Never Underestimate Your Teachers: Instructional Leadership for Excellence in Every Classroom

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Robin Jackson. Robin Jackson, PhD, is the founder of MindSteps and is the host of School Leadership Reimagined. the podcast for school administrators, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders. Dr. Jackson is the award-winning author of 10 books, including the best-selling Instructional Leader's Guide to Strategic Conversations with Teachers and the ASCD member book, Never Underestimate Your Teachers, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

Robin, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:50] SPEAKER_02:

I am thrilled to be here.

[00:52] SPEAKER_01:

Well, we have recently met in person and now are meeting virtually to talk about a topic that is near and dear to both of us, and that is instructional leadership, really the subtitle of your book, Instructional Leadership for Excellence in Every Classroom. And I wonder if you could take us back to the moment when you decided to write this particular book, and I know you've written many, but what was it that you saw happening in our profession or what need did you see in our profession that sparked you to write Never Underestimate Your Teachers?

[01:21] SPEAKER_02:

So when I first started my company MindSteps, I was working exclusively with teachers. I was showing teachers how to plan more rigorous lessons and I was showing teachers how to motivate reluctant learners. And I was really working on giving teachers strategies around equity and access. So we talk a lot about how we need equity and access. But then once we start building that in, once we start helping kids have access to more rigorous opportunities, we don't have strategies to kind of support these kids. And so that was really where I started working.

[01:50]

And then I would go into a school. I would do an amazing workshop. The teachers would get really excited about planning rigorous lessons or differentiating their instruction or motivating the reluctant learners or putting support strategies in place. And then when I checked back on those teachers a few weeks later, they weren't doing the work. And I'd ask them why. And they said, well, I started, but then my administrator would come into my classroom and he would want me to do things differently or he'd question it.

[02:14]

And so I started realizing that if we were going to have this kind of change in teaching, because I really believe that every kid deserves a master teacher in front And if we're going to have that master teacher standing in front of them, then we have to lead differently. We have to have administrators who know how to lead master teachers. And a lot of administrators don't know how to build and grow and continually lead master teachers. I said, I need to write a book for them so that when we're supporting teachers and when we're building this mastery in teachers, the administrators know what to do with that. They know how to nurture that. And if they're seeing a teacher who isn't masterful yet, they're not writing that teacher off.

[02:52]

They're not just trying to evaluate that teacher out, letting them know that there is something that you can do to help every teacher become a master teacher.

[03:00] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I love that vision because I think, frankly, so many of the books about how administrators can help improve teaching are so squarely focused on the needs of new teachers and on the needs of struggling teachers that we as a profession don't pay enough attention to that question of how can we make sure that every teacher is a master teacher and how do we lead the master teachers that we have? I was talking with a principal earlier today who was looking for some of those strategies to use with his teachers, those kind of strategies you read about in books that are focused on helping new teachers go from kind of struggling or bad to good. And I said, it sounds like you have a lot of people who are veteran teachers who are not in that kind of first five years where they're struggling with the basics. And I'm honestly not sure that they need tips on how to get class to pay attention to them you know or a signal to get everybody's attention and i think as administrators often we go to where the problems are right we gravitate to problems and we solve those problems so inevitably we spend an inordinate amount of time focused on dealing with struggling teachers but ultimately we don't want them just to not be struggling teachers we want them to be great teachers so i love that you've kind of framed this around leading master teachers

[04:14] SPEAKER_02:

I just wanted to say this because there's another big mistake that I see a lot of administrators making, and that is that they only focus on developing a teacher's skill. You know, everything that we've been taught about leadership is I need to give a teacher another strategy, or if a teacher's struggling, I need to get into that teacher's classroom and model for that teacher what good teaching should look like, and hopefully they'll get it by osmosis, or I need to give them another book or another training. And all of those are really around skill, but we rarely ever focus have strategies or techniques to help a teacher with their will. And if you only focus on skill and you never focus on will, you're never going to get somebody to be a masterful teacher. And I think that's what a lot of our teacher evaluation instruments have turned into, which is trying to coerce skill into teachers or punish teachers for a lack of skill or train them into wanting to serve kids the way that we want them to serve kids.

