Instructional Leadership: Creating Practice Out of Theory

[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_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the show, Peter DeWitt. Peter is a leading education consultant and the author of six books, including his latest Instructional Leadership, Creating Practice Out of Theory.

[00:30] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:32] SPEAKER_00:

Peter, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thanks for having me, Justin. Well, I'm excited to talk about this new book. I know we've spoken before, but this new book is squarely on the topic of instructional leadership. And even though education publishing is kind of a big world, instructional leadership is kind of a small world. And I'm very excited to talk about instructional leadership, creating practice out of theory.

[00:54]

What was it that prompted you to write the new book?

[00:57] SPEAKER_01:

It was one of the influences that I chose when I wrote Collaborative Leadership, Six Influences that Matter Most. Instructional leadership was one of those pieces. And then as I began running workshops, it was one of those topics that, because a lot of my work is repeat work, they would say, you know, the instructional leadership piece, could you come back and talk more about that? And that's where I get all of my writing ideas from. It's what sort of gets my thinking going is when somebody's asking about, you know, that's great. We know we're supposed to do it, but What does it actually look like or how do you do it?

[01:27]

So all of those kind of things led into me saying, I really want to focus just on that topic.

[01:33] SPEAKER_00:

So, Peter, you begin the book fairly early on with a chapter on program logic, which is something as a researcher you hear about quite a bit. But as a practitioner, we don't talk a ton about program logic. What is that and why does it matter for instructional leaders?

[01:49] SPEAKER_01:

Well, if you think of that question, we hear a lot about it from researchers, but not necessarily from practitioners. You'll know exactly where I got the question from. So I've been thinking a lot about implementation because, you know, through a series of events, I realized that a lot of school districts do a lot of activities, but they don't always have a huge impact with those activities. So I started thinking about activity rich and impact poor. And so implementation is one of those areas that is really, really important. Michael Follin's talked about it a lot, right, with implementation dip.

[02:20]

So when I was talking to Hattie, John Hattie about it, John was really the one that, you know, we were going back and forth about implementation and he said, what about the program logic model piece? And for me, I mean, I'd seen program logic models in the past, but they've always been really complicated. There have been a ton of different parts to it and I wanted to make it as simple as possible. So for the program logic piece, model that I created for the book and for the work that I do is really based on where you're looking at your needs. It's five steps. You're looking at your needs.

[02:55]

Where is the place you want to make improvement? What does your evidence tell you? The second one would be inputs, which is what are the resources that are necessary to actually help you meet your needs? That might be research-based practices or models of successful practice or even putting down something like time, because I don't think people They know that time can be a challenge, but I don't think they actually are purposeful enough to put it out there. The third column, if you can think of it from columns, is the idea of activities. What are the activities that you actually do every day that are going to help you create that improvement?

[03:32]

And what I notice is that I don't know if it's due to social media, due to different books or whatever, but people tend to think that they're supposed to add another meeting or add something. And I've always been sort of a less is more kind of guy. And I'd rather look at what are you doing presently that you can use as an activity to actually help that improvement? Walkthroughs, flipped faculty meetings, those kind of things. PLCs are something that I'm asked about a lot. Those are a great vehicle to be able to help you with that improvement if you're doing them correctly.

[04:02]

The fourth column is outputs. And that's where I actually talk about making actionable steps. Because I know that from the research around change, we spend a lot of time in a pre-contemplative state of change. So if you think about it from like a diet or getting healthy, we think about, yeah, we're going to go on the diet. We're going to get healthy. But then years go by and we haven't started it.

[04:21]

So outputs are really where you put an actionable step and you actually put a timestamp. And then last but not least is impact. What is the ultimate impact on students and teachers? If it's not going to have an impact on them, then why are you doing it? And that's what program logic models are meant to do. They're meant to have you sit down with your group, your stakeholder group, whether that's your assistant principals that you're working with, or in my case, when I was a principal, I didn't have AP, so it was my stakeholder group of teacher reps and those kind of staff.

