[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my colleague, Cassandra Erkins. Cassandra is president of Anamkara Consulting and is an internationally renowned expert in professional development and teacher training. She's the author of more than half a dozen books on assessment and leadership. We've spoken on Principal Center Radio before. And she designs and provides training through the Solution Tree Assessment Center and is also a Solution Tree PLC associate and trainer of trainers. And we're here today to talk about her new book, Instructional Agility, Responding to Assessment with Real-Time Decisions.
[00:54] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:56] SPEAKER_01:
Cassandra, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back. Great to have you back on the show, and great to speak with you again. Now, we spoke in person, and I got the privilege of seeing you present one of the keynotes at the Solution Tree Leadership Now conference a few months back, and I was just amazed at the work that you and your team at the Assessment Center have been doing to help schools understand develop instructional agility. And I hadn't heard that term before, but as I listened to your presentation, your keynote for the whole group there, I was really impressed with the depth of thought and the rigor and just the feeling of cutting edge practice that I got from that presentation.
[01:35]
So I wonder if we could start just by kind of describing what you mean by instructional agility and kind of where this comes from. in your work with schools, with districts. Take us into the origin story of instructional agility, if you will.
[01:49] SPEAKER_02:
Certainly. So when my colleagues and co-authors, Tom Shimmer and Nicole Wagle and I designed the assessment center, we called through the research and tried to find what it was that was most current best practice and what it was that teachers really would need for support in classroom assessment practices. And so we created an entire framework that has tenets or what we call truths around assessment and instructional agility is one of those tenets. It's one of the ways that teachers have to be able to respond to what's emerging right in front of them. And as we walked out into the country and beyond with our framework around assessment, it became crystal clear that instructional agility was resonating with so many people in the audience as a great area of need.
[02:40]
Teachers get frustrated with when do I use assessment? How do I use assessment? So we wanted to create a book that would be user friendly and that would help them understand that you are assessing all the time when you're in front of kids. So how do you do it with observation? How do you do it with feedback? How do you do it with listening to what kids have to say?
[03:01]
And what are some of the maneuvers that teachers have to make in order to respond successfully? And how do you not go too slow? For example, we would sometimes hear teachers say, well, my kids can't do that, so I have to go really slow sometimes. And other times we might hear teachers say, well, my kids already have it, so I'm going really, really fast. And how do you know for sure so that you can be both flexible yet precise to get all kids to the same place by the time you're done? So that's the root of the concept and.
[03:34]
kind of where it came from with how we put that book out first out of that framework.
[03:38] SPEAKER_01:
Well, it seems like kind of a different perspective on assessment. You know, if schools have been adopting or purchasing, you know, what might be called common formative assessments or some sort of standardized assessments, I think there's been a push in the last decade or so in our profession to see assessments as a thing, but you seem to have kind of a different perspective on the role that assessment plays and treat assessment in the book as more of a verb. I wonder if you could speak to that idea of assessment being something that's happening all the time, but something that's active and not just a document.
[04:12] SPEAKER_02:
Absolutely. So when you are looking at classroom information, you're trying to make an informed decision about what's best for that kid. And an event like a test or a quiz or even a formal piece of homework can certainly give you insight, but it's absolutely never enough. It's impossible to see what a child is thinking. So masterful teachers know how to elicit or ask questions that elicit thinking so that they can better understand how a child is approaching a problem. So for example, if a teacher asked a kid a question like, how many apples did Hakeem have left?
[04:53]
If you have 12 to start with and he gave a third to Brenda and a third to Brian, how many do they have left? And the child answers the correct answer four. It'd be easy to assume that the child then understood the math. But when asked to explain it, the child says, well, I knew that we were dealing with thirds and one plus one is two and three plus three is six and two plus six is eight and twelve minus eight is four. it becomes immediately clear that while the child gave the right answer, they have no understanding of the math that's going behind that work. And so we wanted to arm teachers with tools and ways to think about how do you know when a child gives you an answer that they truly understand?
[05:36]
Because you're doing that kind of work as a teacher in front of the classroom all the time. That's not something that you wait for a formal event to clarify.