[05:07]

But we never, ever focus on the will piece. And so in addition to just grabbing strategies and saying, I'll just grab these random strategies and throw these at teachers and require all of them to do it. And maybe that'll help them become better. We also don't nurture the teacher's willingness. It's already in there. We don't have to put will inside of a teacher, but we do have to tap into that.

[05:26]

And we rarely do that.

[05:27] SPEAKER_01:

What do you mean by will? Like will to improve or a will to keep improving?

[05:32] SPEAKER_02:

It's more about their motivation, not just the will to improve, but also the will to put in the work. You know, becoming a master teacher is not something that's going to happen overnight. And the process to becoming a master teacher may not be a smooth, straight line for everybody. And teachers need to be willing to put in that work regularly. and to go through what it takes to become a master teacher, they also need to be willing to accept and act on feedback. And I see a lot of principals who don't know how to give feedback in a way that a teacher will accept it.

[06:04]

So your feedback may be right on point. It may be perfect. You may see this is the issue that's happening in your classroom, and this is what needs to be fixed. But how you say that to a teacher makes all the difference between whether a teacher will receive that feedback and act on it or whether a teacher will resent that feedback and refuse to act on it, not because they don't want to get better, but because you've demoralized them or because you've treated them in a way that saps their motivation. And I don't think we think about that enough.

[06:32] SPEAKER_01:

So thinking about that potential that's always there for our feedback and what we think of as instructional leadership to result in resistance, what are some ways that we can approach feedback? If we see someone has an opportunity to improve or maybe they have an urgent need to improve and we don't want to trigger that resistance, what are some of your recommendations as you work with administrators?

[06:53] SPEAKER_02:

So the first thing is, and this is the title of the book, to never underestimate your teachers. And I find that a lot of administrators who have been trying so hard to move their schools and they sit down with some teachers and they've already written them off. They've already said this teacher is never going to be a master teacher. And when I go places and I say any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice. People want to put modifiers on it. Most teachers, maybe if they really want to, but you know, they don't really believe that.

[07:22]

And so I think a lot of it comes down to the disposition. I talk a lot about judgment and we all do it. We all judge and it's hard not to, especially when you walk into a classroom where you see a teacher who is not trying to get better in our estimation or who hasn't been acting on the feedback or taking advantage of the supports that we've given them. It's easy to judge them. So I think the first step is we've got to sit down with somebody and we have to give them feedback without judgment. And it's really hard to do.

[07:48]

I mean, there's a simple way to get out of judgment. And that is to, when you find yourself judging, then you go immediately into curiosity. And the way you do that is like, why wouldn't you want to help kids too? Why wouldn't you want to help kids? What's going on? That changes everything.

[08:04]

And people pick up on that attitude and they're more likely to be influenced and receptive to your feedback when you do that. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that you may trigger resistance. And the first thing that we do when we trigger resistance often is we try to rescue the teacher or we blame the teacher. So judgment, you know, we blame them. But the other thing we do is we see resistance or we see tears and we try to rush in and say, oh, no, no.

[08:27]

You know, I mean, you're doing pretty well or you back off as soon as you see resistance. And that's because we believe that people should never be uncomfortable when, in fact, the only way that you grow is you have to go through a little discomfort. So you have to be able to give your feedback in a way that doesn't rescue people from the discomfort, but makes them safe to be uncomfortable in your presence. And that's a hard thing to do. When other people are uncomfortable, we're uncomfortable too. So we rush in and rescue and you can't do that.

[08:54]

But you do have to make it safe for someone to be uncomfortable. You can't just say, well, you know, there's my feedback, live with it. You have to say, I understand that this is tough for you. And it is, but I believe that you can act on this feedback and improve from it. So let's figure out how to do it. And that's a very different conversation than here's my feedback.

[09:11]

And if you don't like it tough, get another job. The third thing is that we have to pay attention to the person in front of us. A lot of us have a feedback system or feedback dance that we perform no matter who's in the room in front of us. We expect teachers to differentiate their instruction, but we don't think that we need to differentiate our feedback. If I have a struggling teacher and I give a struggling teacher a laundry list of things that need to be fixed, all of those things may be true, but is that teacher really in a position to fix all of those? Versus...

