Leading for Professional Learning: What Successful Principals Do To Support Teaching Practice

[00:01] Announcer:

welcome to principal center radio bringing you the best in professional practice here's your host director of the principal center and champion of high performance instructional leadership justin bader welcome everyone to principal center radio i'm your host justin bader and i'm honored to be joined today by annika mark holt and joanna michelson from the center for educational leadership at the university of washington

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authors of the new book, Leading for Professional Learning, What Successful Principals Do to Support Teaching Practice.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:36] SPEAKER_00:

Anika and Joanna, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:38] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks. Thanks so much. Great to be here.

[00:41] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so great to speak with you and get a little bit of an update on the work that you're doing at the Center for Educational Leadership, which I got to experience a little bit firsthand as a Danforth student when I was in my principal prep program years and years ago, and just have really enjoyed following the work of the Center for Educational Leadership over the years because Of course, it is absolutely top notch, one of the leading think tanks and service providers on instructional leadership and especially the way that leaders support teachers and the way that leaders of leaders support leaders in supporting teaching practice. So I'm very excited to talk with you about the book. So let's get into it. Where did this book come from? What work that you're engaged in led to the book Leading for Professional Learning?

[01:28] SPEAKER_02:

For both of us, our entire careers have really been centered on how do we really improve the quality of learning opportunities for all students, particularly students who have been marginalized from really top-notch learning opportunities. And that's our central question always at the Center for Educational Leadership is, what is that vision for student learning that we're really trying to galvanize around? How is it that adult practice, teaching practice, leadership practice, actually impacts those learning opportunities for students? And in recent years, as we've been uncovering more and more about the complexity of what it takes to do just what Anika was describing you know what it takes to be a principal who really is striving to keep students at the center of everything that happens at the school including professional learning we started developing some tools and this book really comes out of the work of our entire staff in a variety of contexts as we have tried to really help principals with some big work you know how do you land on

[02:37]

really specific outcomes for teacher practice as well as for student learning. What is the role that a strong leader plays in assessing what's happening instructionally in a school, building a leadership team of teachers? I mean, so a lot of that's just an example, but a lot of what happens in this book is based on tools we've developed in real schools in partnership with leaders. And it actually follows the case of a school that we supported, although we've also been compiled other cases to create this one. Yeah, and I want to say too that our work is really converging around a time in our profession where there's been a lot of attention, for example, on the quality of professional learning that teachers are engaged with and how to make that more powerful. And because we do so much work with leaders, we know the potential of the principal's role.

[03:31]

In this case, this book is primarily about the principal and And their role in really being a much more active learner, organizer, orchestrator, systems leader around teacher learning and the difference that makes in teaching practice and ultimately for students.

[03:48] SPEAKER_00:

And I think that's a departure from the norm in our profession. It's easy for me to take for granted as someone who kind of grew up as an instructional leader in your neighborhood and kind of being exposed to a lot of those ideas. It's easy to take for granted the importance of teacher professional learning because I think more broadly in our profession, we focused so much on teacher performance and accountability and these other efforts to ensure the quality of teaching, that teachers' actual learning doesn't get the attention it deserves in our profession. So I think just because this is familiar ground to the three of us, I wanted to acknowledge that it's untrodden ground in much of our profession, that we just don't pay enough attention to how teachers are being engaged as professional learners and the environment that they are in as learners, not just facilitators of learning for students.

[04:46] SPEAKER_02:

Joanne and I are vigorously nodding our heads, Justin, as you're talking. And part of them, one of the big barriers that then leaders who actually want to support teacher learning in these much more robust ways, part of what they encounter then is this sort of extant culture of teacher learning, which is oftentimes very compliant. It's oftentimes, it's very private, like the default teacher learning culture, if I can use that phrase here, is counter to what learning really requires, right? To learn anything, we have to be able to take risks. We have to be able to be authentically owning the process of our own learning. We have to be accountable to our learning and what that's doing for our students.

