[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 Kenneth Baum, an award-winning former principal and superintendent. Ken is an expert in school design, strategic planning, and leadership. His experience leading in both the district and charter settings has given him a deep understanding of today's leadership challenge. And we're here today to talk about his new book, The Artisan Teaching Model for Instructional Leadership, Working Together to Transform Your School.
[00:44] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:46] SPEAKER_00:
Ken, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:48] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
[00:49] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let's jump right into it. What is the Artisan Teaching Model for Instructional Leadership?
[00:53] SPEAKER_02:
So, the idea is that our school model, it's really a model that was born out of the school that my co-author, David, and I founded in 2004. And the central idea is that as we built that school, we were trying to, as most principals do, have teachers accelerate their growth And we realized that traditional PD, at least our take on it, wasn't working very well. We talked to other colleagues. We really started thinking deeply around traditional PD. And if we look at that for a second, a typical teacher who wants to get better might, in the course of a couple of weeks, encounter six, seven different adults, leaders, who are attempting to make them better. They might sit in on, if they're a math teacher, a math professional development meeting.
[01:40]
They might sitting on a vertical team meeting. They might go to an after-school PD on questioning techniques. They might meet with a disciplined person who helps them with their most difficult kids. And from a teacher's perspective, that's a little rough in that, how do you keep all that straight? How do you prepare for six meetings? How do you follow up on six meetings with six different people telling you different things you can be doing?
[02:06]
And perhaps also importantly, you know, any one of those specialists might not have the full picture. If you're struggling with a class, for example, is the issue going to be a pedagogical one? Maybe you aimed your lesson too high, aimed too low, or is it really a question of classroom management techniques? And there was something you're not doing in that realm. And so when you have it all divided, that makes it very hard for six individual leaders or developers to develop one person. But the other thing also is that Even if you could keep it all straight and even if all these different people did have the context to help you, there seems to be no time for what we would argue is the most important work.
[02:50]
And if you ask a teacher who's not yet proficient at their job what their dominant need is, what they're worried about, what they think about when they go home, it's about tomorrow's lesson, the next day's lesson, less than two or three days out from now. They don't know how to do it. They don't quite understand the point. They don't really have the activity set. And they're not fully prepared to do that. And they want help creating lessons that engage kids and get kids thinking in higher order ways.
[03:18]
So the dominant need of the adult traditionally in a school with teachers who are not yet very good is they need help with their lesson plans. And with all these other meetings during the course of a week, none of that actually is getting at the actual daily work that Some would argue, and we do, matters most creating high power lessons that drive student achievement and then helping teachers deliver those and debrief those to make them even better. So this traditional PD model is one where a teacher meets a lot of different people and we in our school and the book Artists in Teaching captures that and pretty much replaces all of that professional development. So a teacher now doesn't go to a vertical meeting for a mathematics doesn't go to an after-school general workshop on questioning techniques, but works in a small team, an artisan team, if you will, with two or three colleagues, one of whom is already an expert, and they meet to do what arguably is the most important work, which is designing and refining upcoming lessons.
[04:28]
And so what is different about this model is that there really is, by and large, one meeting that goes on during the course of a teacher's week and it's in this small group with precisely the teachers who teach the exact same subject to similar groups of kids. So that all the adults present at that meeting have the exact same desire, which is to produce a tremendously good lesson tomorrow. They all want to talk about the exact same lesson and they're in it together. So that in a nutshell is The artisan modeling, the piece I could add on to it also is not just you're with your colleagues or a small collection of colleagues who also teach exactly what you do to the same group of kids, but you're also led by someone who knows that grade level masterfully.
[05:21]
And that's a key part because as the title of the book indicates, This is an artist and apprentice model.
[05:29] SPEAKER_00:
Well, and I'm hearing embedded in that terminology around artisan and apprentice, the idea of a career ladder, that teaching is not necessarily just a flat profession where on day one, you're a teacher and on the day you retire, you're a teacher, but I'm hearing that there's a little bit more to it along the way. Could you talk about how that showed up in your school, how that shows up in the model that you're talking about in the book?