[09:42]

If I sit down with a teacher, I look at all the things that need to be fixed and I spend some time thinking about that and come up with the one thing that that teacher needs to do right now that'll give them the biggest leverage and the biggest traction in their growth towards mastery. If I could figure that out and give that to the teacher and let's say, let's work on this first. I solve a multitude of problems. I create momentum and I give the teacher feedback they can actually act on. And so a lot of times people give you resistance because there's no way that I'm going to be able to fix all of those things. So we have to make sure that we're giving people the root cause of their practice.

[10:14]

I have this saying. I feel like you should give people the truth about their practice. And my definition of the truth is something with which you cannot argue. And a lot of us give people facts about their practice. And people can resist facts. But when you give people the truth about their practice, you can't argue with the truth.

[10:31]

And you can overcome a lot of resistance by just simply giving people the truth. Now, that takes work on our part. We can't just go through with a checklist and our instrument and say, well, you need more student engagement. I mean, what does that mean anyway, right? Or you need more rigor. Again, what do you mean by rigor?

[10:48]

But if you can sit down and say, you know what, here's the thing. If you did this one thing, it will make a tremendous amount of difference in your practice. This thing, if you fix this one thing, then we'll fix the next and then we'll fix the next. And you sit down and give people the truth. It's really hard for people to resist that.

[11:04] SPEAKER_01:

So take us into an example, maybe. What would be the truth that a particular teacher might need to hear that an administrator might pick up on and say, okay, I know I need to provide this feedback. I know I need to provide support for improvement in this particular area. And I know I need to focus on just that one thing and not the 11 other things that I've also written down or that our rubric says are below standard. Take us through kind of a scenario, if you could, on using that kind of one thing approach.

[11:30] SPEAKER_02:

So we do something in our trainings called micro slicing, where we actually show people videos of classrooms and we might show them a random five minute snippet. And then people have to, in that five minutes, uncover the truth about a teacher's practice. And it's a really powerful thing because it lets you know that you don't need a 30 or 40 minute observation to discover the truth. And in fact, the longer you stay in a classroom, the more you talk yourself out of the truth, right? that the first five minutes that you're in the classroom, you can intuitively come to the truth if you know how to pay attention. So in one of those examples, there's a classroom that we show where the teacher starts off great with a great warm up and the kids are engaged.

[12:10]

And maybe there could be a little bit more student engagement, but for the most part, the kids are paying attention and engaged. And it's an interesting question that she's posing to the kids. And then the moment that she's ready to go into the main part of her lesson, she switches off and it becomes no more student thinking, I am going to march you through this curriculum. Now, when we first look at that classroom, we see all kinds of things happening. We see that she's calling on more boys than she's calling on girls. We see that there's no student to student talk in the classroom.

[12:39]

We see that the warmup, there isn't a clear connection between the warmup and the next part of the lesson. We see that she's using technology in a sit and get kind of way. We see all these different things. But when you really dig beneath it, the root cause of what's going on is that She starts out with a very interesting question. And then rather than following that through to her lesson, she shuts down when she gets to the teaching. And it's like all the interesting stuff is over because now I want you to just copy down these notes.

[13:08]

When had she just carried that interesting question through to her lesson, her lesson would have been more rigorous. There would have been more engagement. It would have been much more interesting to her kids and to her. That takes some digging. Like if you just sit down with an instrument, you're not going to notice that. It's not until you keep asking yourself, what's the one thing that if we change and If everything else stayed the same, if we just fix this one thing, the lesson becomes infinitely better.

[13:32]

So what I teach people to do is they list all the things they want to talk about. And then they go through each one and they say, is this the one thing? If everything else stayed the same, if nothing else on this list changed, but they changed this, would the lesson become significantly better? And you keep doing that until you narrow it down to one thing. Now, imagine walking into a conversation, haven't given the observation that kind of thinking. Imagine how you might carry that conversation differently than if you just go through that laundry list, and over here in domain three, you didn't do this, and in domain four, you didn't do that.

[14:04]

Now teachers, when they hear it, and this has been my experience and the experience of hundreds of administrators that I've trained, when teachers hear the truth, when they see that you've given their teaching that much thought, then teachers start engaging in conversations, not in defense of what they were doing. Instead, they're engaging in conversations about where they're struggling. They're engaging that you've made it now safe for them. to be able to open up and for that conversation to be a really meaningful conversation because you're talking about the truth and because you took the time to dig past all of the little things that you're checking off on your instrument to get down to that one thing.