[05:27]

That is not the culture many principals walk into in their building. And if you don't have that culture, it becomes very difficult. Difficult for teachers to learn the much more ambitious practices that were asking them to learn on behalf of student learning exactly You know and there's been some attention in the research lately about cultures of collective efficacy Jennifer Donahue for one has been writing about that and you know We really learned with and from the educators we described in this book that it's not sufficient to even just set up these amazing learning opportunities that have all the components of what we know effective professional development for teachers has to have, like ongoing sustain, there's coaching. We know all that. It's sometimes not enough to create cultures where teachers really are learning together and are learning on behalf of the students in front of them.

[06:21]

So that's something else we tried to highlight in this book is that it's not an event, that professional learning at its best is an ongoing part of how people operate in a school.

[06:31] SPEAKER_00:

And I think that lends itself to kind of a different view of instructional leadership as well, because when teachers are learning, one aspect of that can be a little bit threatening to administrators is that they go beyond our understanding of what they're doing. If we're pushing teachers to the forefront of their practice, they're going to get out of our field of vision. We're not really going to be able to keep up, and that's a good thing in some ways, but it challenges our traditional understandings of instructional leadership. So I wonder if you could give us your definition of what instructional leadership really is, because it's one of those terms that You know, a lot of people use, and I have my definition, but I think as a profession, if you ask 10 people, you get 10 different definitions. So in this book, how do you define instructional leadership and some of the key aspects of that?

[07:22] SPEAKER_02:

So we do actually have a chapter where we have a definition of instructional leadership, and it's really based on our framework that we've developed here at the center called the four dimensions of instructional leadership. And in this framework, we really try to name what we know from the research or the sort of the big ideas around instructional leadership. And it's not about leadership in general or the other things that principals have to do. It's really about the instructional leadership. So big buckets around creating vision and culture, big bucket around supporting teacher learning, big buckets around orchestrating your resources and allocating resources and those kinds of things. And then in the book, we really highlight a case and it's sort of a double click on some of those ideas.

[08:08]

We're trying to bring it to life with this case in the book. And to your earlier point, Justin, about a principal having to perhaps work in a different way and really depend upon their teacher leaders and teachers' knowledge and developing their own leaders' own learning alongside is a critical element. And it's beyond just sitting in on their PD and kind of learning what they're learning. There's a role they play. And so we really try to highlight what they do alongside teachers, what they do and their role in supporting teachers. sort of systems and structures that teachers engage in for their learning.

[08:44]

The only other piece I would add is, and I'm sure Annika just said this, instructional leadership in our view is a type of leadership aimed at improving the quality of learning for each student and the ways that we recommend that that happens have to do with vision and mission work as well as creating those systems and resources and supports for teachers.

[09:02] SPEAKER_00:

So let's talk a little bit more about the leader's role in observing, because I think this is one of those areas where we have to be very careful about how we approach our role as leaders, because sometimes it can come across as snoopervising or policing or micromanaging. And often our models for observing teachers aren't really based on an understanding of teaching as professional work. They're much more based on an understanding of teaching as entry level or fast food level work where we have to just make sure people are doing the right thing and we want to catch them doing the wrong thing if they are. But Improvement, you know, leadership for improvement requires something different. And I'm curious as to your take on when we get into classrooms and observe teachers teaching, what do we need to be doing differently in order to support their learning as opposed to simply holding them accountable or making sure they're not doing anything terrible?

[09:57] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. We love how you just described that tension and that issue because we know firsthand how challenging it is to observe well. You know, we would, I think, argue you would start with the framework for, you know, what the common vision for powerful instruction is. develop some shared understanding of what practices look like and you can't do that without actually observing and talking through what you're seeing so without a framework of some kind you're observing based on your own opinion or the last training you sat in you know so taking your observation to the level of a framework that cuts across content area grade level etc seems critical and And, you know, our chapter in the book is also about observing for teachers' current understanding of what they've been learning in professional learning. So you'll read about the principal and the teacher leaders reflecting on what they've been learning through professional development, what teachers might be trying but maybe not getting.

[10:55]

fully implementing yet well and what that would look like and also what student learning should really look and sound like if whatever it is the teachers have been learning is actually effective and helpful. So, I mean, that's, I think, where we would start. Annika, what would you add? Yeah, definitely. And really thinking about observing in a formative way, right? So I know recently administrators have gotten a lot of practice in observation in order to calibrate and rate a teacher for evaluation, right?

