[00:01] SPEAKER_01:
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_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Joseph Murphy. Dr. Murphy is the Frank W. Mayborn Chair at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of Education and the author of more than 23 books on educational leadership and school improvement. Dr. Murphy led the development of the ISLIC standards for school leaders and is a leading international expert on instructional capacity.
[00:37] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:40] SPEAKER_00:
Dr. Murphy, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin. So we're here today to talk about your book, Creating Instructional Capacity, a framework for creating academic press. And instructional capacity is something that I'm personally very interested in, professionally very interested in. But what does instructional capacity mean to you in the way that you're looking at it in this book?
[01:00] SPEAKER_02:
Well, it means a number of things. But when you get a chance to look at the new uh... professional standards which are really that sort of third round of the islet which was just just adopted uh... by the national policy board for admin last thursday there's a there's a separate standard on instructional capacity and i think what we mean by that is the principals and superintendents and others but especially principals um... oftentimes get down into a pretty micro level understanding of what they're doing um...
[01:35]
And at times they need to step back and realize that their capacity building in the school is actually more important than the micro behaviors. So the main thing principals do or can do is to get great teachers and leaders. I mean, to get great teachers. You know, if we did that right, we could all have a house at the beach and just come back on occasion to work, right? But when you actually look at the amount of time that we spend doing that job compared to the time we're doing other things, we often find that it's really pretty thin compared to how powerful that dimension of the work is. And we would say the same thing about professional development and other dimensions of capacity building for teachers.
[02:25] SPEAKER_00:
So it really is at the heart of our work as leaders not to just run around and kind of stay busy with administrivia, but really to build capacity. What are some of the key challenges you see around that issue of not just distractions from that work of building capacity, but what's hard about it at its very core?
[02:44] SPEAKER_02:
Well, there are all sorts of difficulties, I think. One is the larger the district you're in, the more likely they are to be interventionists on who comes to see you for a job, especially when you get to issues like transfers during the year and stuff like that. So that can actually be a pretty significant constraint on capacity development. I'll just give one other. I think the main one is we've been on this ferocious – effort and appropriate to get principals into classrooms and look and see what's going on. And that's not insignificant for sure, but you can save yourself a lot of time if you spend two or three days visiting teachers that you want to hire at school and talking to people and seeing them in their own classroom than you can walking around in classrooms in your school for weeks at a time.
[03:44]
So I think the pressure of I want principles to be sort of really, and it's instructional. I don't mean managerial. It's instructional, but it's still pretty nitty-gritty stuff as compared to the big decisions that we can make to set things up so there's an 80% chance that we're going to win.
[04:03] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let's talk more about that issue of hiring, because I think sometimes we feel like we're somewhat at the mercy of circumstances beyond our control, especially, as you mentioned, in larger districts where teachers can be placed and we might not necessarily have as much control over the process. I love that suggestion of actually getting out of the school and going to prospective hires' classrooms and seeing them there and being proactive at that level, you know, it breaks my heart to see schools that have year after year have a preponderance of first year teachers. And, you know, you know, that these are not high achieving schools, you know, that these are not schools that serve middle and high income students, you know, these are schools that, for the, you know, overwhelming part serve our neediest students that have our least experience and probably most poorly hired students. teachers. Talk to us about that hiring issue.
[04:54]
How did we kind of stop seeing that as the urgent priority it is?
[04:58] SPEAKER_02:
I think it's where principals actually have some more leeway. The criteria we use to hire teachers right now leaves a good deal to be desired, to tell you the truth.
[05:14]
We have this sense that test scores and certifications and letters of recommendation and so forth and so on are actually valuable. And I don't want to be rude, but they're not. The question is, I don't even read letters of recommendation unless I know the person who wrote it. And I don't think they add much to anything. And same with others. So the question I think the principals do have control over is in addition to those things that you're required to do, what are the primary criteria one should look for as they hire teachers?
[05:55]
And again, I'm going to say this. Having parents involved is not unimportant, but it's not very important to determine quality of a teacher. So we've got to step away from the things we do, the processes we use, and the criteria and ask yourself, what would you want for a new teacher? From a principal, right? I'm sitting in my principal's role here now. The things that you want to be able to look for are, the questions I would ask are, demonstrate, show to me that you've exercised, in some role, real care and commitment to children somewhere.