[14:39] SPEAKER_01:

It reminds me of the idea of root cause analysis from Toyota and from other quality improvement models. And I love the idea of digging until you find that one thing, because I think we have an epidemic in our profession of second guessing, especially second guessing around tactics and instructional techniques that really don't matter all that much. And I see just so many teachers demoralized by this kind of you know, very surface level feedback that says, well, you did this and you should have done that, and then you did this and then you should have done that. And I have my list of things that I like to see when I'm in the classroom, and you have your list of preferred strategies, and I'm not going to let up on you until you use all of my preferred strategies. And my reaction to that approach, that kind of micromanaging approach, has always been one of, you know, it doesn't really matter that much which technique a teacher chooses to use at any given time.

[15:35]

What I care about is the learning. And if the learning is not where it needs to be, we've gotta figure out why, and we've gotta figure out what to do about that. So I think we've got to get ourselves out of this second guessing and evangelizing certain strategies and certain tactics and really dig, as you said, and figure out what one thing is going to help this teacher improve.

[15:59] SPEAKER_02:

You know, whenever I do a training, I can always tell whatever the district initiative is for that year, right? Because when I show them a classroom, every problem is checking for understanding or every problem is student engagement. And when I ask people, what do you mean by student engagement? And they come back with, well, we need more student-to-student talk. I said, well, what would that look like and how does that make this classroom better? People stop there, right?

[16:21]

And I don't blame the administrators for that either. I blame the way we're training administrators for that. We are training administrators to come in and check and chase and control. We're not training administrators on how to build that kind of mastery. It's almost like the moment you become an administrator, everything that you learned about teaching human beings, you have to throw it out the window and adopt this checklist, clipboard approach. persona when you're sitting down and working with teachers.

[16:51]

But what we forget is that teaching, the education, the profession of it, that if I would never let a teacher do that to a kid, why would I do that to a teacher? I've got to model it. I've got to build an environment where everybody's learning. And the best way to help everybody learn is typically the things that worked the best when I was working with students. So a lot of times when I get stuck with a teacher, a teacher that I don't know, I'm like, I remember...

[17:15]

working with one of the worst teachers I've ever met in my entire life. I tried all the things that I knew, all the leadership strategies that I'd learned over the year, nothing was working. And I just remember being up one night at three o'clock in the morning, just sick to my stomach because I had to sit down and do another meeting with him the next day. He wasn't getting any better. In fact, the relationship was deteriorating. He was calling the union on me and it was horrible.

[17:39]

And I said, okay, what would I do if he were a student in my classroom? And I started really thinking about it. When I had students who were in this position, how did I handle it? What worked? And only by doing that did I figure out how to support him and get him moving towards mastery. I think that we lost sight of what our role is, what instructional leadership really is.

[18:01]

And it's not a checklist and it's not a clipboard and it's not even slavish adherence to our evaluation instrument. The evaluation instruments, there's nothing wrong with them inherently. What's wrong is that we've been taught to use them in a way that stifles mastery and creates compliance. But what if we took those instruments and unpacked them, not the typical unpacking, but, you know, really sat down and understood what those instruments were saying about what good teaching should be? And what if we built that? then I think things would be different.

[18:30]

I think things would be totally different. And we would approach how we led differently, too.

[18:35] SPEAKER_01:

You know, I think back to Charlotte Danielson's book, Talk About Teaching. And of course, people know Charlotte Danielson primarily from her evaluation framework. But I think some of her best work is her book, Talk About Teaching. And that was a book that had a big influence on me, because it really presents teaching as...

[18:52]

professional work and not as standing at the front of the room and pushing buttons the way you would if you worked in a fast food restaurant, but really exercising professional judgment. And I think as instructional leaders, one of the ways that we've pushed teaching in the wrong direction is to see the evaluation of teaching as the scoring of a performance rather than as the shaping of a professional. You know what I mean? Like if we're Olympic figure skating judges, then okay, we're scoring a performance. You get on the ice, you do your routine, you do your jumps, and if you fall over, well, we take points off. But I really don't think that's a good metaphor for teaching.

