open mind, we can focus on addressing the issues that are most relevant to the teacher. For example, if a lesson is effective at helping students achieve the selected learning targets, but those targets aren’t rigorous enough, prescribing a different instructional technique won’t help because increasing rigor is a planning issue. When we seek to understand the teacher’s approach and consider it on its own merits, we can have more substantive, impactful conversations that change teacher practice in meaningful ways and result in higher levels of learning for students.

Make Evidence-Based Visits

The goal of classroom visits in the high-performance instructional leadership model is to obtain firsthand information from the classroom—where the work of teaching and learning is taking place—to inform subsequent conversations and decisions. When an instructional leader gives only a vague description of what happened in the lesson, such as “Students were not paying attention while you gave instructions,” it’s difficult to map the relationships between teacher actions and students’ experience. Richly descriptive evidence, on the other hand, can lead to deeper explorations of the impact instruction is having on student learning.

Taking descriptive, low-inference notes can both help you recall what happened and give the teacher—who was too busy teaching to take his or her own notes—a record of what transpired. For example, if you noted that one group of students was talking, and the teacher immediately went and worked with that group to get them started, this low-inference evidence can lead to a richer discussion than a more judgmental comment such as “Students were not paying attention.” Equipped with this written record, both parties can remain open to new interpretations of the lesson based on their conversation.

Because the word evidence may have negative connotations for teachers, you may wish to simply refer to your written records as notes.

Make Criterion-Referenced Visits

Descriptive evidence doesn’t stand on its own; it only gains meaning within a set of shared expectations. These shared expectations are drawn from teacher evaluation rubrics, professional standards, curriculum, professional development, strategic plans, and other resources that collectively define professional practice and performance for teachers at your school. We’ll refer to these expectations collectively as the instructional framework that teachers and instructional leaders share.

Even an evidence-based conversation can devolve into little more than philosophizing if it’s not anchored in a shared instructional framework. When the instructional framework takes on the role of defining effective practice, the instructional leader can step out of the role of judge and into a more collegial role. When the framework becomes like a third participant in the conversation between teacher and instructional leader, the discussion can become less focused on evaluation and more focused on evidence-based insights.

It’s important to distinguish between a shared instructional framework and an observation checklist or rating tool. Some instructional frameworks’ criteria describe practice writ large, not individual lessons or activities within a lesson. Not everything that characterizes effective practice will be visible in a single lesson, so we must resist the tendency to turn overall evaluation criteria into observation criteria. Additionally, many sources of shared expectations, such as curriculum guides, are not designed to evaluate teachers, but rather to aid teacher decisionmaking. Rather than using the language of your instructional framework to rate teachers during your visits, you’ll find it most helpful to use this language as the vocabulary of professional conversation.

Make Conversation-Oriented Visits

The immediate goal of spending time in classrooms is to inform the follow-up conversation that must then take place, either face to face or via email. In this conversation, you can provide firsthand observations that can eliminate the teacher’s blind spots and provide rich fodder for discussion. It’s critical, though, that this discussion occur as a conversation and not as a cross-examination. The goal is not to point out flaws and make suggestions for improvement; it’s to enhance both participants’ understanding of the teacher’s current practice as well as the ideal of the instructional framework. This understanding can, in turn, lead to better decisions by both the instructional leader and the teacher.

It’s not unusual for even the most experienced instructional leaders to walk away from these conversations having learned a great deal and having made few or no suggestions. The teacher learns and improves his or her practice not by accepting suggestions, but by developing a deeper understanding of professional practice through evidence-rich, criterion-referenced conversation.

The high-performance instructional leadership model—centered on classroom visits that are frequent, brief, substantive, open ended, evidence based, criterion referenced, and conversation oriented—leads to stronger collegial relationships, better decision making by both parties, and a culture of continual learning.

Day 2 Action Challenge: Find Your Framework

Make a list of documents that comprise your overall instructional framework. The following questions may help you as you compile your list.

What formal document contains your teacher evaluation criteria?

Where can you find descriptions of curriculum-specific instructional practices that teachers have been trained to use?

What professional development experiences and materials have shaped your school’s collective definition of effective practice?

Compile a list of these sources, and as soon as possible, gather the actual documents. This will aid you in having framework-linked conversations about classroom practice in the coming weeks. I will elaborate on developing a shared instructional framework with teachers in chapter 13 (page 115).

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