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Introduction

Should school administrators visit classrooms? If you ask any education leader, you’ll undoubtedly hear enthusiastic support for the idea. As leaders, we understand intuitively that instructional leaders belong in classrooms because effective classroom visits can lead to significant improvements in teaching and learning.

Yet we know the reality is far from our ideal: it’s hard to get into classrooms on a regular basis, so the practice is far less common than we’d like. Since much of my professional work focuses on helping administrators spend more time in classrooms, I’ve made a habit of asking teachers how often they receive helpful feedback from an administrator. The answer is almost always the same: somewhere between once a year and never. When I ask administrators how much feedback they received as classroom teachers, they too report receiving either once-yearly feedback or none at all.

These reports from the field match data from a study by Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Benjamin Master (2013), who found that while principals in their study spent 12.7 percent of their time on instructional leadership activities, including 5.4 percent of the workday on classroom walkthroughs, they devoted only 0.5 percent of their time to coaching teachers. Across the span of a school year, this equates to less than ten hours—not per teacher, but total. In the same study, Grissom et al. (2013) found that informal classroom walkthroughs were the most common instructional leadership activity principals engaged in, but these walkthroughs had a negative correlation with student achievement gains, which the authors suggest is “because principals often do not use walkthroughs as part of a broader school improvement strategy” (p. 433), but rather as a means of collecting data.

Why are we failing to tap into the potential of regular classroom visits? Having tried a variety of approaches to classroom walkthroughs as a principal, I believe it’s because we don’t find our visits to classrooms to be professionally rewarding—for ourselves as leaders, or for our teachers. We may strive to provide high-quality feedback, but find that it never seems to have the impact on instruction that we hope. Deep down, we know we need to be in classrooms, but we also have doubts about whether our standard approaches to providing feedback are effective enough to justify the time and effort involved. Since there is no shortage of other work to keep leaders busy outside the classroom, it’s no wonder we don’t make much time for classroom visits.

In this book, you’ll discover an approach to instructional leadership that recognizes the importance of getting into classrooms on a daily basis, but without the drawbacks of traditional walkthrough models. I call this approach high-performance instructional leadership. The core practice is simple: visit three classrooms a day for five to ten minutes each, and after observing, have a brief conversation with the teacher to make sense of what you’ve seen and to learn more about the teacher’s thinking and instructional decision making. This basic practice holds surprising power to build capacity for instructional leadership in your school.

The Importance of Effective Instructional Leadership

What is instructional leadership? It’s not just a matter of providing feedback to teachers or planning professional development; it’s about doing what you need to do to run and improve the school as a learning organization. I define instructional leadership as the practice of making and implementing operational and improvement decisions. Building capacity for instructional leadership, then, is a matter of helping everyone in the organization—teachers and administrators alike—obtain better information for better decision making.

Unlike other approaches, the high-performance instructional leadership model doesn’t emphasize supervision, coaching, or data collection—though it facilitates all three. Instead, the purpose of visiting classrooms is to simply pay attention—to learn what teachers are doing—so you can have evidence-based conversations about practice. This is a subtle but key difference, driven by the reality that as an instructional leader, you play a critical decision-making role in your school. Henry Mintzberg (1973), in his classic text The Nature of Managerial Work, explains that decisional roles are unique to leadership positions:

Probably the most crucial part of the manager’s work—the part that justifies his great authority and his powerful access to information—is that performed in his decisional roles. These roles involve the manager in the strategy-making process in his organization. Strategy-making can be defined simply as the process by which significant organizational decisions are made and inter-related. (p. 77)

School administrators need rich, firsthand information about teaching and learning in order to make good operational and instructional decisions, and the best place to gain that information—the best setting for continued professional learning—is the classroom.

It’s my goal to help you develop the habit of visiting classrooms and having evidence-rich, framework-linked conversations with teachers, every single day, so you can increase your effectiveness as an instructional leader. The model you’ll discover in this book will help you avoid the awkwardness and conflict that often accompany traditional walkthroughs and teacher observations, and instead reap the professional rewards of stronger relationships with teachers and better information about the teaching and learning taking place in your school.

While I wrote this book with school-based administrators in mind, you will also find its perspective valuable if you’re an instructional coach, school improvement facilitator, or central office leader. You may not be able to adopt this exact approach to visiting classrooms and having conversations with teachers, but the high-performance instructional leadership model reflects a philosophy of professional learning that applies to instructional leaders of all types, not just administrators.

This book grew out of a global online experiment called the 21-Day Instructional Leadership Challenge (visit www.instructionalleadershipchallenge.com for more information). I set out to help school leaders get into classrooms more frequently and have a greater impact on instruction, and with over ten thousand participants in more than fifty countries, it’s safe to say the experiment has been a success. Every day, instructional leaders are choosing to spend their time where the real work of schools takes place: in the classroom. Over the course of a single school year, many leaders are now making five hundred or more classroom visits. Visit www.instructionalleadershipchallenge.com/500 to see their comments and photos.

Leaders who know what that work looks like, day in and day out, are more effective decision makers and have a greater impact on classroom practice. It’s my goal that you’ll join the global cadre of instructional leaders who strive to visit classrooms daily—not just occasionally, but consistently.

About This Book

I have organized this book into twenty-one chapters and designed it for you to read and implement over a period of twenty-one school days. Each chapter concludes with an action to complete that day, so if you prefer to read ahead, or if you’re reading the book when school is not in session, simply go back and complete the action items, in order, whenever school is in session. Some of these action items relate to your visits to classrooms, and others will help you develop systems to manage your workload and make time to get out of the office and into classrooms. Over the course of twenty-one days, you’ll visit each teacher you supervise at least once—what we refer to as a cycle of visits—and we’ll also discuss what to do in future visits, so you can lay the right foundation.

The first part (chapters 1 through 5), which you may read over five school days, will address high-performance instructional leadership fundamentals. It will discuss why instructional leaders belong in classrooms, introduce the high-performance instructional leadership model, and compare this model to several other classroom walkthrough models with which you may already be familiar. You will also plan and complete your first day of classroom visits.

This introductory section also describes the first three cycles of visits, which will gradually increase in intensity as you develop your skills in high-performance instructional leadership. Although you will not participate in the third and most complex stage of visits at this point, I describe the third cycle (in chapter 5, page 43) so you have a complete picture of the model and an eye to what you will work toward as you improve your instructional leadership skills. You may revisit these fundamental aspects at any time throughout the twenty-one-day process.

The second part (chapters 6 through 10) delves into high-performance habits. Many of these administrative habits, such as making time to visit classrooms, keeping interruptions under control, and organizing your to-do lists, will assist you in your efforts to get into classrooms daily.

The third part (chapters 11 through 15) emphasizes the crux of the high-performance instructional leadership model—learning how to have high-impact instructional conversations with teachers. These chapters discuss going beyond data collection and learning the skills required to have productive, evidence-based conversations with teachers.

The fourth part (chapters 16 through 21) builds on the results of your classroom visits. It discusses improving your feedback repertoire, balancing formal with informal evaluation responsibilities, identifying improvements to make, and scaling high-impact instructional visits across your school and district.

I’ve arranged the chapters and action items in a sequence that will help you adopt a bias toward action, because—while it will take the entire book to fully share this instructional leadership model and its many benefits—I don’t want you to postpone taking action. Take small steps daily to implement the systems and strategies I describe in the following chapters, and in about a month’s time, you’ll develop powerful new instructional leadership habits that will increase your impact on student learning, reduce your stress level, and strengthen your professional relationships.