Becoming a School Principal: Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn

[00:01] SPEAKER_02:

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. Sarah Fireman, a former public school teacher, principal, and lecturer at Harvard Graduate School. Dr. Fireman is an independent education consultant and the author of several books including Instructional Rounds in Education, as well as the book that we're here to talk about today, Becoming a School Principal, Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_01:

Sarah, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:42] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. Great to be here.

[00:43] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit about the origin of the book. So you served as a principal and some of your story is told in the Instructional Rounds book. But in this book, Becoming a School Principal, tell us where that book kind of came from in your professional journey.

[00:59] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Yeah, I was a principal at two different schools. And before entering those roles, I had done a lot of staff development with folks, both at the classroom level, the district level, school level, the state level. And I'd spend a lot of time trying to help people understand how to engage in continuous improvement. I thought I was pretty good at it. Then I went into a school where I was the principal in charge of leading continuous improvement.

[01:28]

And I realized this is a lot messier than we make it sound as consultants. This is really challenging work. And I think pretty unsupported work. I was surprised at how little coherent support was. there was for principals. I really just want this book to be a colleague to people who are principals and to share a lot of the lessons that I wish I had learned before becoming a principal.

[01:54]

I wish somebody had sat down and said, hey, okay, it's going to take a long time to build trust. And here's what you need to know about teacher supervision that nobody's told you before. Just all the nitty gritty sort of behind the scenes collegial conversation that I wish somebody had with me. That was really my goal for the book, to help people feel a little less alone in this really, really challenging and really important work.

[02:15] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it can be very lonely, even with colleagues in your district that you can call on, even with a supportive boss. There's just so much to the job. And often it's the things that we don't even know that we need to be thinking about that catch us off guard. Things like trust, things like looking at data, things like the supervision process going beyond the you know, the on paper required process. I wonder if we could start by talking a little bit about trust. What do you see as some of the challenges around trust and some of the key tasks, especially coming into a new school, coming into a new leadership role?

[02:51]

Frame that for us around trust. What do we need to be thinking about when it comes to building trust?

[02:55] SPEAKER_00:

Right. It's great that you're starting with that because it is such a foundation piece for being a strong and effective leader. I think often we think of trust as something that's just either there or not there and not something that can be deliberately built and cultivated. And it can be. And so I guess. things first I think it's impossible to underestimate just the value of personal connections so just providing time to learn about people to hear from people what's important to you when I started at my second school I sent all the teachers and all the families and then I ended up doing it also with students the same three questions and they were what is working well at this school and What do you think needs to work better at this school?

[03:47]

And what else is important that you think I should know? And then I collected all of that information and I summarized the key lessons I was learning from that. And then I reflected it back to people. So I had meetings with all these different groups, meeting with the teachers, several meetings with parents, meetings with students. When I went around and introduced myself at each class, just reflecting back, here's what I've heard you say. here's what I need to learn more about, and here's how I'm going to do that.

[04:16]

And then following up, you know, Breit and Schneider in their book, Trust in Schools, say that some of the ways that principals build trust is really by some simple things that are often overlooked, just following up when you say you're going to do something, doing the grunt work. And then the other thing that I learned in that role is the way I listen is really important. So am I listening so that I can convince someone better of my position or am I listening to really try to understand where that person is coming from, particularly people I disagree with? And I found that was also a really critical part of building trust was seeking out divergent views and really trying to understand those so that even if I was going to present something different from that, Let me show that I have understood the variety of perspectives, have really listened to try and understand the thinking behind those, the motivation behind those.

[05:11]

I think demonstrating that I value disagreement. I think that's a powerful way of building trust with me and also among the adults at the school. And so I really enjoy looking for specific opportunities to highlight that. So at our staff meetings, at the end of a staff meeting to just ask how many people heard us respectfully disagree? Did you hear an example of respectful disagreement today? And just see a show of hands and say, all right, that shows that we're doing something right in this community, that people are disagreeing with each other.

[05:46]

Or even when someone disagrees with me at a meeting, when I was a new leader, I found I had to over and over again reinforce the fact that I really valued and appreciated appreciated when someone disagreed with me and I would try to point to the ways in which that disagreement had shifted our conversation. So I guess that's trust and also some of the values that I wanted to very deliberately build in our community. We need to disagree with each other. Here's how I'm going to reinforce that, try and build that skill.

[06:16] SPEAKER_01:

I think it's one of those things that tends to catch us off guard because we assume the kind of absolute trust that often is placed in the role. And we understand the relational trust aspect of But the, you know, building up the kind of transactional trust and developing that working relationship. And as you said, following through and doing what you say you're going to do, you know, like just the just the awareness that there are multiple kinds of trust and different ways that that gets kind of developed and formed and strengthened, I think is so critical.

