The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders: Leading for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Douglas Fisher. Doug is a professor at San Diego State University and a founder of Health Sciences High and Middle College. And he's the author of numerous books, many with Nancy Fry and John Hattie. And we're here today to talk about their new book, The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders, Leading for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_01:

Doug, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, great to be here. So Doug, I know many educators have seen the distance learning playbook for teachers and the ways that you've helped teachers think through some of the key issues with remote learning. What are some of the key challenges that school leaders are facing with remote learning, you know, seeing that that has extended perhaps much longer than we initially anticipated. What are some of the big challenges that you saw school leaders grappling with when it comes to remote learning and how did those factor into your development of this new book?

[01:18] SPEAKER_00:

So two big areas that Nancy, John and Dominique and I have been spending time talking about. The first is how do you maintain the climate and culture of a school? You know, schools have an identity and they have their niche and they have their like their feel when you show up. And a lot of people, students, teachers, staff, haven't been at physically school for a while. And so we need to think about how to maintain that culture and climate, that feel and being virtually present, having a social presence out there as the leader. So people are still connecting with you, connecting with the organization, connecting with the mission so that school isn't an individual classroom teacher with X number of students, that we're part of something bigger.

[02:02]

So that's one area that we've been thinking a lot about. The second is around teacher agency and this idea that when you put forth effort, good things happen. And by and large, teachers, you know, when we plan lessons, when we design learning, when we are hanging out with our students and engaging in meaningful experiences, we see the fruits of our efforts. We see a return on investment. We see the light bulbs going off in their faces. We see the wonderment and curiosity and surprise and all of those things that feed our souls.

[02:38]

And as we didn't see as much of that in some locations, teacher agency took a dip and people were starting to question whether or not their efforts mattered. And when agency starts to reduce, that's when burnout comes. The evidence on burnout is it's not how many hours you work, although I'm not asking people to work piles of hours, but it's not really how many hours you work. It's whether or not you feel that the work is meaningful and that it results in things you care about. And if we have a whole bunch of teachers who are saying, it doesn't matter what I do, nothing is working, the kids are not learning, they're not logging in, whatever. that burnout starts to happen.

[03:19]

Eventually that leads to people leaving the profession. And I think that's part of the role of the leader is we have to help make that connection between teacher effort and the good things that are happening.

[03:34] SPEAKER_01:

I love your framing of that because we tend to think about absolute success, right? Are 100% of our students showing up? Are 100% of our students passing? And this year we are dealing with unprecedented levels of success. you know, of failure, of disengagement, of, you know, as you said, kids not logging in. Even if they do log in, sometimes we don't know if they're really there because their camera's off.

[03:59]

We really have much less feedback about our own success than we ever have as a profession. And I appreciate your drawing the connection to burn out there because you know people are putting forth such great effort to you know to learn new platforms to learn new skills uh you know perhaps after very long periods of success in face-to-face instruction you know everybody's kind of a beginner at this and then we don't have the positive feedback you know the the look on on children's faces that you know that we're used to So on kind of an emotional level, how do we deal with that gap between what we envision for our success as educators and what we're currently able to achieve and realize just based on the circumstances? Like, how do we emotionally deal with that?

[04:46] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I guess part of my answer is around early wins or harvesting wins, I might say, that if we can start to look at any kinds of successes, and I'm not in denial about the realities and some of the really difficult situations, but our day can't be the five kids who didn't log in, the seven kids who didn't submit their assignments, because that's where we're spending our energy. And I think we're forgetting the 20 kids who did it, who showed up, who were on their Zoom or Teams or Hangout and they were there and they were trying and they wanna connect with their teacher. And so I think we've shifted to focus mostly on the negative things and we haven't given ourself permission to also recognize those little wins. little tiny things.

[05:38]

And as leaders, I think it's our job this year to make explicit for teachers the connection between their effort and the good things. In the past, I would have never said to a teacher, When you did X, I saw five students suddenly understand the lesson. I didn't have to do that. I mean, they already saw it. Now I'm making a direct, when you, I saw. Or I said this the other day to a group of teachers that we were having a meeting and I said, I watched how many kids turn their cameras on when you said three, two, one cameras on.