[05:53] SPEAKER_02:
So the idea of, the artisan teaching teams is that you are simultaneously developing teachers to teach and giving them the training to become leaders. And I think one of the things in our profession, education, which is different than other professions, is that often in schools you can be a teacher and do well and have some nice metrics and you get some nice recognition and you're allowed to develop as a teacher and then somewhere in the five-year mark or seven-year mark or sometimes in the three-year mark someone says, well, you ought to think about leadership. And that's the first time many teachers think about leadership and probably well past the point where they've already got very strong opinions about what school leadership ought to be. And so this model not just has in name teacher leaders with responsibility of leading groups of colleagues, but at the meetings themselves, participants are going through
[06:52]
Very similar exercises where actually they're going through exercises that are leadership developmental in nature. They're not just writing curriculum, but the team meeting helps leaders chase down adult mindset and helps teachers learn the basics of school leadership and instructional leadership by the nature of the very, very small group. and the intensity of the problems that were explored.
[07:19] SPEAKER_00:
Right. So I'm hearing a couple of ideas there. One, that instructional leadership is not something that's just for administrators, that, that teacher leadership is instructional leadership and that, uh, team leaders that, uh, master teachers who are kind of at the top of their profession within their area or their grade level are in a very real sense, instructional leaders, um, and that there is a kind of distributed nature to that that they are conducting activities that that get them better that get other people better at those you know those kind of leadership skills that maybe traditionally were reserved for administrators or coaches or people in more more formalized roles i think that's right and i think it kind of also brings up you know the big buzzword in our field is is collaboration and it seems to be that um
[08:07] SPEAKER_02:
Certainly in our field, almost any time two people get together to discuss something, it gets a collaborative title. And I think the distinction here when you are developing teachers and also having artists and teams, it's a really drive adult development and make adults better at their craft. At the heart there is that people just don't need to meet. They need to meet together on a work product and try and make that work product superb. And it's that kind of setup that characterizes apprentice artisanship generally in any field that the people who meet get together to make something better, not to talk about what they might do if they then go home and write their lesson plans, what they might do if they learn this principle and then are able to apply it. They actually work on that together and there's something in that creative process where artisan and apprentice
[09:05]
in creation, trying to make something superb where a lot of adult learning happens.
[09:12] SPEAKER_00:
I love that focus on the product or the artifact that's being produced, because I can't think of any field that we would call artisan work that doesn't have some sort of object that's created. So I think of a sculptor or someone who's making pottery, you know, there's always an object there. And are you saying that the object here is, you know, lesson plans, you know, plans for what's going to happen instructionally?
[09:33] SPEAKER_02:
Phenomenally, the object here is lesson plans. When the artisan and the apprentice or the artisan and two or three apprentices get together, the goal is to create and or refine a lesson plan from wherever it's at to the best it can be. But the ultimate product there are the teachers and their thinking, the choices that go into making high quality lessons, the choices, the reflection on what happened when they made those choices, when the group gets back together. and discusses the impact on students. And this is true of any profession, where there's an artistry flavor to it, is that there is this work, you don't collaborate, you collaborate on something, and it's collaborating on that work, and through that, you are not just creating good work, you're creating people who can do that work, and you're changing the way people think about their profession, how they think about their subject, and ultimately how they think about themselves as teachers.
[10:32]
the choices they make, and they're much more conscious and aware of the intentionality of the choices they make when they plan and execute anything.
[10:42] SPEAKER_00:
I love that. I was definitely not expecting you to say that the people are the product, but I love the way you kind of came full circle with that because I think when we engage deeply around practice, it does get to identity. It gets into professional identity and who we are and the kinds of decisions we make And I wanted to kind of connect that decision-making aspect to our definition at the Principal Center of Instructional Leadership Capacity. It is our mission to build capacity for instructional leadership, and we define that as an organization's kind of collective ability to make and implement decisions. And what I'm hearing in your definition there of Artisan Teaching is that the way we make those decisions, the way we get better at making those decisions has a ton to do with instructional leadership, has a ton to do with professional growth.
[11:34] SPEAKER_02:
Oh, absolutely. I agree with that wholeheartedly. I think what you're doing is teaching people contextually. And the only way you can to make rock solid, better decisions increasingly as they refine their craft. And, you know, it's in working on the The real product that they have to deliver tomorrow, the next day, that they just delivered, that they're most invested in. You know, you can get typically at a big after school PD, you might have a math teacher sit down with a science teacher and maybe an English teacher in grade seven.
[12:10]
And they talk about, let's say, improved questioning. But, you know, it's often the case that when a teacher is confronted that they're questioning needs improvement, and that confronting can happen in an observation, it can happen informally. The teacher knows that many times, and the issue is not what is a good question, let's say, or the characteristics of a good question, but they simply do not know how to create them in the courses that they're teaching. And that is a skill that needs to be taught by actually creating those questions, co-creating those questions, alongside someone who knows that material and knows how to ask questions masterfully. And so the idea that at these average school PDs, for example, you might learn about questioning, but when it really comes down to it, you still have to go home alone and translate that to your work.