[05:44] SPEAKER_01:
Right, right. It's at the very heart of teaching as one of kind of the core moves of checking for understanding, figuring out if you're ready to move on, figuring out maybe if you explain something in a way that was helpful to students or if you need to take another shot at that. Absolutely. What do you see as some of the first things that teachers need to kind of master as they're striving to build their practice in the area of instructional agility? So in other words, You know, we've all had classes on designing assessments. We've all had classes maybe in a master's program on using formative assessment to make instructional decisions.
[06:21]
But in your work with schools, what do you see as some of the key learning needs that teachers have? Like what's kind of the normal state of practice and what do you see as the next step for where most teachers are that you work with?
[06:33] SPEAKER_02:
It's a really great question. I think sometimes we get lost in teaching strategies like use this strategy, use the question all right strategy or use the think, pair, share strategy. And so we give teachers an awful lot of strategies. But what sometimes is missing, we focus so much on the energy around helping teachers be flexible that we miss the piece about helping them understand how to be precise. And so a big area is how do teachers get crystal clear and consistent about what standards mean, how to interpret them, what's rigorous enough, how to guarantee that students are getting to a high level of proficiency. When you're looking at that work, would you score it the same way as someone next to you?
[07:18]
So a big, big area for leaders and for teachers is to start getting crystal clear about what we're talking about teaching and how good is good enough. I sat with a third grade team, and we were talking about a test where we had done some work with inference. And it became clear as we were going through the results that each of the eight teachers on that team had a different definition of what inference even was. And once we agreed on the definition of inference, We still disagreed on how far we should go in terms of rigor with inference, because you could take a single verb and you could run it all the way up all the levels of rigor. And so teams have to work together. And here's the anomaly or the odd juxtaposition here.
[08:04]
That in order for a teacher to be independently flexible, he or she must be team wise, precise and consistent. So that when he or she walks into that classroom, they can respond in an accurate manner, yet a flexible manner with what's happening right in front of them. So behind the scenes, we're unpacking standards, we're leveling the rigor, we're examining student work and scoring it with consistency, we're isolating error and talking about what are the most common errors that kids will make with this concept and how do you instructionally address that type of an error once it's made. And that's the work that cannot be handed out in a document. Too often, school districts will say, well, let's just break down the standards and give everybody the document. that is not any better than if the State Department said, hey, here are the standards.
[08:56]
Because this is a process of shared meaning. And that happens through deep conversation in and amongst teams of teachers.
[09:05] SPEAKER_01:
I've been trying to figure out why it is that I like the way you think so much and trying to figure out what some of the big things that really stand out to me and resonate with me are. And one of the things that I think is a theme in your work is is the idea that teaching is decision-making. And that's kind of on the cover of the book, looking at the subtitle, Responding to Assessment with Real-Time Decisions. But if I can go on a mini rant here, I feel like there is this push in our profession to focus on technique and, as you said, to focus on strategy and to get teachers to learn strategies and then use strategies, almost to the point of automaticity, that teachers are just kind of blindly applying strategies, that I think really diminishes that decision-making role. And one of the things that, again, really speaks to me about your work is that you are focusing on the teacher as a decision-maker and not simply as an implementer of strategies that have been selected by administrators somewhere.
[10:04] SPEAKER_02:
Exactly. And it cannot be handed to them either in a, what would we say, research-based curriculum that's supposed to have it all laid out. Just follow this and then learning will happen. It doesn't work that way.
[10:16] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And I think that for district administrators, for state-level administrators and system leaders, it seems safer to buy something and hand it out. As you said, it seems like that's a shortcut to getting the result that we want. But I just have never seen...
[10:34]
that work at scale where we really get the kind of teaching that we had in mind by buying something and handing it out. And I wonder if you could kind of give us a sense of what the kind of capacity building looks like to get teachers to teach in that way. Because, you know, I'm thinking about Dr. Amy Bader's work with project-based learning and the kind of the long-term work that she does to build capacity for teachers to design their own project-based learning units. And I know the work that you do often is long-term with helping schools develop instructional agility. So give us a little sense of what does it look like to build that capacity?