[11:25]

That's been very loud in their own practice lately. And they also use a framework or a rubric for that. But we're talking about a slightly different skill set. Actually, it's a very different skill set. And that is really observing for evidence of where teachers are in relationship to this practice that we're trying to get better at as a building. So really trying to observe for what is there, like what appears to be something that teachers are approximating or not.

[11:52]

What is it that students are now able to do as the result of teachers trying on this in their practice and using it as a basis for further planning around their learning. So you're trying to observe in a way that actually helps you as a leader, you and your leadership team, think about your next leadership moves as a leader to support the learning and really having your observations be a data set to inform you and your practice. If you are going through classrooms and seeing the same thing over and over again with the same bad results for kids, ultimately, like That's on the leader to do something about, right? So we do have a chapter that really goes into that whole role of observation in a formative way and how those observations then really inform the leadership team's thinking around supporting, in this case it's a math department, supporting the math department's learning.

[12:45]

Exactly. And what to even, you know, ask the math department itself to understand better what's happening and why.

[12:52] SPEAKER_00:

There is so much there and anybody who's been through our high performance instructional leadership certification program will recognize a lot of familiar themes around the instructional framework and the different dimensions of an instructional framework. And you mentioned having an overall framework that cuts across subjects and grade levels, such as the 5D framework that Cell publishes, or say the Danielson framework, but also getting into the specific practices that teachers, I love the word you used, approximating. The teachers are working toward a specific practice that they're trying to implement, that they're trying to learn. And the way that you observe and provide feedback and support teachers when they're learning a specific new model is very different from the way you observe when you're trying to score somebody based on a rubric. And it bugs me to no end that so much effort has been put into that scoring approach and the, you know, we're trying to achieve inter-rater reliability and we're trying to ensure that anyone who observed this classroom would score it the same way.

[13:49]

And those purposes are almost directly countered to the purposes of professional learning in my view. I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but one of my particular soapboxes.

[14:00] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we couldn't agree more. And again, if you're in a system that is all about rating teachers so that you're going to make sure you don't have a lawsuit at the end of the day, by all means, do your rate of reliability. That's really important. I'm probably, you know, exaggerating the point here, but that will give you a sort of a dipstick in time. And who knows how really accurate even that one dipstick is, you know, beyond that point in time for that teacher's practice. But observing with a lens towards we're trying to improve something here.

[14:30]

And we're trying to find evidence of that improvement. And where we're not seeing that evidence, like what are we doing to make sure that we're constantly thinking about continuous improvement and that students are actually having better experiences as a result of what teachers are learning? One of the things that we didn't do in this book that we kind of wish that we would have is point to some of the recent research around how effective principal feedback is for helping teachers with complex practices, say, around math. There's some specific research around that. It's Jessica Rigby's research, actually, at the University of Washington, and they were looking at the impact of principals' direct feedback, particularly around learning to teach math in more ambitious ways. And what they found was that, you know, beyond the leaders giving sort of generic feedback around, you know, sort of the management issues and engagement, that kind of thing.

[15:21]

Because they didn't know the math content, like the teachers, they really couldn't give feedback that moved teachers' practice. And so there's this whole like, oh, feedback doesn't really matter. And then we know from a lot of districts we work in that there's sort of the hope that if principals just learn how to give better feedback, that will solve everything too, right? And I think what we do in this book without, it's actually not said explicitly, unfortunately, but there is something principals can do. They can do. They can actually improve the quality of their feedback by having enough understanding of what teachers are learning, making sure that their improvement work, principals' improvement work, is directly tied to their leadership team's work and what teachers are taking up in their practice so that their feedback is directly connected to what the agreements have been among the leadership team and the teachers they're supporting.

[16:11]

And so this book is really heavy in the doing and some practices. It's not very theoretical. It's very practical. And I think it does paint the picture of this is how principals can work. give better feedback and is in the context of orchestrating professional learning writ large, not just the feedback piece. So that was, you know, again, in sort of hindsight about it, which may have been something we could have said about feedback sort of more explicitly and then to connect that to some of the research out there around whether or not principal feedback is or isn't effective.

[16:44]

I mean, I think so much is around what's around that feedback, what's the context, how is that part of teachers' learning?