[04:51]

And it's about sitting down and going through, for me, the program logic model that I created being five steps to focus on what is the improvement we're looking for? What is that going to look like in action? And what ultimately will that have as an impact on students and teachers and being purposeful about thinking about that? Too often we jump into an initiative. without thinking about all of those steps that go along with it. And then they falter or they create chaos.

[05:18]

Program logic models are meant to prevent that kind of stuff.

[05:22] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Peter, I love the simplicity and the clarity of that model because I think we get the mistaken message in our profession that if we want to do great things for kids, then we need to do complicated things that sound fancy. And we sometimes end up with these flow charts and these diagrams that have a lot of boxes with concepts written in them connected by arrows to lots of other boxes and all the arrows point to everything else. And it becomes a lot to hold in our heads, you know, just for starters, but then it becomes very difficult to boil it down into the specific things that we need to focus our attention on. What do you see happening when it comes to focus? and instructional leadership, because we're pulled in so many different directions. What do instructional leaders need to do to focus on those key priorities?

[06:08] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is where I've had a lot of help from the leaders that I coach, because as an elementary school principal, I didn't have APs, but my teachers, one of the reasons why they chose me as being their principal is that I was coming from the classroom, and we could talk about instructional leadership. So when I started doing coaching or running workshops, I kind of assumed everybody had that same sort of support from the staff that they work with or from their district. And what I soon found out is that that's not actually true. So, you know, I coach middle school and high school principals in a couple of the districts in California one week per month. And they've taught me a lot because they have such complicated situations going on, whether it's poverty or gang violence or something like that, that it was kind of the focus was how do we actually become instructional leaders? So one of the things that I look at is, you know, instructional leadership is always going to be that focus on learning.

[07:03]

You know, many times we talk about adult issues, you know, union, whatever. We don't talk enough about learning. So being able to take those spaces like faculty meetings or PLCs or observations and being able to put a focus on learning, figuring out what questions to ask during that are really what I wanted to hone in on the book. But one of the pieces of pushback that I get is that, you know, instructional leadership is a small focus area. for, um, school leaders. And that's absolutely correct because I don't expect you to be an instructional leader 24 seven.

[07:37]

We can't do it. But if you get that small focus incorrect, then it can have a devastating impact on your school climate. So for me, sometimes it's all right. So you've got the management stuff that you have to do, but maybe we need to start with where do you have an hour during your day? where we can talk about how you approach walkthroughs, things that you're doing already, right? Because I've been on the receiving end, and I've also partnered with people that are doing walkthroughs or learning walks, whatever we want to call them, but they're not necessarily sure what they're looking for.

[08:07]

Or maybe they know what they're looking for, but their teachers have no idea what they're looking for when they come into classrooms. So when I was honing in on instructional leadership and your question about what does it look like, it's those things right there. It's Give me a starting point, whether it's how you approach walkthroughs, your observations. Give me an hour during your day when we can talk about those elements that you're going to be including in your leadership anyway. But on the other side, it might be, let's talk about these topics that you could actually bring up at your faculty meetings, like things like instructional strategies or something as simple as what does student engagement look like? One of the biggest topics that I wrote about in the book was this idea that we have a common language in schools, but we don't have a common understanding.

[08:51]

So I might be your principal, Justin, and you might be one of my teachers. And I say I'm doing walkthroughs on student engagement, and you're like, hey, not a problem at all. I have my students engage in dialogue and I believe in authentic engagement. But on the other side, what you don't know is that I believe in compliant engagement. So I come into your classroom and I expect the kids sitting down and I expect to hear you talking because I pay you to teach. And I've actually had a principal say that to me, that they paid me to teach.