[06:39]
So they could talk about They're working the Boys and Girls Club. They could talk about their church and what they're doing. I don't really care. But if they can't answer that question, they haven't demonstrated care and support of children, they're not likely to do it in your school. They shouldn't be hired. That's pretty clear.
[06:57]
Care is half the game. And I don't mean there aren't exceptions, but that should be a red flag. You just don't pick up caring and support, you know, when you're 22 years old or 23 years old. It's got to be part of the fabric of who you are. And that's the first question I would ask. I try to get answers to in addition to the other things that the districts require.
[07:23]
And then I think when you see them, you have to see them teach. We talk about academic press. There's a handful of norms. And this goes back to my thing about the nitty-gritty principles down the nitty-gritty principles. Principles really, they're going to be most effective, need to have powerful norms in their head. And it's those norms that guide their behavior, not policies and regulations and procedures from the school district.
[07:50]
So one of the norms, a couple of those norms evolve around the academic focus of a classroom. So they would be things like, is the instruction authentic? Is what's going on in the class authentic? And the answer to that 90% of the time is no. We have textbooks and systems that have no relation to what kids do or why they wouldn't engage in it. So that's not particularly good.
[08:19]
You want kids working on things that have meaning to them as well as to the school. I'll just give you one more. The other thing is if you go into many classrooms, or most, you find that the teacher is on stage about 85% of the time. That's not good. The norm you want to have here as a principal is interactive, constructive learning. That's the norm.
[08:48]
Don't worry about the little micro things. But you can go in and see, is this interactive, constructive learning going on in this classroom? And if the answer is no, when you go see the teacher teach, that's... that's not good.
[09:02]
That's violation of the... There's only like nine of these principles to follow across the whole school. And if you see them violated, that means either the person's going to have to be retrained and redeveloped or they're going to do the same thing when they get to your school, which is the most likely thing that's going to happen. And you don't want that.
[09:24]
So I think the good news, even though principles are constrained, there are very... important norms that they can look for when they hire that will actually determine whether teachers will work out or not.
[09:39] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let's talk about the other side of that set of norms and that set of expectations that a principal may have, especially when bringing new teachers on board. And I think about the model that Uncommon Schools uses to kind of rapidly induct new teachers, often new teachers who are untrained, who are unproven, who often don't have any experience, really. And there's a system in the book Leverage Leadership, Paul Bambrick Santoyo talks about their system for improving the quality of teacher's instruction. very rapidly and in a very directive and very hands-on way on the principal's part, how does that post-hiring support and kind of indoctrination into the culture of the school and the instructional practices that characterize the way we do things here, how does that play into the principal's role and interact with the hiring piece?
[10:28] SPEAKER_02:
Well, no, I think that's actually absolutely correct. I mean, I remember when I was hired as an administrator and teacher, basically, I went there and they gave me the key to my cubicle and said, hand it in when you retire. So that doesn't work. So the notion of hands-on support, training and development, again, but this requires the principle to shift energy from a lot of microactivity to setting up structures and systems and procedures that focus on this. And I think that's absolutely...
[11:09]
A wonderful idea, and especially when you have young teachers because they're not inculcated in norms that may be not functional for teachers who have been around for a long time and know if they just go back to their classroom, they can do whatever they want anyway.
[11:28] SPEAKER_00:
Well, it seems to me that if we are going to have norms in our school for what high-quality teaching looks like and for having common expectations, it feels to me like some of what we need to do is to hire... And I got a little bit of flack for this recently in an article I'd written on my website about hiring, you know, hiring the best teachers and really striving to find people who not just met the qualifications, but really who were exceptional and who would kind of raise the level. And I think about a new teacher that we hired a couple of years ago at my last school. who was honestly who was better than a lot of the people that she would be working with, even though she was new and we'd kind of seen her throughout her internship and kind of seen her grow up.
[12:16]
What do you think of this issue or this idea of talent or this idea of outstanding teachers or the idea that talent is something that we need to actively be searching for? Because I don't know, sometimes that word talent makes us a little bit uncomfortable in education.