[11:07]
Because I think the norm in our profession is much more around here. Let us teach you a strategy and then you do that strategy. And then as administrators, we'll come around and make sure you're doing it. but the thinking is not there. The teacher decision-making and the skill development is not there. So I wonder, what's your perspective on building that capacity for teachers, helping them gain those skills over time?
[11:30] SPEAKER_02:
I deeply believe that this is a shared conversation with teachers and administrators, and that we're all a little bit afraid of making mistakes, right? Because student learning is happening in front of us. But this is a process that's going to be rife with mistake-making. So just like students need formative assessment and the opportunity to improve, so do administrators and teachers. So for me, the bottom line is, can we find the space and the resources to sit down and have some really meaningful conversations about what it is we're trying to accomplish and to allow for some errors, right? Like I've been with teams where they get started and they're developing an assessment and I can see that it might not be right and the principal might be chomping at the bit and wanting to immediately redirect it, but you have to step back and let the team try it, of course not penalizing kids in the process.
[12:25]
So if a bad question gets asked, wiping that question off and not holding kids accountable to it, but letting them try it and then step back and reflect and learn about whether or not that actually got them the results they were intending. And that's a bit nerve wracking to let go. But it's also really important that we allow teams that space. And sometimes we have to ask them the difficult question because sometimes their mindset might be kids can't do that. And so sometimes when I'm sitting in the room, my response is, well, how do we know? Let's try it.
[13:02]
Let's just try it and see what might happen with that. And it is, I think, sometimes through insight and the aha moments that people realize, you know what? I had a paradigm that was getting in my way and there are some possibilities here and there are some things that we could begin to do differently. And it's a long, slow process to get them to trust each other and then to feel empowered again. I worked with teams that I'd been working with for a year, and they'd still look at me and say, we want your opinion. And I had to constantly push back to say, you're the experts.
[13:35]
You've got to learn to trust yourselves. If it doesn't work, we always have other options. let's do this, let's get started, what do you think we should do? And to not hijack that, not take over.
[13:46] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely. And readers of Now We're Talking, my book, will recognize an idea in there that I've believed for a long time, that in order to judge the effectiveness of a lesson, we've really got to ask ourselves the question and ask teachers the question, did this particular activity or this particular question or this entire lesson accomplish what the teacher had in mind? What was the teacher's goal? Because I think often when we fail to ask that question, we try to evaluate the use of a technique, the use of a strategy, the facilitation of an activity, the rigor of a question. We try to evaluate those things in the abstract against this kind of idealized model. And I'll see things like districts are rating the questions that teachers are asking according to Bloom's taxonomy.
[14:35]
And they're saying, well, if it's a synthesis question, then it's high rigor and it's good. And if it's a recall question, then it's low rigor and it's bad. And my reaction to that has always been, you know, if the teacher is intending to ask a a recall question for a good reason, you know, that they have an instructional purpose in asking that question that aligns with where they are in the unit and what they want their students to accomplish and what they need to know assessment wise, then that's a great question. And as administrators, I think we've got to be really careful not to get people to just jump through hoops because we want to see synthesis questions because we have some sort of form that looks for higher order questions, quote unquote.
[15:15] SPEAKER_02:
I think sometimes in order to help, we over scaffold and under empower and we oversimplify and things are not that simple. There is a real reason to ask a recall level question before you move into a more rigorous question. There's a real reason to try to get to concept understanding because you can't do reasoning without knowledge. So it's very sophisticated decision making. We can't take that away from teachers by giving them tools and saying, just use this. We really have to allow them the space to try to think it through and work through with each other, did that work and how do I know it if it did?
[15:53]
And how do I know it if it didn't? And how am I okay with that and what do I do to fix it?
[15:58] SPEAKER_01:
One of the things that I hear a lot from administrators, I will say especially at the secondary level where the curriculum is broader, there are more subjects taught, there are maybe wider variations in teacher performance. And I hear from a lot of administrators who are frustrated that teachers are teaching in kind of outdated ways. They're not reaching all students. They maybe are reaching the most motivated students and the students who've always done well academically. And there's this desire among administrators, which I think is very positive, to really shake things up and help people do better. But often we don't have a specific enough vision for what that can look like, for what changing teacher practice so that teachers are actively using formative assessment, actively responding to where their students are, and actively being decision makers about what precisely their students need in order to master the essential content and skills.
