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4

Conducting Your First Two Cycles of Visits

Now that we’ve explored the high-performance instructional leadership model in depth, compared it to other models, and identified the role it can play in your larger work, it’s time to take action. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to plan your first two cycles of classroom visits—two rounds of visiting every teacher you supervise. It’s critical to begin with the full cycle in mind rather than start to visit classrooms without a solid plan, because how you start determines how successful you will be—which, in turn, will determine whether you abandon your attempts or turn them into a powerful habit. This chapter will help you develop a realistic plan for your visits, as well as set expectations and communicate your intentions to teachers. We’ll then discuss how to conduct your first cycle of visits and highlight how this process will develop into your second cycle.

Consider Planning Issues

If you’re a school administrator, there’s a good chance you’ve already resolved and attempted to make regular visits to classrooms a core element of your leadership practice. If you’re like most administrators, though, your attempts have been short lived and less impactful than you’d have liked. Using the strategies in this book, every administrator can—and should—visit classrooms upwards of five hundred times per year (three classrooms a day for most—if not all—days of the school year), but make no mistake: it’s a challenge. And as with any challenge, success requires a solid plan.

There are two key planning issues to consider. First, you’ll want to develop a realistic schedule that creates time for classroom visits, and a plan to handle the additional work they create. Second, you’ll want to plan what expectations you’ll communicate to staff about your high-performance instructional leadership visits, as well as how and when you’ll communicate about them.

Develop a Realistic Schedule and Plan

If you’re excited about the idea of getting into classrooms more, you may be tempted to set an unrealistic goal such as visiting every classroom every day. Instead, let your commitment and enthusiasm spur you toward realistic planning and diligent follow-through. On the other hand, don’t aim too low or try to ease into the habit; like medicine, classroom visits require a certain dose to have any meaningful impact, so if you decide to visit only one classroom a day, you won’t have a noticeable impact on learning and won’t get the positive feedback that is essential for forming habits.

Plan to visit three classrooms per day, every day. If you share teacher evaluation responsibilities with other administrators in your school, plan to visit only the teachers you evaluate. Most administrators evaluate approximately thirty teachers, so making three visits per day should take you to every classroom every two weeks or so. If you supervise a large number of teachers, you may not make it around to each teacher quite as often, but having a sustainable, consistent habit is the goal, and three visits per day seems to strike a reasonable balance between practicality and frequency.

Plan to visit three classrooms per day, every day.

You may be concerned about the time it will take to visit three classrooms per day, but once you get started, you’ll find that you can recoup this time in a variety of ways. Many administrators have reported to me that they saw a drop in office referrals when they began a regular habit of visiting classrooms—perhaps because teachers are more able to handle minor discipline issues when administrators regularly visit their classrooms.

One of the most common complaints of administrators is that emergencies interfere with visiting classrooms as planned. If you know there’s a good chance that your plans will be disrupted, build a few extra blocks into your schedule. Your visits should be spread out throughout the day and, whenever possible, adjacent to other events on your calendar. For example, you may want to visit classrooms on the way to an existing meeting or scheduled supervision duty, as it’s easier to leave the office a few minutes early than to interrupt a block of focused office work.

To minimize the chance of disruption, schedule short visits throughout the day, rather than one long, continuous block of time. If you schedule a ninety-minute midmorning block for classroom visits, a single interruption could derail your plans. Instead, schedule shorter time slots throughout the day, and schedule more than you need. If your school day is divided into class periods, schedule one visit during each period, so you can get around to more classes. You may find it easier to get into classrooms in the morning, but interruptions will often force you to use the afternoon time slots. Additional suggestions for scheduling are included in chapter 6 (page 53).

You’ll also want to consider the order in which you will visit classrooms. It’s helpful to visit teams or departments back to back, for several reasons. First, it’s harder to miss someone when you’re observing an entire team or department in just a day or two. It will be tempting to first visit the teachers who are the friendliest, highest performing, and physically closest to the office. This means you’ll wait until the end of the cycle to see the toughest-to-visit teachers, which creates a growing incentive to abandon your efforts. Instead of saving the toughest teachers for last, develop a systematic plan: Which grade levels or departments will you visit first? Plan to visit each team in succession, and continue the same order through your second cycle in order to equally space the visits.

Second, you’ll learn much more about the curriculum, shared practices, and assessments that a team or department uses when you visit every member of the group in rapid succession. Once, I observed a first-grade mathematics lesson that made no sense to me as a new principal still becoming familiar with the district’s new mathematics curriculum. At first, I mentally blamed the teacher for failing to plan a coherent lesson. When I visited the classroom next door, though, I saw the rest of the lesson—taught by an equally effective teacher—and it all made sense. Because I became better informed before speaking with the teacher, I avoided a serious misstep. The more context you can gain by visiting other teachers in the same grade or department, the richer your conversations with teachers can be.

The more context you can gain by visiting other teachers in the same grade or department, the richer your conversations with teachers can be.

Third, you’ll be able to draw more direct comparisons between classrooms, which will increase the quality of your feedback. When you see the pros and cons of different approaches side by side—even if you’re not going straight from one class to another but merely visiting on the same day—you can more easily provide useful recommendations to teachers and engage in more productive conversations about learning.

Fourth, you’ll find that teachers will immediately check in with their closest colleagues when you start visiting classrooms. If they feel you’re singling out or targeting them with increased scrutiny, they’ll naturally become more fearful and defensive. For this reason, you may want to visit all the members of a team in rapid succession, so when they compare notes, they’ll know you are not singling them out. You’ll also want to be sure to visit every teacher once before visiting any teacher a second time. This is an essential aspect of communicating positive intent and minimizing teachers’ anxiety about your increased presence in classrooms, which we now explore in greater depth.

Set Expectations and Communicate Your Intentions

For your first cycle, it’s best to just start visiting classrooms without any kind of formal announcement. The more you remain low-key about your classroom visits, the less likely you are to spark mass resistance, which is important if the level of trust isn’t especially high in your school. Your visits will surprise teachers, and it’s your job during this first cycle to ensure that it’s a pleasant surprise. While it might seem preferable to make a general announcement before beginning your visits, an announcement will trigger a range of reactions based on teachers’ previous experience with administrators, and it’s best to simply allow your visits to speak for themselves.

Your goal should be to gain teachers’ confidence that you aren’t visiting to conduct “gotcha” inspections and catch teachers at their worst but instead to listen, learn, converse with them, and become a more effective leader. The easiest way to send the right message and avoid triggering fears of a “gotcha” observation is to simply drop by, pay attention without taking notes, show interest in the lesson, and say something nice before you leave. We explore additional strategies for your first round of visits in the following section.

Your goal should be to gain teachers’ confidence that you aren’t visiting to conduct “gotcha” inspections and catch teachers at their worst but instead to listen, learn, converse with them, and become a more effective leader.

Another question at the top of teachers’ minds will be the purpose of your visits and what role, if any, they’ll play in your evaluations of teachers’ performance. While it may be tempting to state unequivocally that your visits are nonevaluative, a caution is in order. If you are the evaluator of record, you can’t ensure that your firsthand classroom observations, whether formal or informal, will not influence your final evaluations. Instead of focusing on the question of whether your visits are evaluative or not, emphasize your purpose in visiting—to listen, to learn, and to lead more effectively. If a teacher asks you directly whether your visits are evaluative, you can respond that they’re not formal observations and you won’t write them up as such, but that final evaluations are summative and based on your full body of evidence about teachers’ practice. You can also emphasize that the more you’re in classrooms, the more likely you are to have a fair portrait of teachers’ practice (Marshall, 2013).

Conduct Your First Cycle of Visits