[12:30] SPEAKER_02:
The issue, yes, yes, you clearly want good people on the bus. You know, it's sort of the first law. If you don't have the right people on the bus, it doesn't make any difference where you think you're going because you're not going to get there, right? So I think that's fundamentally correct. And then if you have people who are new, a really concerted effort at the first couple years to help them – really not learn the norms of the school so much, but learn the norms, the nine norms across the whole school, what they need to hang on to, and the same thing principals need to hang on to. So you say, all right, you know, give them a day off and have them go in the different classrooms, right, and ask this question.
[13:19]
Was the stuff that the teacher was teaching challenging to these children at all? And what they'll see, that's a norm, right? Norm of academic presses that should be challenged. And they'll see. I mean, the average in the United States of America is one in two children are off task at any moment, right? And the teacher teaches kids about 30% of the time what they already know.
[13:45]
So that's a norm. If you want to attack that norm and you see it and you drag yourself through classrooms for a day or two and you say to yourself, oh, my God. This is incredibly boring. I would kill myself if I were here. I wouldn't be paying attention either. I'm a little dramatic back here, but, you know, they can draw conclusions about the norm of challenge or the norm of authenticity or the norm of kids being seriously interacting and engaging and constructing their own knowledge.
[14:17]
And I don't mean, I mean intellectually too. or not. Those things that are very, very visible if you go into another classroom and look.
[14:25] SPEAKER_00:
Let's talk more about that idea of academic press, because we've referred to it a few times, and we've got it in the title of the book. What is academic press? Because the first time I came across that term, I thought, oh, an academic press is a publisher, but no, you mean something about, you know, about the kind of instructional culture in the school. Tell us what that means.
[14:42] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, let me start with the beginning. All great schools always have do today and always will rest on two feet and only two feet. One is this powerful sense of academic press or demandingness or challenge, whatever you want to call it. It's a place where kids are pushed, carried, led to get serious engagement and challenge work. That's what the academic press is really all about. But the other half of that is not academic press.
[15:15]
It's productive culture. And what we know is you cannot academically press many kids and certainly most low-income children of color, children from low-income families, into better students, right? That just doesn't work. So unless you work the other side of the street, which is the cultural side, and the norms there are very simple. Kids are cared for. Kids are known, respected.
[15:46]
have opportunities to lead, have stake ownership in the building, right? Those kind of concepts are critical if you want to get to the academic press. And both of those things should go on at the same time and they should work around each other, right? They should wind like a DNA. So that's the central message. And I tell my students, my doctoral students after the first class, if they can remember that, I'll give them their degree.
[16:12]
because that's the job of principals. They're not going to get another hour of work. We're not going to get another period of time to do something. We make 1,200 decisions a day. If religiously one eye on every decision is focused on the culture and one eye is focused on academic press, we can change 200 or 300 of the decisions we do every day to the betterment of children. That is the primary thing we have to do, is get press and support as the foundations.
[16:49]
And that's where the principal comes in handy. I mean, they're the person who sets the tone for that, who shows it and models it. Here's the, it is on the cultural side.
[17:01]
I was working with a principal last year, and he said, in middle school, And I said, we're talking about culture. And I said, well, you know the name of all your kids, right? And you can talk to them. He said, no, Murph, I don't. And I said, well, you need to go home this weekend and you need to learn the names of every child in your school and you need to start thinking about something that's special, something you could actually stop and have a conversation about. And he said, Murph, leave me alone.
[17:31]
I'll go home and do it. And he did. And I saw him a month later and he said, Murph, it's amazing. I was walking down the hall the week after we talked, and a young lady was coming towards me in the hall, and I said, Elizabeth, good to see you today. I'm really glad that you're here. How are you doing?
[17:52]
He said, she froze right there on the floor and said to him, you know my name, right? That's a norm. That's the norm of caring for children and knowing kids, And if we don't put it into place, we don't win with kids. Everything a child does when they come to our schools other than get off the bus is completely voluntary. So it's our job to have them take the path that we as educators want them to take to be academically successful. And you just have to have positive culture along with the academic press to do that.
[18:34] SPEAKER_00:
We'll link up in the show notes on our website to your previous book, Creating Productive Cultures in Schools for Students, Teachers, and Parents. And your co-author there is Daniela Torre.
[18:47] SPEAKER_02:
Yes, yes. And they were designed to be anchor books. So one was press, one was support. And that's exactly what they're there for.