[06:11]

That's because of you and the relationship they have with you. And people need to hear that right now. They need us leaders to help make that connection that there are some good things happening. And you know, by the way, there are some kids who are doing spectacularly well in distance learning. There are some kids who are saying, I am never going back to physical school. This is so working for me.

[06:34]

And there are other kids for whom this is not working. And I think as a profession, we're spending most of our energy in a very deficit orientation. We're saying, you know, learning loss and it's going to be a gap year and there's nothing we can do. And I worry about that mindset that it's all deficit thinking and that we permission ourselves to lower expectations because of that thinking of deficit and that we start to really wonder if any of it's worth it.

[07:06] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I appreciate the agency angle there that we need to reinforce the connection between effort and impact, even if the impact is not 100% of students turned on their webcam, not 100% of students are turning on their assignments, but we are having an impact. And it will fall short of what we ultimately want until this is all behind us and we're back under our more ideal circumstances. Let's talk a little bit about the role of instructional leaders, because you said making that connection between the effort and impact explicit. What are instructional leaders actually doing that's making a difference? Because we always have this tension, even face to face, we have this tension of being helpful versus being invasive. If I walk into the classroom, I want to make sure that I'm not doing that in a way that disrupts the lesson or distracts the students.

[07:58]

I want to be a helpful presence or a fly on the wall. And that's all very different. Negotiating all of that is very different in a virtual context. What are you hearing from leaders that is kind of in the sweet spot of being helpful but not invasive and being a welcome presence to teachers and students?

[08:16] SPEAKER_00:

I think in the early days of the pandemic, well-meaning school systems and leaders said, we're going to back off of professional learning communities. We're going to back off of professional learning time that wasn't focused on technology. We're going to back off on classroom observations. And the idea was because so much was going on for teachers is to take things off their plate, so to speak. The challenge with that and the unintended consequence of that is teachers lost connection to other professionals. And part of our agency and identity is wrapped up in all the stories we tell and the practices we share with one another.

[08:54]

And the reality is the vast majority of leaders did not teach from a distance in the pandemic. And so we have to be very careful about showing up and giving advice well-intended for which we have no direct experience that it's ever going to work. And so I think our job is, Right now, I do think we should be visiting classrooms. I think we should be having teachers reflect. My favorite question right now, Nancy created it several months ago, is how is the lesson you taught different from the lesson you planned? And it's just this really interesting way of having people talk to you about the lesson and having people think about their lessons.

[09:33]

I do think we live in this tension right now between the teacher's well-being and supporting that teacher well-being and having good instructional experiences for kids. And I think that's the role of the leader is to walk that line between making sure we're honoring and recognizing the need for well-being of our staff and helping teachers design good, great instructional experiences for students. And some of those debrief conversations. So we should be a presence in virtual classrooms. We should reflect with teachers. We should work on growth producing feedback that we don't we don't assume and tell people this is how you do it.

[10:13]

But we start talking about the moves you make, like how do you build some cognitive apprentice experience for kids? How do you get them collaborating with their peers using academic language? You know, we have a series of questions or look fors, if you will, that we've been thinking about that help just have this conversation.

[10:35] SPEAKER_01:

It really sounds to me like a noticing role. The idea that our first task as leaders is not to criticize or to make a suggestion, but really just to pay attention and to notice what's going on, what's working. And as you said, none of us as administrators have ever done this, right? None of us taught in a pandemic. None of us are old enough to have taught in the last pandemic. So this is new to us.

[11:03]

And we can't pretend that we're on a kind of a high horse as far as what works. But the way we develop our expertise is by noticing what's working in the teachers that we work with in their classrooms.

[11:17] SPEAKER_00:

You know, Paul Manna several years ago said that principals... have the potential to be magnifiers of effective instruction. And I think that's super important right now is that we take Paul's advice and say, my role is, As you suggested, I'm gonna notice this, and then my role is to magnify it. And to not say this is the one way to teach, there is no one way to teach things, but to say this seemed to work over here in this fourth grade classroom.

[11:45]

Want me to cover your class and you can go see it? Want me to see if the teacher will let us have a short video clip so you can watch it with me? You wanna do some micro teaching lessons? What can we do to magnify? those good practices that people are innovating with right now. The innovation speed is amazing with education right now.