[09:21]

They didn't want to hear the kids talking, which completely baffles my mind still decades later, right? But But just imagine that we have that kind of perspective that you are looking at authentic engagement. I'm looking at compliant engagement. And when I walk in, see the kids up and moving around, I might say to you, OK, I'll come back and I'll come back when you're teaching, which is going to make you very angry. Or I might say, gee, Justin, we have to talk about your classroom management because, you know, the kids are up and moving and that's not what my perception is of student engagement. So program logic models, instructional leadership, a focus on learning is even something as simple as we use the word student engagement all the time.

[10:00]

Can we at least sit down and define what does student engagement actually mean? So those are the kind of elements that go along with instructional leadership that I want people to hone in on.

[10:11] SPEAKER_00:

So, Peter, in Chapter 5, you talk about eight unobserved practices in classrooms that challenge some of the traditional conceptions that we have in our profession of classroom walkthroughs. What are some of those unobserved practices that teachers are engaged in and why do they matter?

[10:27] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's funny because when I wrote that, because that came from a blog that I wrote for Ed Week a couple of years ago. And when I wrote that, some people got very annoyed with me because I think they thought I was picking on them or walkthroughs. And I need people to understand that when I'm writing something like that, it's about me reflecting on how I approach those things too as a school principal and how can we approach those better. So for me, some of the unobserved things that happen in the classroom, one that I really loved over the years of learning about comes from a researcher out of the UK named Rob Coe. And Rob Coe talks about that 70% of the time that kids are in our classrooms, they're involved in some sort of cooperative group, right? But he said 80% of that time, they're actually doing individualized learning.

[11:16]

So we're really good at cooperative seating, not necessarily cooperative learning. And it was great. Like a few weeks ago, I'm on the road a lot. I was in New York City and I had somebody say, is that such a bad thing? And I had to kind of stand back and say, Well, you know, that's a really good question. It's not that I think cooperative seating is a bad thing, just as long as I know that's what I'm going for.

[11:40]

Like when I taught first grade and I taught center-based learning, there were times that kids were not going to be able to do a cooperative group work. They were going to be sitting cooperatively, but doing individual work, just as long as I understood that that was the practice I was going for. I think that that's really important. Um, Another one that I often talk about is this idea of student questioning versus teacher questioning. This comes from the work of Janet Clinton, but John Goodlad from the mid-90s talked about this too. The teachers out-talk students three to one, and less than 1% of class time is spent focusing on open questions.

[12:20]

And then Janet Clinton at the University of Melbourne in Australia actually talks about the fact that on average, teachers ask about 200 questions per day, and students ask two questions per student per week. So one of those unobserved things that often happens in a classroom is that we need to be able to go in And really look to say, what does student questioning look like? Like, are we inspiring questions among students or are we just waiting for them to answer ours? And I did that blog and I focus on walkthroughs a lot because it's probably one of the main things I'm asked to do when I go, when I'm coaching the leaders in California, all of them are saying, can we go to a walkthrough? Which I love because I've been out of the school role, the building principal role. for six years now.

[13:04]

So it gives me the opportunity to go into classrooms. And I love that. Like one thing I didn't add because that blog came out a few years ago, but I did add to the book about walkthroughs is that we often have a walkthrough bias. And I'm talking about me too. Like I'm not pointing fingers at people. When I walk into a first grade classroom, when I'm doing a walkthrough with some of the elementary principals I work with, I taught first grade for seven out of 11 years.

[13:32]

So instantly when I walk into that classroom, I start thinking, wow, this class doesn't look like my class looked when I was teaching. Right. Not that it was the greatest thing in the world, not that I was the greatest first grade teacher, but just because I spent so much time in that role and I have that mindset, it just clicks back. So it's even about understanding that we'll walk into classrooms, especially those content areas that we taught when we were a teacher. And we may have a walkthrough bias because the classroom doesn't look the way that we may have had our classroom look. Or we may walk into a classroom expecting like the Pinterest classroom, you know, all colorful, shiny and pretty.