[18:54] SPEAKER_00:
Great. We'll link those together and maybe get Daniela on the show as well. Fabulous. So I've got to ask you about the ISLIC standards before we go. You were one of the main people behind the ISLIC standards, which I know are a team effort, but I don't think it would be wrong to credit you as an author and originator of some of those guiding standards that are behind our work that we do as administrators. And I wanted to ask in particular...
[19:17]
your thoughts on why the standards are framed not so much as behaviors or as techniques or as strategies, because we're very into technique these days, it seems like. If you had just made a list of 67 techniques, I'm sure that would have been a best-selling book.
[19:31] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's 190 behaviors.
[19:33] SPEAKER_00:
But why are they responsibilities? Why did you frame them that way?
[19:36] SPEAKER_02:
Because the main reason is, and it's hard for people sometimes, but the standards are not designed to be actionable at the level they are, right? They're designed to tell people, like you'll see in the new standards, there's three standards on care, right, and there's four standards on academic press. So it tells people what they need to be doing, you know, and that's what's critical. Now, what you do when we say you need to ensure that the learning that goes on in the classrooms is interactive and engaging and engages kids, right, That's a norm, okay? So we would say if you are in the district office, how you would come at that requirement would be quite different than if you were in an elementary school.
[20:29]
And I suspect if you were a high school principal, you might come at it from a third way. But the issue, that's fine. Whatever transportation system you need to use to get to San Diego, right, is fine. What's not fine is not to take the trip to San Diego. And that's what the standards do. They tell us what's critical, what we need to work on.
[20:51]
So that standard would look different. It would come out differently if you're in a preparation program than if you were in a training program for senior principals. But what doesn't change is the demand that each of those roles address the norms of academic press. That's non-negotiable.
[21:09] SPEAKER_00:
Right. And I see that that word appearing throughout the standards, a word that we hardly ever use, you know, conversationally, hardly ever use on a day to day basis. And that is ensure over and over again. I see that that commitment to ensuring. And to me, it gets back to that idea of. um, not having to do everything personally.
[21:29]
You know, it is not that the principal has to run around and get into 17 classrooms a day and discipline for students and, uh, you know, single-handedly lead professional development. It's not that we're doing these things personally necessarily. It's that we're ensuring that they're taking place. And it, it seems to me that the more we build capacity for doing those things, the greater our impact can be.
[21:50] SPEAKER_02:
No, no question. That is exactly correct. And, um, You know, for a long time, principals have tried to carry the whole freight on their back up the hill. And, you know, it's just murder. And it's just not sensible. It can't be done.
[22:05]
So that's the main thing. I'd say, well, even if you could do it and you could get it done, then you want to kill yourself, it's fine. But it can't really be done for 90%, 95% of the thing. Now, the critical issue that principals have to hang on to, though, to ensure does not mean to simply delegate to somebody. and let them do it. See, we've done that.
[22:23]
We have a lot of experience in that. Oh, well, the leadership team has that. Well, that's fine, but your job is to get the leader team set up, to have their roles established, to help them get them the support they need, to monitor and check in on their work, not as a snooper visor, but to see how they're doing and what's going on. And that's where we've often broken down. We've given stuff away. And we've claimed that we have built capacity, and all we've done is unloaded responsibilities on other people.
[22:55] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, crucial distinction there.
[22:57] SPEAKER_02:
I mean, I know. I did it myself. Well, they're working on it. Well, that's not a good enough answer, Joe. You need to do better than that.
[23:05] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I usually – we're running toward the end of our time here, and I usually conclude with a question that is, for most authors, intended to be hypothetical. If you write the ISLIC standards, it's less hypothetical, but what's one thing that you would like to see all school leaders do? If you could kind of wave a magic wand and – prompt school leaders to take a particular action. You mentioned earlier the story of getting a principal to learn the names of every student and learn something significant about every student in the school. Is there anything else like that that you can leave us with that you would like to see us take action on across the profession?
[23:43] SPEAKER_02:
I think every student in the school, what I don't think I know, should be meaningfully involved in a hip-to-hip relationship with an adult. And that doesn't mean that somebody's an advocate or a mentor. That could go well or not well. At the end of the day, you need to show me that there is a strong hip-to-hip relationship between that adult and that child, and I'll accept all sorts of evidence, but I want it to be real. So you say, well, we have a homeroom period. Well, I don't care if you have a homeroom period.
