Leverage Leadership - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Why?

The biggest lever on student learning is great teaching (not technology, curriculum, etc.), and the biggest lever on great teaching is great leadership. Everyone on the team needs to know what the team is trying to do. Instruction and culture are not sequential- you need them both, and they need to developed simultaneously.

Leaders are instructional leaders- not secretaries or contract instructional coaches. They need to live the game.

7 Levers

Start with the super-levers, then start the observation cycle.

Instructional Levers

  • Data-Driven Instruction (Super-Lever)
  • Observation & Feedback
  • Planning
  • Professional Development

Cultural Levers

  • Student Culture (Super-Lever)
  • Staff Culture
  • Managing School Leadership Teams

Data-Driven Instruction

It's not whether you taught it, it's whether they learned it.

  1. Assessment: Where is the bar?
    • Assessments should be:
      1. Interim: Not just at the end
      2. Common to all classes and students
      3. Aligned to the end goal
    • Standards are meaningless without assessment
    • They set the bar for teachers too
    • Think about what students need to do to pass the assessment
    • Final tests are autopsies, not assessments
    • Use interim assessments, and give yourself enough time to remediate
    • Things like multiple-choice tests are low-resolution, but cheap to score and can give some insight into what interventions are needed
    • You can borrow assessments instead of writing them, but always check for alignment
    • Teaching to the test is only bad if the tests are poorly aligned
    • Max turn-around for assessment should be 48 hours
  2. Analysis: Where are students struggling and why?
    • Allows for more thorough coverage than any observation
    • Use the data to drive your coaching sessions
    • The data is a springboard to a more in-depth discussion
    • Reports need to be intuitive
    • Work from the "back pocket" even if you know the answer- guide the teacher to the answer, make them do the work
    • Data reports:
      1. Data on individual questions
      2. Standard-level data
      3. Student-level data
      4. Class-level data
    • Analyzing data:
      1. Make a hypothesis
        • Is there stuff that everyone got wrong?
        • What misunderstandings are being revealed?
        • What steps were needed to do the task that broke down?
        • Is there student variance within a standard? Why?
        • Do results on one standard influence another?
        • Are there issues only struggling students are having?
      2. Test the hypothesis
        • Review their other work- does the hypothesis hold?
        • Ask students about their thought process
      3. Make explicit action steps
        • What do you have to teach to overcome this? How will you do it differently than last time?
        • What assignments and exercises should they do?
        • How will you assess and CFU during the lesson itself now?
  3. Action: Implement new teaching plans
    • Give action-items due-dates, and tie them to lesson plans
    • Plan around assessments
  4. Systems: Keep changes in place and drive continuous improvement

Student Culture

  • Culture is practice, not charisma
  • Culture is what lets students fly
  • Send the message that time is precious
  • Keep instructor expectations consistent across the school
  • Take your values seriously and call them out often
  • Leaders need to model the culture every day
  • Put your rituals into the schedule

Steps

  1. Establish a vision
  2. Turn your vision into minute-by-minute systems
    • Daily routines:
      • Morning
      • Assemblies
      • Lunch & Recess
      • Class-to-class
      • Dismissal/After-school
    • In-class routines:
      • Opening class
      • Transitions
      • Strategies & consequences for being off-task
    • During routines:
      • What is the leader doing?
      • What are the teachers doing?
      • What are the students doing?
      • What happens when a student doesn't comply?
  3. Rehearse what it looks and feels like
  4. Monitor with a tool
    • Create a rubric to measure the things you care about
    • Create a tool and use it
    • Have people outside your team evaluate you

In turnarounds

  • Face the brutal facts
  • Model, intervene, wean
    1. All hands on deck- make it everyone's responsibility
    2. Start with the staff who are the most invested
    3. "I do, we do, you do" with this staff
    4. Regular professional development for the rest of the staff
    5. Set aside instruction for a little while and spend a couple days resetting
    6. Evaluate your progress

Observation & Feedback

Observation & feedback weekly drive teacher development.

  1. Observe frequently, on a schedule
    • Do 15-minute observations weekly
      • Keep them short, block them together with other observations
      • Keep the timing of these loose
    • Observation isn't about judgment, it's about coaching them to be better
  2. Identify the 1-2 most important areas for growth
    • Only give them 1 action item at a time
      1. Directly tied to student learning
      2. Address a cause, not a symptom
      3. Is high-leverage
  3. Give direct feedback that practices action steps
    • Detailed but infrequent teacher coaching would be like detailed but infrequent sports coaching
    • Do 15-minute feedback sessions weekly
      • Lock in your feedback sessions
      • Tie into existing 1:1s and planning
      • The teacher needs to do the thinking
    • Structure of meeting:
      1. 1-2 pieces of precise praise
      2. Open-ended questions about the core issue
      3. Identify the problem and make the bite-sized action step:
        • Can be changed in 1 week
        • Can be noticed in 10 seconds
        • Connected to broader goals
        • Use TLAC skills
      4. Practice the action step out loud
      5. Plan when you're going to implement it next together
      6. Set timeline
  4. Create feedback systems
    • Track patterns:
      • Across time
        • What was the teacher's feedback last week, month, year? Have they put those into action?
      • Across teachers
        • What are the schoolwide strengths and weaknesses?
      • Your visits- how frequently is each teacher being observed?
        • Who aren't you seeing and why?
      • How effective your feedback was- what has and hasn't worked?
    • Build an observation tracker
      • Also allows you to supervise the observations of other leaders

Planning

What do students need to be able to do, and how will we help them be able to do it? Make tough choices- what you teach needs to be intentional.