[14:13]

And when it doesn't look like that, our bias is that, oh, this must not be as good of a classroom as other classrooms. So those are sort of those unobserved things that we have to think about when we're doing walkthroughs. I find, and I think I've picked on walkthroughs so much that people think that I must hate walkthroughs, and I don't. I think they're awesome. Like, I love going into classrooms. I love that principals want to go into classrooms.

[14:37]

But if you're going to go into classrooms, you have a certain responsibility that you have to be able to live up to, and you have to have dialogue with the teacher and students about what those walkthroughs are really going to accomplish.

[14:48] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And I like to think of it like an iceberg, right? That teacher practice has these visible things above the surface where, you know, I can see what you're doing, I can see what the students are doing, I can hear what people are saying, but there are things happening beneath the surface. Like you said, sometimes it's not collaborative work, it's collaborative seating, and we have to kind of look deeper to see what's really going on there. And teachers appreciate that when we're willing to look deeper, right? And not just look at the surface.

[15:23]

In terms of the impact that we have on student learning, I think you and I have probably read a lot of the same research around principal impact on student learning, the Leithwood and Lewis Wallace Foundation research. Why is it that teacher collective efficacy is so much of how we have an impact on student learning?

[15:41] SPEAKER_01:

So there's a lot of great research out there. Goddard, Hoyne, Hoy, you know, Shannon, Moran, and Barr out of the College of William and Mary. Those are probably my favorite pieces to look at from a collective teacher efficacy standpoint. And what it is, is that and it sounds so easy. Let's put teachers together, let them co-construct a goal and then start to figure out. Let's brainstorm, you know, instructional strategies or whatever that would work in the classroom.

[16:05]

But what I find fascinating about collective teacher efficacy is that it's really so much more than that. It's yes, it's about getting teachers together. But we know that adults can be tricky to work with. And you have these preconceived notions. I was just talking about biases. Those are things that go off.

[16:22]

As far as even with our students are concerned, right? There are teachers that have a negative or a deficit mindset when it comes to ELL populations or any marginalized populations. We look at poverty in multiple ways. So the reason why collective teacher efficacy is so powerful is because when that group of teachers come together, yes, they understand that maybe poverty has an impact or maybe the background of the kid or yeah, maybe the language can be a barrier. But despite that, we can come together and think about strategies we can use with them, and we can collect evidence to understand the impact on those. Collective teacher efficacy, to me, is so powerful, not only because of the fact that the research shows it has a positive impact on student learning, But collective teacher efficacy is powerful because it raises the confidence of everybody in that group, right?

[17:13]

It creates a positive school climate because teachers are given the agency to come together and have this co-constructed goal and try out these strategies, but understand that maybe it's not going to work the first time around. The strategy is not going to work, but that's okay because we're going to come back together and say, gee, that didn't work for me. Did it work for you? And why did it work for you and not for me? And those conversations can be really powerful. And it means that we have to trust everybody around our group, which doesn't often happen.

[17:45]

It means that we have to understand what it's like to be a part of a collective group. This is something Hattie has looked at when it comes to student collective efficacy. It's do we understand actually how to be a part of the collective group? And what makes this part so hard but so rewarding is that when we go into teaching, we often go into teaching because we love students or we love content or a little bit of both. We don't go into teaching to work with other adults. So when we actually get put in this place where we're going to work as a collective and really be raw with each other and be trusting and really take the evidence and to say where is that goal that we should start with and come up with strategies and try those out.

[18:25]

That can be a very powerful process, but it also means that just like in the program logic model, we have to also talk about what kind of impact are we looking for this to have on our students because that's key to collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is different from collaboration because collaboration, we can get together and talk and have a really great conversation, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to have an impact on student learning necessarily. Collective teacher efficacy always has an impact on student learning because we go through all those things that I already mentioned. And we already talked about what is the impact we want to have. We're taking that purposeful way of looking at it. And therefore, that's what we're looking for when we're collecting the evidence as well.

[19:07]

And we're open to the fact that maybe some of our strategies aren't going to have an impact anymore. But we want to come back and figure out, let's come back with a different strategy then that will have an impact, as opposed to just hoping for the best.