[06:47] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, actually, Justin, can I share one other quick thing? I, you know, I was really fascinated to learn as a principal that the way I receive anger or frustration can actually be a very powerful moment when I'm building trust. You know, because inevitably there are going to be times when people melt down, when people are really frustrated with me, or really they're frustrated with something else and it comes out at me because I am the figurehead, because I am that role. And I used to think that those were relationship-destroying moments, and now I really see those as trust-building moments. if I can receive that anger, I mean, Heifetz and Linsky talk about this in Adaptive Leadership, that the way a leader receives anger can do a lot to build trust, build a relationship. If I can be respectful, if I can really listen behind the anger to try to understand what's going on for that person and then reflect that back to them, that can be a powerful moment where that person leaves the room feeling more heard, more valued, more respected,

[07:51]

than they thought they were when they entered. They may not have convinced me, they may not have, nothing else may have changed, Other than that, but that's pretty powerful in and of itself, that they leave with us having a stronger relationship.

[08:03] SPEAKER_01:

What do you see as some of the big mistakes that new principals make when dealing with that kind of anger or when somebody comes in with a complaint and wants you to do something and you're not necessarily going to do that? What are some of the missteps that you hope to help people avoid in those conversations?

[08:19] SPEAKER_00:

I think a big one is just the temptation to get defensive. And I remember hearing an administrator say, I think it was Kathleen McCartney said something like, if administrators can hear criticism as love for the organization, then they're going to do all right. And I really thought about that a lot as, okay, so this criticism that's coming in, it's so easy for me to say, Do you realize how many hours I'm working in the day? Do you realize how many people are coming at me with different opinions? Do you have any idea how hard this job is? And it's just so valuable to remember how I really appreciate that this person cares so much about this organization.

[09:04]

that they're feeling really passionate about something or they're upset about this. Okay, we have shared values here. We both care about this organization a lot. And so let me hear it that way and really reinforce it that way. And again, listen to understand what's behind that. So I think getting defensive is a really easy trap to fall into and a good one to avoid.

[09:27]

And I think the other one may be that new principals may think that trust is built in sort of individual instances or sort of a big showy event. You know, let me sponsor lunch for everyone or let me write a special letter to someone or to the whole staff. And I think Instead, trust is really built in the very small interactions over time. And so many of these little things that we do and say that accumulate over time and trusting that consistency with that and that really staying true to our values with that and doing all these things we've just talked about of showing respect and compassion for people as learners, that leads to trust over time.

[10:18]

So it takes patience. that can be built.

[10:22] SPEAKER_01:

One of the things I think that's tough about that that I want to go back to that you touched on is the sense that when people do have a criticism, when they do have a passion for improving the organization, there's something that they want to be different than it is. As a leader, it's hard to separate that criticism of the status quo from criticism of yourself as a leader, especially the longer you've been there. Your first week, it can feel great because you're listening to people and you're taking notes. and you're promising to make all these changes that will solve all these problems, but over time you realize that's long-term work, it's not going to change overnight, it's a team effort, and it can be hard to hear that criticism of people being dissatisfied with the way things are and wanting them to be better, and recognizing that the organization is not you, it is more than you,

[11:14]

And there is an interplay there between what we accomplish as leaders and the criticism that falls on us versus just that positive desire to see things get better. What do you see as kind of the core improvement task? How do we look at that? And I know you've got a chapter in the book on getting traction with improvement. How do we look at getting those priorities organized, getting that work defined, getting that work underway? Because it can be so overwhelming when we have so much that could be better, or we might have so many things that need to be fixed right away, so many fires to put out.

[11:53]

What is that process of getting traction, as you put it in the book?

[11:57] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a big question. You know, as such, there are sort of seven different fronts to be working on all at once, of course. I think one way I want to start answering that is just sort of in follow-up to what you were just saying about how criticism can feel once the work is underway. And so you've got teams of people working on this. So this is to say, I think a really key part of getting traction with improvement is is making sure that I, as the leader, am not the only person leading the improvement and that I don't see the role of improvement as resting on my shoulders alone. And I actually think this is a common misstep for new principals.

[12:48]

And certainly it was a misstep that I made as a principal. I really did feel that I was carrying that very, very heavy burden on my shoulders alone and sort of felt it was in some ways a martyr stance. You know, I will do this for the school. And it's ultimately very short-sighted and not going to produce the kinds of in-depth, long-term sustained gains that are necessary to making the kinds of improvement that we all want to make at our schools. Instead, as the leader, I need to see my job as engaging the entire staff in what I came to think of as a leadership mindset, not informal teacher leader roles necessarily, but to have everyone at the school see it as their responsibility, as part of their role as a member of that school community to be thinking about our whole school's growth.