Plans should indicate:

  • What students do
  • Order and prioritization of content
  • What's in, and what gets left out
  • How the activities help the objectives
  • How low-cost can you make the activities?
  • How will you find out whether students met the objectives?

Daily planning:

  • Continuously update the week with blockers, carryover work, "always" tasks
  • Set the core content
  • What do you need more time on, and what will you cut to accomodate that?
  • Develop tight activities for key lessons

Planning pitfalls

  • Not end-goal driven
    • Planning has to start from the assessment, not the standard
  • Treating all content equally
  • Providing insufficient guidance
  • Believing that leaders lack expertise because they may not be SMEs
  • Letting plans gather dust

Professional Development

  • Professional development only matters if it drives improvement in student learning
  1. What to teach: Focus on the areas that drive results
    • Plan based on what teachers need:
      • From data
      • From observations
      • From culture scores
    • What will you be able to do by the end?
      • Actionable
      • Evaluable
      • Feasible
  2. How to teach: Actively engage the teachers
    • Participants need to do the heavy lifting
    • Guide, don't tell
  3. Make it stick: Keep people accountable
    • Add PD goals to their individual goals

"Living the Learning" Structure

This is an alternative to guided practice (I do / we do / you do)

  1. Airtight activities- impossible not to come to the right conclusion
    • Video clips - Short, focused, positive
    • Case studies
      • Problem-solving
      • Learn from failure
      • Success stories
    • Role play - Aim for a visceral reaction
  2. Sharing - Let them formulate conclusions together
  3. Framing - Give a shared, formal language to the conclusions
  4. Application - Schedule putting it into practice
  5. Reflection - Take notes and gather thoughts (build this into the session)

Staff Culture

  • Staff culture is based on concrete actions, not charisma
  • Helps new teachers improve faster, returning teachers work smarter, and vets stay longer
  • Be authentically yourself
  1. Set the vision
    • What is the staff culture you want to build?
    • What do you want them to say about the school?
    • What do you want them to feel about the school?
    • How will you measure this?
  2. Get the right people on board
    • Hire for mission-alignment
    • Openness to feedback
    • Team fit (what do you need?)
  3. Put a stake in the ground
    • Set the right expectations during hiring, the beginning of the year, during the year, and at the end
  4. Look for negative culture warnings
    • Observe their interactions with each other for data
    • Confront warning signs at their cause
      • Immediately
      • In person
      • Private, with enough time
      • Targeted (only actions)
      • Don't "ban behavior"
      • Listen without responding, then ask questions
      • Use "we" over "you" / "I"
  5. Actively maintain it
    • Spend downtime on culture
    • Survey instructors:
      1. What's going well?
      2. What one thing that needs improvement
      3. What one thing that would make your life easier?
      4. A fun question that you can share with the team
    • Don't panic- keep your face "open" during stress
    • Tie back to the mission often
    • Make your culture hostile to disengagement
    • Explicitly track status of your culture
    • Why did I hire this person? Show people the "rare white buffalo" in each other

Managing School Leadership Teams

  1. Identify leaders
    • Max 15:1 ratio between leaders and teachers
  2. Train them
    • You are a coach of coaches
  3. Give them feedback and practice
    • Observe them the same way you observe your teachers
    • Leaders are rarely coached
    • Give them feedback on their feedback
  4. Evaluate them as leaders

Leadership Meetings

Common errors:

  • More announcements than instruction
  • More focus on the teachers being observed than feedback
  • Only doing walkthroughs
  • More reading than doing (book club syndrome)

Finding Time

  • Be intentional about how you spend your time
  • Firefighting doesn't improve student outcomes
  • Coach people to save smaller questions for their 1:1s
  • Figure out how to delegate your operations tasks
    • Make an ops checklist
    • Assign an ops leader or an ops team
  • Do all non-routine tasks and email at once
  • Make a monthly "on my radar" map to keep big events visible
  • Make every minute count

Lock in a weekly schedule:

  1. Determine the leader/student ratio you need
  2. Block out student culture- arrival, lunch, dismissal, and culture events
  3. Block out team meetings, professional development, leadership meetings
  4. Block out 1:1s
  5. Block out observation times
  6. Make time for culture observation
  7. Build in time for projects (probably no more than 3-5 hours a week)