[16:49] SPEAKER_00:

I love what you said about this problem of generic feedback, you know, the teacher is working to implement some very specific nuanced and advanced mathematical teaching practice. And then the feedback they get is, you know, two of your students were off task and it's like, well, let's focus on the thing that we're here to focus on and not get distracted by, you know, teaching is complex. There are always 8 million things we could give feedback on, but if it's going to actually advance the teacher's practice, it has to actually focus on that practice in that specific area. And I love the idea of teacher involvement in defining that, again, because often as principals, we simply don't have the pedagogical content knowledge for every subject area to really know what it should look like and to even know when we're contradicting ourselves in our feedback or we're, you know.

[17:36] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. Yeah, there is an emphasis in the book and in our work on teachers really naming precise goals for their own practice based on the students that they're teaching that year in the context of what they're learning through professional learning, which is a contrast to what we often see in the field when we see more general teacher goals that really actually aren't helpful when the principal is trying to give feedback because they are too generic, right?

[18:02] SPEAKER_00:

And often at the same time, too quantitative, I will say. You know, we try to jump to the data when the data is like a downstream indicator. It's not what the teacher is actually doing and practice is all about doing. So I love that this is a practical book and that you focus on what the school that you focus on is actually doing. You also talk in the book about the idea of sponsoring professional learning. What does that mean?

[18:25] SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question. And we use that term so often in our work. And so we define that in the chapter around sponsoring. And that's really, it's an example of when leaders are in a session. And in the book, the session that the leader's in is, again, part of a larger session. teacher learning agenda in the building, but in this particular example, it's when you have an outside facilitator come in, an outside expert around, in this case, mathematics, and they're there to set up across two days of learning and a really nice job-embedded kind of studio slash lab model, and the principal's there.

[18:59]

So what's the principal say to kick that off? What's the principal's role besides sitting there during PD and being present, right? So it's one thing to say, I'm going to be there with my teachers. I'm not going to be on my cell phone. I'm going to be there all day. That's awesome.

[19:14]

Like that's step one. But what do you do? Like, what are you listening for? How are you framing the day? How are you closing the day? How are you using the day to really learn with and from not only the content that teachers are learning, but about the teacher's learning?

[19:29]

And then how then that informs the agreements you have with teachers about the feedback you'll give, about the connection to the learning they're having after the consultant leaves. So it really spells out what principals can do during a professional development session like that so that they are really informing themselves about their leadership moves and what they're doing as they're not just sitting in on the PD. I mean, they're listening, they're learning, they're using that time strategically to think about their next steps with the leadership team. What else would you say about sponsorship? I think that's right. I mean, it's communicating your support and interest as a leader in the hard work your teachers are doing.

[20:11]

I think that's another really important piece.

[20:13] SPEAKER_00:

It almost gives me the visual picture of, you know, of having some beautiful plant delivered to the school, not so that it can sit in a pot, but so that it can be planted and start to grow, you know, and having that outside expertise come in and make sure that that plant is transplanted successfully and that everyone there knows how to keep it healthy, how to keep it growing. And not just, again, let it kind of sit there in the pot and wither as soon as the outsider leaves.

[20:38] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and there's so many instances. We've heard other folks say, oh, I'm working with this school and we kick off the day and I'm doing this work with teachers and the principal's nowhere to be seen. And so how do they possibly support teachers if they, one, don't even know what's happening? But again, and then the point we make is that it's beyond just sitting in. It really is. There's actually things you can do that will support teachers' learning after the consultant leaves.

[21:05]

Another really important role that the principal plays, and I think this is implied, but I'd like to state it, is it helps when someone is, you know, an expert, so to speak, is there helping teachers learn. The principal's presence there communicates that this is important work that we are doing as a school. This isn't somebody outside coming in to make us do something. Principal's presence and their language can help teachers really understand how how what they're learning fits with, it's the school's work. It's not the work of this consultant.

[21:34] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Annika and Joanna, thank you so much for sharing some insights from Leading for Professional Learning, What Successful Principals Do to Support Teaching Practice. And if people want to learn more about your work at the Center for Educational Leadership, where's the best place for them to go online and find out more?

[21:52] SPEAKER_02:

Great. They can go to www.k-12leadership.org or just Google Center for Educational Leadership, University of Washington.

[22:03] Announcer:

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