[13:06]
And how do you actually, staring at a piece of content, an activity, how do you come up with those questions? Not what some questions might be, But it's in that process. Where do you look? How do you start thinking about what higher questions should be? And that is best done on the product. And if the analogy goes to creating a piece of art, It goes to appreciation of art versus creation of art, and there's a lot to be gotten with co-creation.
[13:35] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely, and I think one of the key elements there in what you're talking about is that it is joint work. As I think back to Wenger's Communities of Practice work, the idea that we're engaged in a joint enterprise together. We're not just people who are working in parallel boxes on parallel projects. you know, the collaboration really comes alive and really becomes more than the sum of its parts when people are working on something in common. And I think that's often what's missing from collaboration is we say, okay, collaborate, but really people are doing totally separate work. You know, they're not actually, there's no common product because everybody is working in parallel.
[14:15]
And I think the vision you're describing is much more of a common kind of work product or common practice that they're working toward.
[14:23] SPEAKER_02:
That's right. And if you look at these artisan teaching groups, those present are only those who teach the exact same lesson plans the next day. And anybody else in on that meeting is going to have, rightly so, their own particular agenda about what is important to them. But what is interesting about, I think what is powerful about these meetings is it collects together folks with the exact same dominant need. They are all, in some degree, needing and wanting improvement in what they're about to teach and are wondering about why what they taught wasn't even done better. And so by collecting the precise group of people who have the same dominant adult need, you're able to accelerate
[15:15]
adult growth at rates much faster
[15:19] SPEAKER_00:
than otherwise. Well, let's talk about some more of kind of what needs to happen structurally for this vision of artisan teaching to become a reality. Because I think, you know, it sounds like we're not terribly far from, you know, from the conditions that we need in most schools. You know, most schools have people who teach the same things. They have the opportunity to collaborate. But we're also doing a bunch of other stuff that might kind of crowd that out.
[15:44]
What are some things that... you think we need to think about as school administrators in terms of stopping doing or expectations that we need to modify to get from where we are currently to the vision that you describe in the book?
[15:58] SPEAKER_02:
Right. And the vision of art teaching this book is revenue neutral, and it's also time neutral. And if you look from a school leader's perspective, if you look at the roster of non-classroom teaching folks, you might have APs not teaching a class, certainly not teaching a full load, You'll have the principals not teaching a full load. You'll have content specialists that hold after school or during the day meetings. You'll have PD specialists. You'll have deans, all of these different meetings that are happening.
[16:31]
And what artisan teaching does is essentially aggregate almost all of that time. I'm not saying we never get a full faculty meeting together. It's important to have community and to have some commonality. But by and large, The seven meetings you might have in the course of a week, which could be seven hours, the vertical planning meeting where the sixth grade math teacher meets with the 10th grade math teacher, or the kid talk meeting, or the meeting about questioning. If you take all of those meetings, they're all being led by somebody, and essentially artisan teaching eliminates those and puts into place these meetings, which instead of being one hour in duration every week or every other week, are several hours in duration every week and every other week. So from that perspective, you know, there's, you gain this time by eliminating these sometimes sacrosanct structures that are assumed to drive adult development significantly, but we believe do not.
[17:33]
The other thing is that in many schools, you know, there are many teachers that are teaching the same subject. Um, and where, and so I think those schools are ready, almost ready to do an artist teacher, but if they're able to give up this idea that you have to have a vertical team meeting, you have to have a horizontal team, you have to have an afterschool PD, you have to have a separate coaching session, um, where you have to have a special, um, you know, ELL or special ed sessions that happen regularly. Um, if one is willing to give up that belief that that's the only model to have then there is substantial time that can be repurposed for artisan teaching.
[18:12] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I wonder if we could situate artisan teaching as you're describing it in relation to two things that may be familiar to a lot of listeners. And one is Japanese lesson study, which goes into quite a bit of depth on a particular lesson and the planning that goes into that and then the debrief afterward. And then also professional learning communities, you know, with the, the four PLC questions, what do we want students to learn and so on? What elements do you have in common with, with those two models and where, where does the artisan teaching model differ?
[18:41] SPEAKER_02:
Yup. For first the PLC question, um, I think it's a great question. Uh, and it's probably the biggest misconception about our model is that this is, uh, some new agenda for a PLC or is in some way, um, a PLC in substance. And honestly, nothing could be more further from the truth than that. PLC will be an additive thing that happens during the course of a teacher's week. They still will meet intensely with vertical teams, horizontal teams, deans, all these different leaders coming in.