[13:51]

So I think the traditional model is that teachers are thinking about the growth of the students in their classroom. There are a lot of cultural norms around teaching that lead people to not want to intervene on anything that's happening elsewhere in the school. There's this very strong norm of autonomy. And so I learned through working with a really wonderful leadership coach that I could accelerate the improvement at the school and have higher quality improvement at the school if I was engaging more teachers and leading it. The teachers are the closest to it and engaging teachers and leading their peers. It's not easy because it means breaking out of that mode of just being responsible for what's going on in my classroom, but especially for elementary school teachers, but frankly, any teachers, we've got this opportunity.

[14:43]

We have kids for multiple years. If we can think about our responsibility for shepherding kids' learning over multiple years, then teachers are going to feel a whole lot more effective also. And they're going to see their success, not just in the success of their own students in their classroom, but the success of all the students going through the school. So as a leader, I've got to cultivate that mindset. So it means I've got to engage more people in leadership teams. That was a big learning I had.

[15:17]

Let me establish a lot of teams where this improvement work can happen. We had an instructional leadership team where we had representatives from all the different grades in the school, along with special education. We had a math leadership team, a literacy leadership team. And when I first started those teams, I thought, OK, these are the teams that are going to advise me about how we shape the improvement at this school. And then I came to realize, oh, no, these are the teams that that I convene and then I create the conditions for these teams of teachers to lead the improvement at the school. And so what does that mean for me to create the conditions?

[15:56]

That means I need to recognize, yeah, it is really hard for teachers to lead their peers. So what kind of training and support am I providing? Are we teaching on the instructional leadership team? Are we teaching and practicing some protocols that people can use then back in their grade teams? Or are we establishing these guiding documents that help us so that people don't feel like it's a personal push? Oh, we've got to do this.

[16:23]

But no, this was a document that we created together as a staff that we're holding ourselves accountable to. So I recognize that it was a long answer. There are lots of different ways to go in answering this question of how do we get traction for whole school improvement. I think one of the critical things is establishing this foundation that it's got to be led by teachers. We have to create the conditions for teachers to be leading that work.

[16:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I love what you said earlier about how teacher leadership is work and is a mindset, not just a role. So we often think of, OK, you're on this committee, you're the department head, you're the team leader, whatever. But it's it's not just that title or that, you know, function that you serve as teacher. in a role at a meeting, it's the way you think about and take responsibility for decisions in the organization. It's the skills that you develop to move the work forward. And I love that idea of kind of pushing the decision-making as close to the people who are doing the work as possible.

[17:23]

If the people who are teaching the curriculum are making the decisions about the curriculum, those are going to typically be better decisions than if they're made a couple steps removed from that.

[17:33] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I can just give a couple of examples of what I mean by developing this leadership mindset. So for example, when teachers come to me, so for example, I can think of a teacher coming to me and saying, I'm really concerned that this teacher I'm working with has not yet created her differentiated small group reading group. She's still doing whole group, and I know that there are kids whose needs aren't being met. And so when I first started as a principal, my instinct would have been to say, oh, great, thanks for telling me, I'll get right on that. And instead, I realized over time that my role there is to empower this teacher to work with her colleague, to really own that this practice is our shared practice.

[18:19]

And so instead, my response to her became, wow, that sounds like a really important thing for us to be working as a school. How can I help you work with this colleague? What can I help you role play in terms of a conversation with her? What resources do you think would help you? What do you think we could do as a staff to draw attention to the need for more differentiation? And what role do you want to play in that?

[18:43]

What teams could we get involved in this work? So it was just a shift in orientation. Just that small incident became an opportunity for her to see herself as someone who was responsible for and invested in the learning of her colleagues. In order to improve the learning of students across the school. Hard, not easy. And teachers usually think, what?

[19:06]

What? You're going to role play with how I'm going to talk about this with the teacher? I thought I was coming in here to give the problem to you. But, you know, over time, I think people feel supported and feel empowered and excited about how much growth can happen.

[19:20] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, I love that you posed it back as a question. You didn't say, yeah, that sounds like a big problem for you. What are you going to do about it? Good luck. You posed it as a question.

[19:30]

What do you think needs to happen? How can I support you in that? And I think there are times when a good answer from the teacher is, well, I've been down this road before and we've butted heads with each other over this. So I really need you to step in as the principal and you know, and back me up on this, that we are going to do this or, you know, we are going to move forward with this. Or they might say, you know what, you're right. I can go talk about it and it'll be better received than if you go in and pull rank and say you've got to do this.