[16:53]
So I wonder if you could give us a little bit of a kind of before and after at the secondary level. What does this look like in practice when teachers get really good at becoming
[17:02] SPEAKER_02:
Wow, that's a powerful question. When I walk into classrooms where I can see teachers are very agile with their work. they have a way of differentiating. Like they know exactly what they're looking for. And so when they see it happening, they almost have that next question in their back pocket ready to roll. And if they realize only one student is moving forward at this time, they have a way of walking by and slipping that one student a single question to say, here, you work on this for a minute while I help the other students.
[17:37]
And they use the formative assessment processes to help the group think collectively. One of the things that we're learning as we do more and more exploration in the area of assessment is that learning really is a social activity. And kids have to be able to understand what quality looks like and what it doesn't look like by examining an idea that gets put into the room and then arguing through it as to whether or not that's the right answer or a good idea. And then what are the criteria that defined it to be good or bad? And then where does their individual work sit with that? So masterful teachers are always engaging classes in a conversation around error analysis in a way that Highlights what we're looking toward.
[18:22]
What are the quality criteria? What are the targets? What does excellence look like so that learners are like teachers empowered to step back and say I Didn't hit that but now I can see it and now I know what I need to do so they're very fluid as they move through this process and they're very clear on about what evidence would be sufficient and what evidence would be accurate or quality in order to empower them as a teacher to make the next instructional maneuver, but more certainly in order to empower the learners to make instructional maneuvers. Because teaching happens, I think, when we get the learners to do the right work. They are not empty vessels to be filled.
[19:04] SPEAKER_01:
That is a great quote. And I see a link between the way that we as instructional leaders work with teachers and the way that they in turn work with their students. You know, I think if we're rigid about, you know, you will use this technique, you will start every class with this particular activity and you'll use this strategy, and when I come in, I'll see Bloom's Taxonomy and Objective on the Board, and I hear all of these things that we think we're supposed to be doing as instructional leaders, and yet on the other side, we want our students to be empowered, we want personalized learning, we want differentiated instruction, and I think if we want those things, we've got to recognize that we've got to provide those same things to our teachers.
[19:48] SPEAKER_02:
I agree. They've got to experience it, right? So they actually need support and modeling as well, which means our administrators at the central office and the building level have to get more of their own prowess in instructional agility because when you are leading a staff, you are a teacher of teachers. So how do you model in a way that helps your teachers see what it is you're looking for?
[20:12] SPEAKER_01:
So thinking about that need for modeling and that need for teachers to have a clear vision of what instructional agility looks like, how can we as administrators model that for teachers? What does it look like for administrators and district leaders, district curriculum directors to model instructional agility and provide the kind of training and professional learning experiences that teachers need?
[20:36] SPEAKER_02:
Well, every moment that an administrator spends with a teacher or a team of teachers is an opportunity for professional development. So whether it's a staff meeting or a team meeting or a visit to a classroom, there's always opportunity to provide that learning opportunity. To get started, I try to invite principals to take you could take any framework for formative assessment. You could take, for example, Dylan Williams, five strategies of formative assessment or Jan Chapuis seven. But pick a framework and then figure out as a leader, what are you going to do to model that skill? So for example, if students need to have very clear learning targets, then I would start by saying, what are my learning targets for teachers when it comes to assessment literacy?
[21:25]
What is it that I want every staff member in this building to know and be able to do? And how will I know what it looks like when I see it? And if those are my targets, then in what way and when and where am I going to share those with teachers? And one of the things that I think we've failed miserably at in the area of professional development in the past is we do what's current, this year's new thing. And you hear people say things like, well, this will pass too, just wait a little while. And we've got to get to the point where instead of just letting it be a roller coaster ride for we get really clear that this is work that's so important to instruction.
[22:04]
We're not letting it go until we have rock hard evidence that we are all doing the right work. It's not an initiative. It's a way of doing business. So these learning targets for staff, they're in our staff lounge. We revisit them in our staff meetings. We look, we constantly gather and we look for evidence of whether or not each target is in place.