[12:04]

We started something we called Waterfall Chat back, I think August, something like that. And it's where you hold chat and you don't have everybody hit respond until you give a signal word. And then all the chat comes in at once. And the idea was more of an inclusive universal response where students felt safer because their answer was wedged in with all the other answers. That has taken off all over the country. I mean, it's everywhere.

[12:28]

Now we started chat review where you go back and like after you do a waterfall, you go back and you read and you say, that one made me laugh. And you're going to copy it, paste it and tell why. This person made me laugh because. And we're starting to see all these innovations spread around. And people are, there's uptake rapidly here. So if we're the leaders and we're saying, hey, I saw this, what do you think about that?

[12:53]

You know, I saw this really cool response thing where kids had response cards, simple response cards that they held up.

[13:01] SPEAKER_01:

their camera they didn't want their faces in the camera but they were willing to put the cards in the camera so the teacher could check for understanding could you try that i mean that's just that's our role is to start noticing and then magnifying wow so notice and magnify and those are innovations that teachers have come up with and then spread to you know by the time you and i hear about it probably tens of thousands of teachers are already doing that right exactly that's the cool thing so those two examples uh the first one what did you call the first one where students are typing their chat answer but they're not hitting send until a signal is given. So everybody's had time to write. What did you call that one?

[13:36] SPEAKER_00:

We called that a waterfall chat. So literally the words flow down like a waterfall all at once. And so we just say waterfall and all of a sudden it goes. And when we survey students about it, they say it's safer. I had some thinking time. I even changed my idea and deleted it and wrote something different because, you know, wait time has been compromised in distance learning pretty significantly.

[13:59]

So that was the original motivation is to give some wait time. But students really say they really like it. And some of the students say, I don't like responding in chat because then everyone's looking at my answer. The other thing we saw in chat that we were seeing over the course of the summer was a lot of follow the leader. Six students or so would respond and then everybody else would say yes, yes, or just copy the same answer. So we wanted to reduce that as well.

[14:26] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk about sharing within the school because obviously as individual leaders, the teachers that we work with directly and supervise directly are perhaps the primary audience for any any sharing of those strategies that we as individuals identify. When it comes to shared expectations, there's this tension between tight and loose as far as aligning people around new practices. And perhaps leaders have been slow to or hesitant to put too many shared expectations in place because we don't want to burden people. What are you seeing work at the school level to kind of get, you know, give people, you know, things that work, get people on the same page, but not go too far in the direction of kind of micromanaging and over-specifying what people should be doing?

[15:18] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and that's another tension that we have. I tend to fall on the side that there's some consistency that's good for students. Having spent the last, you know, what, 15 years in secondary, having spent a lot of time in elementary, consistency is really important. And I think we forget that, that every 50 minutes or so, the boss changes and all the rules change and all the guidelines for your work change. And you're like, as simple as note-taking. You take notes in science this way and you take notes in this way in history and this way in English, and you don't take notes at all in this class.

[15:51]

And it's very confusing and habits are never built. So I do think there's some role for consistency, some shared agreements. I mean, years ago we said we're going to teach students to annotate when they read hard text, complex text, but we're all not going to do different annotation marks. So what are we going to agree to? What does underlining do? What does circling do?

[16:10]

What margin notes? Because we had to have a conversation so we didn't teach at odds with each other because we share the same students. But there's also the art side of this, you know, like how much of your personality comes through and how much innovation you want to try. I worry...

[16:27]

that we are spending too many minutes on instructions and not enough time on instruction because we keep changing everything up. So this week we're gonna try this and next week we're gonna do Jamboard and the following week, no more Jamboard, we're gonna do Kahoot and then we're doing Desmos and all of this and we spend so many minutes on instructions. And I get that in the early days of pandemic teaching because we were searching for things that worked for us. But at this point, I think there's pretty good, you know, like these are the things we know how to do really well. Let's do them with some routine so that students know what to expect. I'm not saying we don't innovate and add some things new, you know, periodically for students and keeping it a little bit novel and interesting.

[17:12]

But you shouldn't have to spend five minutes every class explaining what's going to happen, what the instructions are, because that's, you know, five minutes at 190 days out of a 15 minute class, that's a lot of days lost for instructions. And so I think that a lot, I think about that. I think early in the pandemic, we got too enamored with all the tools. It was all about all these different tools and we all got ourselves overwhelmed and we didn't know all the tools and we felt incompetent. That tide seems to have receded. We don't seem to obsess on the tools anymore.

