Tier 3 Instructional Leadership: Building Systems for Learning

by Justin Baeder, PhD

How can instructional leaders extend their impact beyond the individual teacher?

We have three tiers of influence:

• Tier 1 : Feedback on specific teaching, as you'd give after a walkthrough or formal observation
• Tier 2 : Coaching for growth, to help the individual grow as a professional over time
• Tier 3 : Building school-level systems that transcend any individual

All three are necessary, and they work in concert. But devoting too much leadership effort to Tier 1 and Tier 2 at the expense of Tier 3 can make a school vulnerable to turnover.

Turnover Is Inevitable

Even when teachers remain in the profession, they may:

• Leave the classroom for a coaching or leadership role
• Move to another subject or grade
• Move to another school for a variety of reasons

And eventually, everyone moves on—even if it's not until retirement. There are no truly "permanent" employees. Turnover is inevitable.

As the old management paradox puts it, " What if we invest in people and they leave…or worse, what if we don't invest in them, and they stay?"

Of course we must invest time and effort in feedback and coaching—this is the heart of instructional leadership. But so is the Tier 3 work of creating systems that will outlast the individual and create durable excellence.

How can we identify and prioritize these systems?

Missing Systems: CAIRO

CAIRO is a handy organizing acronym for mapping the systems that cause a school to produce learning:

• C urriculum—what we teach
• A ssessment—how we measure what we teach
• I nstruction—how we teach
• R ules—how we create a learning environment
• O perations—how we support the functioning of the learning environment

We naturally focus on instruction , but instructional leadership is so much more.

I define instructional leadership as the practice of making and implementing operational and improvement decisions in the service of student learning.

And over and over, I see the same mistakes in these decisions:

• We've de-emphasized knowledge in favor of vague "skills," so students don't have enough to think about, and classes simply aren't teaching enough
• We've drifted away from high expectations in various attempts to be kind and compassionate, with a result that is neither
• We find it unpleasant to think about rules, so we downplay their importance until there's a problem we can't ignore
• We value individual autonomy over systems that will outlast individuals and produce consistent results
• When we get results we don't like, we stop collecting data rather than develop a serious plan

Every school has substantial opportunity to develop more effective CAIRO systems.

How The Three Tiers Feed Into Each Other

The work of building Tier 3 systems must not draw our attention away from Tier 1 and Tier 2 instructional leadership, because they feed into each other:

• Tier 1 and 2 work with individual teachers informs Tier 3 decisions that have a long-term impact
• Tier 3 systems provide expectations on which to base Tier 1 and 2 feedback
• Tier 1 feedback helps people get better at implementing Tier 3 systems
• Tier 2 coaching helps teachers become more capable of designing and improving Tier 3 systems

For Tier 2 coaching specifically, Sibme enables video-based coaching that scales — teachers record lessons, coaches annotate specific moments asynchronously, and the resulting library of practice over time becomes part of the school's institutional knowledge rather than disappearing when a teacher or coach moves on.

Questions for Reflection

To identify your best improvement opportunities, ask yourself:

• Is this system designed to maximize learning, or some other goal? Would we design in this way if we were starting from scratch? How might we reorient it to learning?
• What's undermining the impact of the good work people are doing? Where are great people experiencing frustration or burnout?
• What patterns am I seeing in observations and walkthroughs?
• Which staff members would be difficult or impossible to replace? How could we put systems in place that will survive turnover?