[19:13]
And there might be a PLC where once a week for an hour or so, or maybe once every two weeks, or maybe even more than that, folks might get together in a professional learning community And this is not that first of all, it's, it's much larger than meets more frequently in that, um, because they're not, you know, when you have an artist and teacher team meeting, you're not having all those other meetings. And the other thing that distinguished it from a PLC is traditionally PLCs will, uh, have a presenter and, and, and colleagues that, um, offer advice around things. Teachers might think about further to then go off and produce other work. But this model is not putting off the work for the teacher to do at home, and it's not putting off the work for the teacher to do during the day. It is actually doing the daily, for lack of a better term, the defining work of the profession.
[20:10]
Not the stuff that kind of the grace notes at the end, but the defining work of the profession. What do we do to get better? What is the hallmark of excellent teaching? It's superb lesson plans that are executed increasingly much better. So a traditional PLC is detached. Typically the attendees are not teaching the same course and subject and there is no creation or intense refinement of a work product.
[20:41]
There's something else going on there. And so I think in flavor, in time duration, in And what the goal of the meeting is, it's very different from a PLC. And from a teacher's perspective, often, you know, they go to all these meetings and then the next they look at their daily schedule and we can say, oh, I got a PLC this week. And it's yet another thing that creates potentially more work for them to have to do by themselves. Typically, a PLC, if using maybe a tuning protocol or something, looking at student work and generates a whole bunch of takeaways for a teacher, when that PLC is over, or even just a sequence of three or four on the same teacher, and that person getting developed goes to those PLCs weekly, and what's happening is there's extra work that's being created for people to follow up on, but it's not the work that matters most, which is what will help the teacher get much better at their craft.
[21:48]
The other thing is that folks sometimes have a misconception that this is a form of Japanese lesson study. And again, there is certainly similarities. The depth and intensity of interrogating lessons until they're really well known by all the folks there is certainly in common. And yet there's something else that's happening at these meetings. It's not just production of lesson and here's where i think it differs dramatically let me take you into an artisan teaching meeting i think it might be helpful so at an artisan teaching meeting you might have a newer teacher maybe even a seasoned teacher complain or be frustrated voice concern that some of her kids for example might not be able to learn there might be some adult mindset issue there
[22:40]
with the teachers, you know, kind of dividing the class and the kids who can and kids who can't. I think, you know, principals and teachers have all dealt with folks with that kind of mindset, very difficult. And right there, you're dealing with something other than lesson creation. For this adult to get better, someone needs to reach this adult and dispel this adult, this teacher, of that misconception. You can't walk into, you ought not to, if you're gonna be successful and a great teacher, you can't walk into a classroom already having your mind made up on these seven kids. Well, they're not serious about their work, can't teach them.
[23:16]
And so what an artisan teaching meeting is designed to do is to catch that, is to catch that mindset and do some things about it. One of the vignettes we talk about, David and I in our book that we wrote about in artisan teaching is a meeting that we know of in our school where that very thing happened. A teacher said, well, you know, these kids can't learn or some variation of that. And right then and there, the meeting stopped and the teacher leader, the artisan leader of the meeting, got everyone up, all four people, and they went and walked around the school and found these children in other classes, perfectly well behaved, on task, and engaged in higher order thinking. And that kind of attention to not just the product, right, the product of the lesson plan, but the mindset of the teacher
[24:11]
allows for a much more robust development of teachers because these issues conflate, they confuse, it's very hard. You can't catch it all with simply a brilliantly designed lesson. So that's an aspect where it differs greatly. The other aspect I think on Japanese listeners where it differs is the actual problem solving of lessons. If you have three people that co-design a lesson and they'll let you go, that's a pretty good lesson. We all agree that went really well.
[24:44]
The next day it executes and it doesn't go well. Kids are off task, very little evidence of higher thinking, kids not engaged, whatever your metrics and qualifiers are. The question then becomes, how do you problem solve that? And the folks, and it's certainly the leader in that room needs to be trained not just in great lesson plan writing, but understanding the deep aspects of youth development, needs to understand exactly what's happening in those classroom, need to know how those kids generally behave, needs to understand the dynamics and the forces that go into a successful experience where a teacher is trying to teach several kids, right? A classic experience. at this level, it becomes not just producing the great lesson plan, but dealing with and developing the full adult.
