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Expertise is Everything

I’m so much more gratified by my life now that I have an expertise.

—Angela Duckworth

People who have expertise just love to share it. That’s human nature.

—David Baldacci

If you are committed to driving the instructional vision of your school, it’s immensely important that you are and are seen as an expert. Teaching is the hardest job in the world. It’s like trying to file papers while falling out of an airplane. And while I’m sure being a brain surgeon is hard as well, I’m pretty certain that as the brain surgeon is about to make the first incision in the patient’s head, nobody calls out, “Can I go to the bathroom?!”

Teachers are absurdly busy, managing a dozen things at once, so making sure that your feedback to them is precise and accurate is of the utmost importance. Otherwise, you risk disinvesting the very people charged with educating the students.

I’m fortunate enough to get to observe, speak with, and spend time with teachers all over the country. They’re different in so many ways. Some teach every subject. Some teach one. Some teach students who come up to their knees and others teach students who tower over them. Some are the only teacher of their grade and subject in a small school. Others are one of a half-dozen who teach that grade and subject in a school with north of 1,000 students.

What they often have in common though, is this: many don’t see their bosses—meaning principals, assistant principals, deans of instruction, etc.—as a value-add when it comes to what’s happening in their classrooms. And often, they don’t respect the instructional expertise of the person who’s leading their schools.

Put more simply: teachers don’t think their bosses know what they’re talking about.

This is damning. And it’s happening all over the place.

To be clear, teachers sometimes like their bosses. They often say they’re nice and supportive, but when it comes to seeing their bosses as experts who drive the instructional vision of their schools, they rarely view them as such.

To know why, I’d like to take you on a brief journey into the past, to the first of my two jobs washing dishes and sweeping floors at Italian restaurants on Long Island. My boss was as nice and as friendly as they come. But he’d casually stroll in around dinner time and have the bartender pour him a glass of red wine. He’d sit at the bar, drinking his wine and eating the day’s specialty, even as the evening rush picked up. When customers had issues, he dodged them, often leaving it to less-senior members to handle. On one occasion, when the pizzamaker was out sick, the boss left me to make pizzas for the day. But I’d never done this before and he’d never taught me how to do it (despite telling me for weeks that he would), so my “pizzas” were misshapen, undercooked, and, I’d imagine, pretty gross to eat. He’d show up late, change the menu last-minute without reason, and pay us when it was convenient for him, but certainly not on a regular schedule. And on the rare occasions when he’d come into the kitchen, all I could think was, “Get out of here. You’re in the way. You don’t know what we do every day. So leave us alone so we can do our work.”

The way I felt about this boss is what many teachers express about their school leaders. They express the opinion that they’re successful (to whatever degree they are successful) not because of the school leader and their support, but in spite of them. In spite of their misaligned feedback. In spite of their cancelled meetings. In spite of their disconnect to the content. In spite of their unhelpful PD. In spite of their lack of follow-up. In spite of their infrequent visits to their classrooms.

This makes sense when you think about what happens at a typical school. The school year begins in the summer with some in-service training, usually around school and classroom norms, school culture, and content. Sometimes there’s goal setting and a revisiting of school values, with time to set up classrooms mixed in. Then students come, and in a lot of ways, teachers are then on their own. Even in schools with a lot of teacher coaching, where school leaders see each teacher every week for meetings and observations, teachers are still doing most of their work alone. And that’s in a school where the level of coaching is high. In most schools it’s significantly less than this. I recently had a teacher tell me, in March, that her principal hadn’t observed her all year. While most leaders see their teachers more often than this, for teachers, even an average amount of visits can feel really infrequent. Think about this: if a school leader is observing every teacher in her building nine times per year, which is once a month from September through May, and that teacher teaches four blocks of math a day, that means that teacher is teaching 720 blocks of math a year (four blocks multiplied by 180 days of school), 711 of which she’s teaching without feedback or direct coaching.

The point is, teachers are used to doing things on their own. Even in schools where support is sky-high, where a school leader does fifty or seventy-five observations a year per teacher, teachers still do the overwhelming majority of their work solo.

So, what often happens is teachers begin to see their school leaders as nuisances. As people totally out of touch with what’s actually happening in classrooms. This is why some teachers push back on evaluations (or want them eliminated altogether). Because it can feel like the person evaluating them doesn’t know what they’re doing. Leaders pick up on this, but they’re often not sure how to address it. So, they default to doing two things: hiding and high-fiving.

First, they spend a lot of time “hiding” in their offices. People like to feel successful, and school leaders are no different. They can feel the icy stares from teachers when they enter their rooms. They can see their feedback isn’t being implemented. So, they sit in their offices, responding to emails, meeting with parents, handling operations issues, and in some cases, spending the entire day with a student who’s gotten into trouble. These leaders are not visible throughout the day, choosing small victories with a handful of parents and students at the expense of positively impacting the larger school community.