[19:19] SPEAKER_00:

Reminds me of the old saying, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right, right? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

[19:26] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and that trust piece is really interesting because in the instructional leadership book, one of the things that I started to gravitate to was collective leader efficacy. Because I worked with so many teams or there have been moments where I've just worked with assistant principals at a conference or at a workshop. And then when I talked to them about their barriers and their challenges, one of their biggest barriers is their principal. And I was like, oh, I never even thought about that because I wasn't an assistant principal and I didn't have an assistant principal. So that was so out of my realm of understanding that when they started to tell me then that came up in my surveys, I was looking at that going, how can that happen? And then I started thinking, of course that can happen.

[20:06]

So collective leader efficacy is sort of the next step where collective teacher efficacy is concerned because it's How does a principal and their assistant principal, that team, how does that function? And how does that team have an impact on the school climate and student learning? So the research around any of the collective efficacy, and that's, you know, collective leader efficacy, Leithwood has been all over that. That to me is just like fascinating research because I love the idea of collaboration. And my thing is, how can I be a part of helping collaboration become collective efficacy so it does have that impact?

[20:41] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about that situation. If we have, especially I'm thinking of an assistant principal who is committed to being an instructional leader, committed to getting into classrooms and really building teachers' efficacy, what if the principal is the problem. What if the principal is not on board with instructional leadership stays out of classrooms, you know, as kind of a top down old school kind of leader, what can assistant principals do to start to change things?

[21:06] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I really had to think about that because the problem with that is that it's not just about that assistant principal in that time period. It's about what happens to that assistant principal after they go and they have their own building. Because if we don't prepare assistant principals to be instructional leaders, then they're going to be ill-prepared when they become building leaders. And I'm very thankful for a strong group of assistant principals in Oklahoma that actually led me to looking at this. What they really have to do is they're often responsible for different grade levels. If you're talking to high school, you might have, like, I'm an assistant principal, but I'm in charge of freshmen or I'm in charge of sophomores.

[21:44]

That's where you build that grassroots efforts to say, How can you work? Sure, you're not seeing it modeled from your principal, but it doesn't mean that you can't do it in your role, meaning how can you carve out some of your time where you can go into the classrooms of the teachers you are responsible for, whether that be walkthroughs or learning walks. The other way to look at that is just looking at the idea that if you've got a principal that is not doing any of that stuff and they're focusing on the management side, It might also be possible that the principal likes that the assistant principal is doing some of that because the assistant principal can actually maybe give information to the principal. I think everybody has a starting point. I always look for my entry point. So to your question, it's the idea of who am I directly responsible for?

[22:33]

And can I build that grassroots effort there by working with one, two or three teachers? It doesn't have to be the whole entire school. It's about where can you start? So you can start to practice what that instructional leadership looks like. You can get awareness of what's going on in classrooms. You can start to focus on just your questions.

[22:52]

Like when you go into classrooms, are you actually just watching the teacher or are you sitting down with students and asking them what they're learning? I often give a bank of questions that people can ask during observations or walkthroughs or even informals. Those are the kind of things that assistant principals can do, and they don't necessarily need the permission of the principal. The principal's not there keeping an eye on all of their time. They can't possibly. I don't think they have the time to be able to do that.

[23:22]

So in those moments of freedom, for lack of a better way of saying it, how often are you going into classrooms, even if it's one, two or three classrooms? And what kind of questions are you having in there? And how can you shift the conversations from an adult perspective to more of a what are the kids learning perspective.

[23:40] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Instructional Leadership, Creating Practice Out of Theory. Peter, if people want to learn more about your work, your other books, or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[23:51] SPEAKER_01:

They can just Google my name and my website will come up. It's just PeterMDeWitt.com. All right. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

[23:59] SPEAKER_00:

Justin, thank you very much for the time.

[24:01] Announcer:

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