[19:33]

I really think teaching is much more the exercise of professional judgment, as we would say for a doctor or for an architect. You don't criticize the architect if their ruler slips and their line gets crooked. You criticize the architect if the building's ugly or it falls down. And I think that's what we've got to do with teaching is really see it more as a matter of professional judgment not just behavior. And I think we've got to get away from those checklists about behavior.

[20:00] SPEAKER_02:

I think the problem is more pervasive than that, right? Because I think that we've reduced learning to that. I mean, learning is very performative now, right? It's all we're doing is benchmark testing in March to a bigger test. And we stopped giving kids ownership over their own learning. We stopped helping kids become thinkers rather than performed a task.

[20:22]

And so it's natural that teaching should follow that, that we would treat teachers the same way that we treat kids in terms of checklists and testing and, you know, judging them based on those kinds of things rather than empowering them to make good decisions. Because we don't do that with kids. So... I think that there's a bigger issue in our profession that has to be addressed and that we have to reimagine how we see our profession.

[20:48]

We have to rethink how we're looking at learning and what we say true learning is because we have gone off the rails and we're seeing it in the classroom, but we're also seeing it in the way that we're being trained to work with teachers. I was about to say to grow teachers, but we're not growing teachers anymore. We're not growing students in a lot of cases anymore either. So, Our whole profession has got to let go of this idea that learning or professionalism is something that, you know, is about conformity to a particular instrument. I think the instrument is a great way for us to check in and see how people are doing. And it gives us a common language around which we can talk about our philosophy of teaching.

[21:32]

But used beyond that, I think it gets very dangerous. And here's what else. I think a lot of administrators have stopped enjoying their jobs because they're being forced into a role that they don't even want anymore. I think that everybody needs to just stop. I think that we need to get back to building thinkers in the classroom. I think we need to get back to empowering professionalism in teachers.

[21:54]

I think that as school building administrators or instructional coaches, that we have to be the first ones to do it. We have to model that in the way that we build teachers or else the teachers are not going to do anything differently in the classroom.

[22:08] SPEAKER_01:

You know, it almost strikes me that the better the teacher that we're talking to, the more we might walk away from the conversation with a to-do list of things that we need to take care of outside of the classroom in order to create the conditions for learning for that teacher or the conditions for learning in that teacher's classroom. It's what I call reflexive feedback, which I just kind of made up because we needed another name for it. But, you know, we have directive feedback where we tell the teacher what to do. We have reflective feedback, where maybe the teacher's reflecting on their own practice, or we're kind of bouncing ideas around, and the teacher's making decisions about what to change. But this third kind, which I call reflexive feedback, is this idea that as we have a conversation about improvement, sometimes it's not the teacher that needs to change. Sometimes it's the school.

[22:58]

Sometimes it's the bell schedule. Sometimes if I'm talking with a math teacher about how to teach within a 43-minute period, Maybe the outcome of a really good conversation with a really good teacher is that I walk away saying to myself, you know, we've got to do something about this 43 minute period because our teachers are busting their tails to make it work, but it's not working. And that's my job as a leader to change those things other than the teacher, if that's what is going to move our school to the next level. So I think that view of professionalism, you know, when we see teachers with that professional lens and we see them as professionals who, you know, who have professional practice that that doesn't just operate in the abstract, but operates in a specific organizational context, I think that puts a whole different layer of responsibility on us to not just say, here's how you make this work in our school, but here's how we together can make this work in our school.

[23:52] SPEAKER_02:

I want to challenge you to go even further, because I think that I love the concept of reflexive feedback. I mean, that's such a great way to term it. I would go even further and say that if you have teachers who are not performing in your school, That is a form of reflexive feedback. So it's not just the great teachers in your building saying, I'm scrambling, I can't do the 43-minute period. I also encourage the people, our clients, the people that we work with, when we're going in and we're doing kind of total school transformation, we're also looking at what's broken in the system that makes this kind of poor teaching able to survive or thrive in the system. And that's a form of reflexive feedback, too.

[24:35]

If I have teachers who are underperforming, I need to look at the same thing. Is the bell schedule contributing to this? Is the way that the class is assigned contributing to this? Is the way we do professional development contributing to this? I think we put a lot of the onus on the teachers. Without giving the teachers the same level of responsibility, we hold them accountable.