[25:42]
And that means the teacher needs to understand, yeah, the content thinking, the pedagogical choices, but also critically, aspects of youth development. Are they coming off believable to kids? Or are they doing things that stand outside of curriculum in a sense? Like, Are you able to set up structures and routines that contextually for your lesson will not only get students behaved correctly to do this lesson, but will help pedagogical outcomes of that class. And probably the crowning piece there is that there is great intentionality of the leader of that small group of teachers. What is the mindset of that teacher happening?
[26:27]
So in the course of a traditional Japanese lesson study, you might produce some terrific people who are terrific at lesson planning. When artisan teaching touches enough people, what you're producing is not just those lessons and people who can do that, but people who are already leading. They're actually already doing it in their small groups. So when it comes time to have discussions around, well, we need another leader of this grade, what That's happened almost from day one because the adult mindset, all the forces that go along with shaping someone's view on leadership and vision teaching have been encountered, encountered contextually. and have grown that adult in other dimensions than ability to write lessons.
[27:19] SPEAKER_00:
I love it. It's the idea there that ultimately professional development is not just about the technique, not just about the practice, but about the person behind it. Indeed.
[27:30] SPEAKER_02:
And I think we're always going to be playing catch up. Every principal out there who's ever led a school for a period of time knows that it's kind of folly to try and draft already successful leaders from another school into their building. And it's this ongoing, you know, kind of lament, where are the teachers? We need leaders. We need leaders. We need leaders.
[27:50]
And one of the things I think we need to do as a field is examine why that is so, because it doesn't happen that way in law firms. It doesn't happen that way in medical residencies and in hospitals. And what is happening in other, almost all other professions, is that there isn't this complete divide between you as a worker or a non-leader and then all of a sudden you go to principal school and now you're going to come out all ready to lead. What is the, after five years of being led, you already have either, you either been intentionally developed to have a leadership disposition or you haven't. It doesn't mean that this is the only way to become a leader. I'm not saying that I became a leader.
[28:37]
I was not a product of this. We, We came to this in creating our school. But it seems like if we're going to solve the leadership crisis, dearth, whatever you want to put it, in our field, we can't wait until people already have strong identities about how people should be developed before we start developing them. It's got to happen way early on. The first time a teacher starts to externalize and say, oh, kids can't do it, oh, it's too much work, whatever the situation is. And some of it's legit, right?
[29:13]
It's an incredibly hard job, especially dealing with populations that, you know, artisan teaching has grown out of the school in the South Bronx, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, under-resourced. Kids are coming in generally way below where we'd like them to come in. So it's incredibly hard work, even under the best of circumstances. And so there is, with such an incredibly hard job where there's daily a thousand choices we can make as teachers, each of which might not be right, there is an incredible urge to externalize in our profession. And the question is, when a teacher starts to externalize and starts to go, well, it's not in my control to fix, who's there to notice it and hear it?
[30:01] SPEAKER_00:
and develop it. So the book is The Artisan Teaching Model for Instructional Leadership, Working Together to Transform Your School. And Ken, if people want to find you online, where is the best place for them to connect with you? It would be at artisanteaching.org. Well, Ken, again, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[30:21]
Justin, thank you so much.
[30:23] SPEAKER_01:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[30:27] SPEAKER_00:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Ken Baum about artisan teaching? One thing that really stands out to me is the importance of seeing teachers as instructional leaders. I think there's been a conflation, and I've probably contributed to this misconception myself, but a conflation of the idea that an instructional leader is the same thing as an administrator. And I think what we really need to do, the shift we need to make, is to respect the fact that teachers are instructional leaders and not just administrators being in that role. And I think that gets back to our definition of instructional leadership, which is the practice of making and implementing decisions. And I include in that definition both instructional decisions and operational decisions.
[31:17]
So even if you are... in an administrative role where you're not making a ton of instructional decisions, where teachers are making most of those, or you have instructional facilitators or instructional coaches and you're more firmly on the operations side, that is deeply linked to the work of teaching through the support role that it provides. But if we zoom in on the instructional side, There's no denying that teachers are instructional leaders. And because they're closest to the work, because this is the work that they're doing every day, they're producing those work products of not only lesson plans, but of understanding what their students need from them and who their students need them to be.
[31:54]
That ongoing work has so much promise and so much potential. So I want to encourage you as you make decisions about what structures to create, what structures to dismantle in your school in order to have the system in place that you need to work effectively together on behalf of students. I want to encourage you to take seriously Ken's charge in his book, The Artisan Teaching Model for Instructional Leadership, and think about how you can build the capacity of your staff to work together, to make decisions on behalf of students, and to make yourselves better able to meet those needs.
[32:27] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