Other school leaders decide to pull back from anything instructional at all. They know their feedback isn’t valued. They can feel that they’re in the teachers’ way. So, they become cheerleaders for the school. They circulate the building, patting people on the back, checking in to make sure people are okay, and “high-fiving” everyone they see, all the while, handing over the instructional reins to teachers. These leaders are usually liked by their teachers, which is what they’re striving for. But almost no one takes them seriously when it comes to impacting student outcomes.

In some of our trainings, we ask school leaders to write a job description for themselves. Not what they actually do every day, but what they believe they should do every day. Their answers are surprisingly aligned. They usually write something like this: “To positively impact students by coaching and supporting teachers.” But so many aren’t doing this. They’re either hiding or high-fiving.

To clarify, handling operations issues and meeting with parents are important parts of a school leader’s job. And a leader who has strong relationships and celebrates teachers is a great thing. What I’m suggesting is that doing only these things, out of lack of confidence or to simply avoid the pressure and inevitable discomfort of being the instructional lead in the building is (a) not an effective way to move the instructional needle for teachers and students and (b) not what leaders themselves report they should be doing.

Something else often happens, and it happens whether the school leader is hiding or hive-fiving. Some school leaders try to “fix” their instructional (and overall leadership) misses by implementing something new in their schools. They think this new thing will be the change the school has been looking for. The change it desperately needs. It could be a new math curriculum or a new approach to school culture. It could be a shift to blended learning or new SMART Boards. And on and on. All these new things do is lead to disinvestment and reform fatigue from teachers who likely don’t believe the school leader will be able to support the execution of whatever the new thing is anyway. Think back to my example of the boss at the Italian restaurant. It wouldn’t have mattered if he upgraded every ingredient in the building so that we used only the finest ingredients found anywhere. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he overhauled the entire menu from top to bottom. Building renovations, new job titles, and even changing the name of the restaurant wouldn’t have mattered. He was the issue. No new thing was going to fix that.

And while many leaders will point to the same culprit—lack of time —as the reason for their instructional misses and ineffectiveness, this is almost never the case. Yes, time is in short supply in this work (I’ll talk more about time later on). But it’s the hiding and high-fiving that are stopping them from being extraordinary leaders for teachers and students.

But we can fix that.

The solution is for a school leader to be an expert. An expert who provides accurate feedback, delivered succinctly, with clear criteria for improvement, followed by concrete goals and next steps. An expert in the way Tom Brady is an expert at throwing a football or Simone Biles is an expert at the balance beam.

Let’s journey back into the past again to my other job at an Italian restaurant. This boss was a hothead. He screamed. A lot. He threw garlic knots at us when we messed up. He cursed at us. But here’s the thing: I liked working for him. When a customer had an issue, he was front and center to handle it (sometimes throwing garlic knots at them if he thought their concern was petty). When the head chef called in sick, he stepped up and spent the night cooking and sweating with us in the kitchen. When it snowed and one of the delivery drivers got stuck in a snowbank, he was out there with us, in knee-deep snow, pushing the car out. He was there first and left last. He was an expert at every part of the business. He knew how to do everything, was willing to do anything, and he watched every staff member and critiqued us continually. He’d even give me feedback on the size of the balls of dough that would eventually become pizzas, which I was sometimes charged with rolling. If there was one that was too small, even slightly, he always caught it. And while I didn’t enjoy being yelled at by him (and I don’t suggest doing this with your teachers, ever), it was always after I’d done something that didn’t meet the bar he’d set for us. It was always in an attempt to make me better.

While it’s likely not possible for any school leader to be an expert at everything from phonics to chemistry and from abstract art to The Scarlet Letter (and I’d argue they shouldn’t be), it is possible for you to become an expert at building classroom culture, lesson design and delivery, and deeply engaging students, regardless of content. But to do this, you need a simplified approach that allows you to simultaneously build your knowledge, capacity, and confidence. And I dive into this approach in the next chapter.

But there’s something else you need as well. And for some of you, this will be a major mindset shift. But without adopting this mindset, you simply won’t be able to access this book to the same degree as someone who has this mindset. Without adopting this mindset, you won’t be nearly as effective an instructional leader as you possibly can be.

Ready? Here it is: You need to be okay with naming that the students in your school are your students.

This seems obvious, but too often school leaders tell teachers things like, “You know your kids better than anyone,” and “You know what’s best for your students.” Whether this is true or not is not the point. The point is, all the students in your school are your students first. And last. Yes, their teachers spend the most time with them. But you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for their success (or failure). You’re the one sitting in data meetings with your bosses and stakeholders while teachers are off on summer vacation. You’re the one looking at a sea of red, being grilled by your superintendent, or members of the archdiocese, or your board, about how you’re going to turn it all to green. You’re the one whose picture makes it to the newspaper when test scores drop. You’re the one parents, neighbors, and reporters want to speak to when they have an issue. The buck stops with you. Even if you’re an instructional coach and not the principal or AP, I’ll bet you’re still held more accountable for student results than teachers are.