[24:58]

We rarely give them and allow them to be responsible, right? We say it's your fault if it's not working. And, you know, we'll even give you praise if it is working, but we don't understand that our system plays a huge part in it. And a lot of times I always tell people whenever they say I have a people problem, I say, no, you don't. You have a system problem. You fix the system and the people will adjust to the new system and they'll perform better.

[25:23]

And so I love this. I mean, I'm just like, you know, I'm going to steal it. Reflexive feedback. I think that reflexive feedback also happens. Not just in those conversations with great teachers, but in the conversations with the really struggling teachers. That if you listen carefully, you're going to find flaws in the system that promote or contribute to their struggle in the same way that you find flaws in the system that prevent excellent teachers from doing their job and being excellent.

[25:49] SPEAKER_01:

The fact that we've always had excellent teachers allows us to overlook that reality. The fact that some people have always been able to make it work, it makes us pine for this imaginary future day when we'll have only excellent teachers who can get incredible results no matter what circumstances they're working under. And I think the reality is that the circumstances teachers work under play an enormous role in their effectiveness, the context.

[26:17] SPEAKER_02:

We cannot hire or fire our way to excellence. You know, schools are weird, right? I don't know any other profession where you take everybody. You know, we don't sort kids and say, well, these kids are going to learn or have the best potential to learn. These kids don't, so we're going to leave them alone. So we have an ethos in our profession that we have to work with everybody, and that everybody can learn and can learn at a high level.

[26:41]

I mean, that's kind of the premise of education, and that's what we're working towards. But we... Stop thinking that when it comes to the adults, because we say, well, they're the professionals, they should know. And I'm trying to understand in what industry, other industry is that true, where you're a professional, you should come in and no matter what the work conditions are, no matter what the circumstances are, you have to make bricks without straw and you have to perform miracles every single day.

[27:08]

And that's our baselines. Why don't we build schools that make good teaching the default rather than building school policy based on the two outliers? We either go and we say we have great, excellent teachers who make it work anyway. So what's wrong with you? Right. That's an outlier.

[27:27]

That's somebody doing it in spite of the system rather than because of the system. Or we make all these policies because of these defaults. poorly performing teachers and so we have to buckle down and tighten up and get in the classrooms more or make sure that everybody's on page 27 or march 23rd or else we're not going to move so we've set our policy and school systems based on both outliers rather than paying attention to what's happening in the middle and building a system where that upper outlier can more easily be the norm where i'm excellent in my classroom not in spite of the system but because of the system

[28:01] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's another point where a lot of our leadership strategies are coming from contexts that churn through new teachers and don't hang on to experienced teachers. And that's why we have a very difficult time understanding how to work with master teachers. You know, once people get up to that level of skill where they really are exercising leadership and we should be listening to them in terms of how to get everyone else to improve. You know, a lot of the environments where we're getting our ideas, you know, particularly sectors where there's a lot of turnover, there are a lot of new teachers, it's a very high stress level, very long hours. You know, if we're making that our model, we're never going to end up with a profession full of professionals. It's going to churn.

[28:42]

It's going to be people who don't want to work in that environment for very long. They burn out and they're replaced by more new people like them. And I think if we're going to build a profession, we've got to do it on purpose.

[28:53] SPEAKER_02:

It's so hard to become excellent in our current system. It's so hard. In order to become a master teacher, you really have to fight through a whole bunch of stuff and you have to do it by yourself because the system is designed for conformity these days and not for mastery. And true mastery is where people are professionals and they're empowered to make good decisions on behalf of kids. And I would challenge administrators to ask themselves, What would our school look like if it were built for the professionals and if it were built to support professionalism rather than people becoming professionals in spite of the system? I mean, I'm listening to you talk and describe it, and it sounds so bleak.

[29:37]

It's a miracle that anyone. becomes a master teacher in that kind of environment. You either churn out before you can develop mastery or you conform to the system in order to survive the system and you truncate your path to mastery because you're just trying to survive or you become a master teacher and you get so frustrated with your working conditions and with insipid feedback and silly hoops through which you have to jump because those rules were designed for people who are underperforming and not for you, but you still have to jump through them anyway. It's a wonder that anybody becomes a master teacher. I hate to sound so depressing, but you took me there.