[19:57]

So I think it is a situation where we've got to recognize the complexity of relationships and also have to build people up. You know, like think of the potential – growth that that creates in someone when you do, as you said, empower them that way to exercise that kind of leadership. Let's talk a little bit about the supervision and evaluation process, because I know when we're coming into a school, often there is unfinished work that needs to be done. Perhaps we see a lot of evaluations as a formality, but everybody wants to have a good evaluation, and there are probably people who have been getting good evaluations for a long time that we might differ with when we get to that stage in the process. For a new principal who comes in and realizes that there are some challenges around teacher evaluations, what do you see as kind of the order of the day? What are some of the things we need to be thinking about as we approach the evaluation process?

[20:49] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think it's true that one of the problems with evaluation is that it is so highly variable from school to schools and from administrator to administrator. So anytime an administrator enters a building for the first time, it's pretty much guaranteed that people in that building have had a range of experiences with evaluation. So that building trust, again, is really important there. I think it's really important to make it clear that Evaluation is not going to be a matter of personal preference for teaching styles or teaching methods that I'm going to be evaluating people based on a set of standards that are absolutely transparent that we all can look at and study that are shared in our district and that those standards aren't describing the specific

[21:44]

actions that a teacher does, but really the outcomes that are looked for in student learning, in classroom community. And that's the second part of what I make really clear, and I think is really important to make clear to folks as a beginning principal, is that the evidence that I am looking for in my observations is student learning. Front, center, hands down, that is the bottom line of what I'm looking for as I go into classrooms. I'm not looking to check off a list of specific teacher behaviors. You know, our conversations may end up talking about teacher behaviors that lead to student learning, but what I am looking for, and I think this is a huge change in orientation for a lot of people, what I'm looking at is what's on students' desks, not necessarily what the teacher is saying or what's on the board even.

[22:35]

Of I think those are really the two main things that they're teacher standards. This isn't a matter of personal preference. And the way that I measure the efficacy of the teaching is through what evidence I see of student learning. So when I'm in a classroom, I'm collecting evidence about the student learning. Then we talk about that together. And I tell teachers this, and I would recommend that first-year principals, of course, start by saying, okay, this is a transparent process.

[23:09]

Here's how I approach this process. Here's what I value. So that when we meet to talk about a lesson, always going to start by looking at student work. So what were your goals? What did you want students to know and be able to do as a result of this lesson? All right, what's the evidence?

[23:26]

And now how do you make sense of that? And what are the next steps? And then the next steps often go back to, so what are the teacher standards that then we can see in patterns over multiple observations are ones that you're struggling with. And if you worked more on strategies for checking for understanding, for example, we would see a difference in the student learning that we see in your class. But I think that shift from principals looking and documenting very carefully everything that the teacher is doing in the absence of student learning, I think that shift to sort of pointing your head downward, looking more at what students are doing, recording what students are saying, I think that's a really critical shift and is the Evidence that I want teachers, basically it also is reinforcing the habit that I want teachers to be using all the time in their day-to-day practice and their minute-to-minute practice is what are the students, what evidence do I have of what students know and are able to do?

[24:27]

That's what determines my next move in this lesson. So I want to continuously be cultivating that habit that we're looking to student work as a measure of our efficacy.

[24:37] SPEAKER_01:

You also said something I think is really critical in the post-conference, in sitting down with the teacher, starting with, what was your goal for this lesson? And I have to say, I think a lot of discussions of teachers' lessons, their observations, start with... a compliment, you know, here's something you did well, and then here's something you could have done differently. Or maybe there's a little bit of grilling, you know, like, why did you do this?

[25:02]

Why did you do that? Without asking in the first place the question, what was this lesson supposed to accomplish? You know, where does it fit? And I found that to be such an important question for myself as an instructional leader and as a learner moving from being a middle school teacher to an elementary principal and moving from being a science teacher to an administrator supervising, you know, largely literacy and math. And, you know, in a lot of cases, most of the lessons I observed on a formal basis were literacy and math. And I think we all have this picture in our heads of like what the perfect lesson is supposed to look like, you know, like where's the stuff supposed to be written on the board and what happens in what sequence when in reality that's very, you know, subject grade level dependent, uh, some of that's personal preference and doesn't actually matter that much, but it's, You know, what we have in our heads is the perfect lesson might be very different from what the teacher has.

[25:53]

And if we're going to evaluate its effectiveness, I love what you said about, you know, like student evidence being the bottom line, but judging the success against the intended target, like where were we supposed to get this day? I think that's a huge guidepost to keep us from that pitfall of, well, here's what I thought you should have done that you didn't do. And, you know, we can go off course pretty quickly with that.