[17:46]

We seem to have tools that work for each of us, We tend to have more tool orientation at the school level. Here's our learning management system. Here are the four platforms we use. Here's the web conferencing tools we use. That seems to have gone away. Now it's the instructional stuff is what kinds of habits are we trying to build with students across their experience?

[18:08] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Doug, I think that's a great segue into talking about professional learning and how people learn from one another, how we do professional development. What are you seeing as far as, you know, kind of the state of professional development? Because certainly, yeah, initially there was a pivot to focusing only on technology. You know, here's how you use the learning management system or this new quiz tool that we're doing online. Where has PD gone since then and what's working?

[18:36] SPEAKER_00:

I think there are two directions I see PD right now. And the first is around more instructional moves, you know, kind of the buckets, if you will. Like if we want students collaborating, what are the ways we can get them to collaborate? If we want them to practice and apply, how do we get that to happen? You know, if we're trying to scaffold in an online environment, how does that happen? So I do see a lot of focus on instruction now moving away from the tools.

[19:01]

The other area that I'm seeing increasingly is teacher led, you know, peer professional learning. And this started, Zoom created an option where people could select their own breakout rooms. And what we started seeing was in professional learning, you know, like if you want to learn, you know, like how to create an online task assessment, You can go to this room. If you want to do, you know, if you've never used Jamboard and your students know Jamboard and you want to know Jamboard, go to this session. Kind of like an EdCamp. It's way more like EdCamp.

[19:39]

And I'm seeing that very commonly now because the platforms have evolved to allow more choice. And so people can say, for the next 20 minutes, I want to go to this room. But even that EdCamp kind of thing, but it's teacher-led. And so I'm seeing some recognition of success with their peers. Like I went to one where a teacher had created a series of Google slides and she had the same function in mathematics required of all of the groups, but all the problems were different. And so all the data was different and they were doing regression.

[20:17]

analysis and she put she gave them instructions. They knew how to use Google Slides. They knew that if they were grouped to it was slide to they knew all of this because there was no minutes spent on that. They went in their groups and she had taught them that if you get if you get stuck, you change the background of your slide red and she will know and she'll join that group. And she told them that if they needed to, they could send a spy to a different Google slide and see how that group was solving their problem because the problem was different. but using similar functions.

[20:48]

And just going to the room and having her talk through what she did, I'm not a math teacher, but I can see the implications for the things I'm teaching. And the science teacher that was in there was thinking like, oh, I could do labs in a whole different way. And we all learned a lot. But even more importantly is the teacher who was sharing that got reinforced that all of us are saying, wow, this is pretty cool. I'm learning something new. I've known Google Slides for years.

[21:14]

I never thought to teach students to turn the background red when they needed help, because you're seeing it in gallery view and you can instantly see which slide goes to red and where you need to go. And to teach the kids to go, you know, send a spy to go look at another slide because it's still learning because they can't just copy because their problem sets are completely different. I just think that that share and that reinforcing is super powerful.

[21:41] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it brings us back to where we started, which is teacher agency, right? This idea that there's a connection between effort and the impact that those efforts have. that we need to see that, we need to reinforce that as leaders, we need to amplify that. When it comes to personally seeing what's going on with virtual learning, obviously we tried to initially just do the Zoom version of what we always do in person. Is that working? Are people making that work?

[22:10]

What are people doing to get into classrooms when they can't get into classrooms?

[22:14] SPEAKER_00:

I do think there's a lot of video conferencing And I think we've gotten more sophisticated with our asynchronous learning tasks. And I hope we don't forget this when we come back. I think the quote homework is very different now when we really embraced asynchronous tasks. I think of asynchronous learning as review preview. So what can I do when I'm not with the students? So this quasi flipped, if you will.

[22:39]

But what could I do to preview learning? And what do I need to do to review the learning? So it's not just homework. It's a very, it's a next level of independent practice kinds of things. I see a lot of interactive video right now. And there are, you know, whether it's Edpuzzle or Playposit or, you know, Canvas Studio, you know, there's all these, Nearpod, there's all these different tools that do it.