[24:14]
That could either work or not work. Or we have mentorings. The question is what are the dynamics of that hip-to-hip relationship that you want to see in place? And then how do you look for that when you go out? You're not going to get it from the State Department. You're not going to get it from the district.
[24:30]
You have to look for it internally. And you ask your staff. You say, okay, what four things would we count as valuable that we would agree, if they were there, we would have hip-to-hip relations from every child in our school with a significant adult? define them, and then go after them. If you can do that, you have the opportunity to really challenge kids to do the kind of things we want them to do in school. And if you don't, at least 40% or 50% of the kids will just go off and do their own thing because there's no obligation to do our thing.
[25:06] SPEAKER_00:
Those relationships are key. Very well said.
[25:08] SPEAKER_02:
I'll just give you an example. In my last district I was in, we had the principals bring in the name of every kid They had a long sheet of paper in their school. And what they had to do when they come in, there were three columns. They had to have in each of those three columns a reason that child was at the school other than the fact that the bus dropped them off in the morning. And if they couldn't fill that in, they didn't do it, right? It wasn't their job to make that.
[25:33]
It was their job to make it happen. And if they could not fill that in for every child, given our clients at the time, they would not win with the kid. That's exactly what we need to do. Fabulous.
[25:45] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is Creating Instructional Capacity, a Framework for Creating Academic Press. And the companion book came out about a year earlier, Creating Productive Cultures in Schools for Students, Teachers, and Parents. Dr. Murphy, thank you so much for joining us on Principal Center Radio.
[26:01] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you, Justin. I appreciate it. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[26:08] SPEAKER_00:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Murphy? First of all, I want to encourage you to review the new ISLIC standards. The 2015 edition has some great updates, and I want to refer you to both of Dr. Murphy's related books, two of his many books. But I have to say my biggest takeaway was around hiring.
[26:29]
And if I think about our schools where we have the neediest students, as we talked about the schools where year after year, it seems like we're not retaining talented educators. We're retaining some staff, but we're constantly having to hire people. And the people that we're able to hire tend to not have much experience hiring. This to me is an emergency. This is a moral imperative that we address this issue of the instructional capacity of our staff in our neediest schools. And if you're in a fairly affluent school, a school where achievement is high, a school where you have a lot of family support, by all means, hire new teachers.
[27:05]
Hire first-year teachers who have demonstrated, ideally by you going into their classroom as a you know, during their internship, that they have what it takes, that they will make it in your school. But if you are in a school where your students are coming to you with a very high degree of need, where perhaps they're living in poverty, perhaps they're behind academically, and perhaps they rely pretty heavily on what you provide for them in the way of academics, in the way of resources, in the way of just support for getting through the day. If your students depend on you that much as a school, you cannot afford to hire unproven and untested teachers. You need to be hiring talented and experienced teachers who are committed to the vision that you have. And it may be that that's a reach. It may be that your school is not currently one where people just look at it and say, oh yeah, I definitely wanna work in that school.
[27:56]
That may be a little bit ambitious to hire in that way and to attract the kind of talent you need into that kind of environment, and it's a long-term project. So I want to challenge you to start today. Don't just plan to post some jobs when hiring opens up, and don't just plan to kind of review the three or four people that get sent to you through your district, whatever your process is. If you're feeling like you're stuck in a process where you don't have control over who you hire, I want to encourage you to get ahead of it this year, and don't be a victim. Don't be a passive recipient of...
[28:30]
Teachers, this is too important for us not to be deliberate and intentional about and to take control of, even if it means we have to negotiate some things with our union or with our district. Hire early, hire well, and hire ambitiously. Don't just think, okay, we've got to find a new ninth grade language arts teacher. Think to yourself, how can we find the best ninth grade language arts teacher in the state? How can we hire that caliber of person who will not only be great for our kids, but will be great for his or her colleagues and who will raise the level of teaching across the board? That's the kind of person that you need to be hiring, especially if you're in a high need school.
[29:10]
So if I can help you with that, please give me a call. You can get on my calendar at justinscalendar.com. You can get into our high performance instructional leadership network program where we talk about teacher growth and evaluation. And we'll be having some new content in the next couple of months on hiring and making sure we're getting the right people on the bus. As Dr. Murphy said, you can learn more about the network at principalscenter.com slash leadership.
[29:35] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