[30:15] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think about this idea of leadership pipelines, and I know a lot of organizations really pay a lot of attention to how they're cultivating leaders. But I almost wonder if we have it backwards, that we shouldn't just be looking at, are we developing future administrators, but are we getting people to the point in their practice as teachers where they want to stay, where they want to keep on teaching rather than leave and go be a district administrator or principal or assistant principal? I think that would be a good measure of improvement for a lot of districts and organizations if people are actually staying in the classroom longer, continuing to get better, continuing to exercise instructional leadership from the classroom, rather than feeling like, okay, I've maxed out as a professional in my classroom because teaching is an entry-level job in this organization. And if I want to be a professional, I've got to go be an administrator.

[31:07]

Like, I think if we can change that, amazing things will happen for kids.

[31:10] SPEAKER_02:

Well, that's what happened to me. You know, I was a very good teacher. And because I was a good teacher, people kept pushing me further and further away from the classroom until I became an administrator. And that Peter principle is real. I didn't rise to the level of my incompetence. I think if I had been like a superintendent of schools, that would have made me rise to the level of incompetence because I'm not necessarily politic.

[31:30]

But what I did see happening is that the better I was at my job, the more people tried to take me away from my job. And when I became an administrator, I was good at it because I learned how to be good at being good. But my heart wasn't in it. And I remember working for one administrator in particular, and I saw how much he loved being a principal and how much he wanted to be a principal. And I remember saying to him one day, I sit here and I watch you and I don't have that same kind of feeling. I used to feel that way in the classroom, but I don't have that feeling now.

[32:00]

And that conversation and that kind of thinking eventually led me to leave the school system entirely just because I felt like. that the thing that I was the best at, my zone of excellence, the thing that I loved the most, I wasn't rewarded for being good at that except for it to take me away from that. And I agree with you. I think that what, you know, and I challenge people to imagine what would a system look like if you rewarded great teachers by keeping them in the classroom? What would that mean? Instead of seeing teaching as an entry-level job, seeing it as the most important job in the system and And everybody else, the superintendent, the central office staff, the administrators, they're all the supporting roles.

[32:41]

The teacher is what's elevated because if we really think about what business we're in, we're not in the business of building school systems, we're in the business of educating children. Who's the person who has the biggest impact on educating a kid? A teacher. So why isn't the teacher the center of the system and why isn't the entire system orbiting around the teacher? I mean, what would that look like? And what would that do for kids if we have that?

[33:05] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Robin, I think we could talk for hours about the way that our school systems need to change. And we do in our respective podcasts, me on Principal Center Radio. But you have a podcast as well. And I definitely think people should know about that and should subscribe and listen to your podcast. Tell us a little bit about the podcast, because I know that's been a big project lately.

[33:24] SPEAKER_02:

I started a podcast earlier this year called School Leadership Reimagined. And it's me on my soapbox a lot of times sharing both that visionary, let's think about what we could do differently and why it's important, but also practical things like, okay, if you want to build that kind of school, what interview questions do you need to use when you're interviewing a candidate that is going to help you find the best candidate to come into your culture? How do you create a culture? What are things that you could be doing throughout the year that build that culture? What do you do to overcome a toxic culture? You know, those kinds of things.

[33:59]

So we release a new episode every Wednesday and you can find out more and subscribe and also listen to past episodes at schoolleadershipreimagined.com.

[34:10] SPEAKER_01:

And the book is Never Underestimate Your Teacher's Instructional Leadership for Excellence in Every Classroom. Robin, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[34:19] SPEAKER_02:

It's been my pleasure. I love talking to you.

[34:22] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[34:26] SPEAKER_01:

So, high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Robin Jackson? I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about teacher professionalism and this idea that teaching is professional work. And at the same time, we get more of what we focus on So if we decide as leaders to treat teaching as if it's not professional work, we are going to find that we're working with teachers before too long who are not professionals. On the other hand, if we decide to treat teaching as professional work, and as an exercise of professional judgment and see our role as helping teachers grow and improve their judgment, we will find that we attract teachers who are professionals and that we retain them. They don't leave when we treat them the way they want to be treated as professionals.

[35:16]

So if you would like to learn more about Dr. Jackson's approaches to building the kind of professional teachers that every principal wants to have, I really want to encourage you to check out her book, Never Underestimate Your Teachers, as well as her podcast. School Leadership Reimagined, and you can find that at schoolleadershipreimagined.com.

[35:35] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.