[23:07]

But I see students actually interacting with video content, sometimes with more forced choice answers, sometimes with constructive response answers. But it's just really interesting to watch them go back again to the video because they want to get a perfect score. So they watch it three times. Well, that kind of learning, we could have never done that in physical school. We would have never done that. If you're going to show a video clip and you're going to have students take notes or whatever, or use vocabulary, whatever, it's once, it's done.

[23:37]

And what they got, what they got. And then we might have to do some reteaching, but now students can watch that video three times. And with embedded interaction, if they don't get them all right, they can go do it again. It's just, I think review preview is gonna be really important in the future as we think about what's the role that we have for synchronous learning. And when I think about the synchronous time, the Zooms and the Teams and all those things, It's about getting kids to use language, to talk to each other, to scaffold. Why would we do a lecture in that format anymore?

[24:07]

Why wouldn't we just do the lecture on a short video with embedded interaction questions. I think we're seeing a difference in what that's going to look like.

[24:17] SPEAKER_01:

One of the things that we're starting to see as people start to get more realistic about how to manage the workload of remote teaching is that teachers are getting better at finding and curating resources rather than creating them themselves. may not even be a video created by anyone who works in the district. It may be a random video found online or purchased from somewhere or provided by a curriculum vendor. What does that mean for the relationship between teachers and instructional leaders when a lot of the instructional materials, and that's always been the case to some extent, we have textbooks and things like that, but When many of the instructional tasks are being designed by someone other than the teacher, or at least the explanation maybe is given by someone other than the teacher, what do we need to think about differently because of that shift?

[25:05] SPEAKER_00:

I think the question I ask, and teachers do love all kinds of YouTube, PBS, all these videos that come from curriculum resources, and I say to them, what did you want the students to learn? How do you know they were successful in learning it? So if that meets the learning intentions that you've set, if that's if that resource is helping you accomplish that and that what you have in your progression of learning. Awesome. If it didn't and it was kind of filler, there's a different conversation that we need to have. And if this is really helping you ensure kids are learning things and that you understand, like, here's the progression of learning and this day they needed to learn this.

[25:43]

Great, fantastic, because then you didn't have to develop it.

[25:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Doug, in all of this, often we're thinking about other people. We're thinking about students and teachers and their needs. For leaders, how do we take care of ourselves during this time when some of the same things about agency are true, that we're lacking the feedback about whether what we're doing is making any difference, whether we're just speaking into the void and no one is hearing it because we're certainly not hearing anything back. How do we keep ourselves going and keep ourselves healthy in all of this?

[26:17] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, a super important question because we spend all of our time as leaders, like really worrying about our teachers, our staff, all that, the students, the parents. And if we're not taking care of ourselves, we're not going to be any good for any of them. So remember, if you don't. If your cup's empty, you can't fill another person's. So taking care of ourselves is super important. So things like morning routines, end of day routines, breaks during the day, a wellness plan, all of that has evidence that it helps you take care of yourself.

[26:48]

But I think it starts with giving yourself permission, that you have permission, that you are worth the investment in you. And if we don't say that to ourselves, we can write a wellness plan, but we won't do it. We can say we're going to have morning routines, but we don't because we have to give ourselves permission that we're worth it. And we also need to harvest those wins and attribute some of that success. When those teachers come and say, wow, that idea that you got, that you shared from that third grade to my class, take it, own it. You had a part in that and recognize that success.

[27:24]

And I think if we could shift the conversation to all of us having successes, we can make it through this.

[27:30] SPEAKER_01:

So Doug, it's always a pleasure and always enjoyable to hear your thoughts on the latest research that you've been up to with your co-authors. So the book is The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders, Leading for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting by Doug Fisher, Nancy Fry, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie. Doug, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[27:54] SPEAKER_00:

The easiest place is Twitter, DFisherSDSU. That's the easiest place. Teachers and leaders are sending me all kinds of stuff on Twitter, and I just send it right back out. So that's a great resource. Also, our website is fisherandfry.com.

[28:07]

Our last name is F-R-E-Y, so it's F-I-S-H-E-R-A-N-D-F-R-E-Y.com.

[28:13] SPEAKER_01:

Doug, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Great to talk to you.

[28:18] Announcer:

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