[22:25]
And those targets can be things like I understand how to write quality assessments. I understand how to respond to a student's erroneous answer in a way that still promotes hope and efficacy for kids. I understand it could be anything like that. But we put them up on the wall as administrators. We hold fast to a few really important learning targets for teachers. We model what it looks like to introduce that during a staff meeting.
[22:50]
And then we say for the next month, we're going to be walking around looking for how you introduce targets. We want to find outstanding ways of doing it. I'm not suggesting what I've just done is the only way to do it, but let's start gathering evidence. Let's let's gather little video clips of how each of us introduces targets to kids and how we use that. And then let's get together as a staff, look at two minute segments from each of our classrooms and talk about whether or not we think that strategy worked and why, what evidence promoted that thought so that we are in a constant conversation about this work. And it's just a natural way of how we operate.
[23:28]
And the principle isn't above us, but it's part of us trying to figure it out. and helping us understand what he or she thinks quality looks like when it comes to this work.
[23:40] SPEAKER_01:
I love that idea of ongoing conversation and ongoing kind of triangulation and figuring out, you know, where are we relative to the criteria? Where are we relative to the targets we've set? And then what decisions do we need to make? And I really define instructional leadership as a process of making decisions and then implementing those decisions. And I think the very nature of instructional leadership is that it is distributed. It is shared among teachers, among teacher leaders, among administrators, rather than simply being something that administrators exercise.
[24:16]
So I'm very appreciative of your perspective there on how we can do that modeling, how we can build that capacity. Cassandra, if people want to learn more about your work, learn more about the book, maybe get in touch with you about doing some work in their school or district, what's the best place for people to find and connect with you online?
[24:34] SPEAKER_02:
I have a Twitter account, at C. Erkins, E-R-K-E-N-S. I have a webpage, www.anamkaraconsulting.com. And certainly it's always easy to find me through the Solution Tree website if you just look up Cassandra Erkins as one of the presenters.
[24:53]
So there's lots of ways. I'm out and about.
[24:56] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Cassandra, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio to talk about instructional agility. Great to speak with you today.
[25:04] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you. It's always a pleasure to work with you, Justin. I appreciate your thoughtful questions.
[25:09] SPEAKER_00:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[25:13] SPEAKER_01:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Cassandra Erkins about instructional agility? One thing that I want to emphasize that really stuck with me is this idea of sustained focus and this idea that professional practice is challenging and building teachers' capacity to engage in that challenging professional work is a long-term endeavor that really does require focus. And I mentioned this in the interview with Cassandra because I see this happening over and over and over again in districts across the country and schools around the world where we're always jumping to something new. We're always starting another initiative. We're always starting another program. And often what we're asking people to do conflicts with the very last thing that we ask them to do or conflicts with the last program that we implemented.
[26:08]
And often we don't respect teachers enough as decision makers. And if we will engage in conversation and ask teachers, how's it going? What do you think about this? How is this working for you? How is this fitting together? If we can get away from the idea that teachers are simply strategy implementers, that we as administrators are the strategy people and teachers simply do what they're told.
[26:31]
If we can get away from that idea, we will find that conversation, that shared decision making, that shared meaning making can take us so much farther. And if I think about where this problem in our profession comes from, I think a lot of people who get into senior leadership positions, if I can make a conjecture here, I think a lot of people who get into senior leadership positions get there by being effective at taking people from bad to good without ever having a whole lot of experience at helping people go from good to great. And I think if we want to take our good teachers to the next level, if we want to take our great teachers to the next level, we're not going to accomplish that by simply telling teachers what to do and having them robotically implement strategies.
[27:21]
We've really got to build capacity and we've got to respect the nature of teaching as professional work, as decision making work. If you are interested in learning how to do that, if you're interested in building your own capacity to be that kind of instructional leader, I want to let you know about our High Performance Instructional Leadership Certification Program, which is designed to help you confidently get into classrooms and have those conversations with teachers, evidence-based conversations that change teachers' practice, that build your capacity as an instructional leader and as a decision maker. and that allow you to make the kind of decisions and take the kind of action that you need to take your school to the next level. So if you haven't already checked out the certification program, you can go to principalcenter.com slash certification to learn more about that.
[28:11] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