[26:15] SPEAKER_00:

Right. And I think actually a really common pitfall that I've heard from a lot of principals is starting their debrief by saying, so how do you think it went? Right. What do you think? And I think, oh, my goodness, that is such a black hole. Because so if the teacher did not have an effective lesson and the teacher says, oh, I think it went pretty well.

[26:37]

You're right away. You're starting your conversation. No, it didn't. Right. Or the teacher says, yeah, it went pretty well. Okay, so where do we go from there?

[26:46]

And really, it's not about, I guess in my mind, I think I really want to get everyone away from this idea that this is about how we personally feel that went. No, this is a profession. This is a profession with standards, with very clear outcomes by which we measure our effectiveness. The outcomes are student learning. And the other thing that I think about a lot and try to instill in other school leaders is the idea that the times when we as school leaders are in classrooms is pretty small compared to the overall amount of time that teachers are teaching. So even if I'm giving the most insightful feedback about how somebody could have improved that lesson, it's that one single lesson.

[27:33]

it doesn't in any way guarantee that that teacher will know how to improve the 179 other days of lessons. So really my goal is to think about how can I use this time with this teacher to help the teacher build habits of thinking about teaching that will lead to improvement in student learning. So that's why my whole orientation from the beginning of what did you want students to know and be able to do? What evidence do you have that they did that? How do you make sense of that evidence, the disparate results? And now what are you going to do about it?

[28:15]

It's all about building habits of thinking. And sure, there are people who are on a full spectrum of experience levels. So beginning teachers may need some more directed feedback or coaching. They may need to hear, you know, here's what I see and here are three different ways I'm thinking about it. Which of those resonates for you knowing your students? You know, they may need a little bit more scaffolding.

[28:38]

But in general, it's really about keeping this mindset that I'm trying to develop habits of thinking for that teacher that will last much longer than this one lesson.

[28:46] SPEAKER_01:

It's a big job, and there's a lot more that we could talk about in the principalship and in the book. But the book is Becoming a School Principal, Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. And Sarah, I love the way you kind of positioned that at the beginning, as a colleague to consult, you know, the book itself as a colleague. And I've certainly enjoyed speaking with you and kind of comparing notes on the principalship. I think it's just incredibly important work. that our listeners are engaged in every day.

[29:14]

And Sarah, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about the work that you do to support school leaders, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

[29:22] SPEAKER_00:

Sure, they can just email me at sarahfireman at gmail. They can get the book at Harvard Ed Press or Amazon. And Justin, I just want to say I really appreciate the work that you do to support principals, because again, I think this is such a critical role. And we all need to find more ways to give principals the support that they deserve. So I really applaud you for all of your work with that.

[29:45] SPEAKER_02:

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

[29:50] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Sarah Fireman about the principalship, about becoming a school principal? I think one of the key things that stuck with me is the importance of building capacity, the importance of recognizing that so much of instructional leadership isn't what we do personally, it's what we do individually. as a school. And of course, that involves teachers making decisions about their own practice, about the direction of our school, and recognizing that leadership is not merely about titles, but it's largely about making sense of our work and making decisions about our work. So one of the things I want to encourage you to do on a regular basis is talk with teachers about their practice. As Sarah said, help them make sense of what's going on in their classrooms and help yourself make sense of what you're seeing in their classrooms by having those conversations.

[30:44]

And my top recommendation for you on how to do that is to get into classrooms every day. Every day, I wanna encourage you to visit three classrooms for 10 to 15 minutes each, not a super long time, just long enough to have something to talk about, something interesting to dig into, an issue of teaching and learning based on what you saw, and then actually have that conversation with the teacher. Come back during the teacher's prep period or whenever you can and talk about what you saw, talk about the evidence, as Sarah said, talk about what's on students' desks, what you're observing in terms of student learning, and talk about the teacher's goals for the lesson. If you do that every day, you will know an incredible amount about the teaching and learning that's taking place in your school. You will have incredible relationships with your teachers, and you will learn dramatically faster than you ever could otherwise. So if you're interested in my in-depth training on how to do that, it's called the 21 Day Instructional Leadership Challenge.

[31:40]

And it is a free program. You can go through it anytime at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com. We've had more than 10,000 people from 50 countries around the world go through that. And you can too. It is a very simple model.

[31:52]

You get into classrooms, you talk with teachers, and there's a little more to it. And I give you some time management strategies and tips and tricks on how to make that work. But check it out at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com.

[32:04] Announcer:

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