Instructional Leadership?

Posted: January 15th, 2014 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Dan Willingham has a great blog about instructional leadership.

Dan cites this study, co-authored by a woman I know and admire, Susanna Loeb, and a guy I think I met on email a few months ago, Ben Master. They find:

The results showed that principals spent, on average, 12.6 percent of their time on activities related to instruction. The most common was classroom walkthroughs (5.4%) and the second was formal teacher evaluation (2.4%).

Questions for Bridge –

1. How much of academy manager time should be on “instructional leadership”?

2. What should this time look like?

3. How does a Bridge AM differ in instructional knowledge compared to a USA principal?

4. What is the next best use of a school leader’s time? For example, could a school leader watch a class, and thereby free up a teacher to observe a peer?

The authors also find:

As to the primary question of the study, time spent on instructional leadership was NOT associated with student learning outcomes.

But once “instructional leadership” was made more fine-grained, the picture changed.

Time spent coaching teachers–especially in math–was associated with better student outcomes. So was time spent evaluating teachers and curriculum.

But informal classroom walkthroughs–the most common activity–were negatively associated with student achievement. This was especially true in high schools.

My reading of this study goes as follows:

1. School leaders who “know what they’re doing” and genuinely interested in teacher improvement can help teachers.

2. There are other school leaders who would prefer not to do this work. In many cases, it’s because they have tried to coach or observe teachers before, with bad outcomes.

3. School districts might coerce their school leaders by saying “You must be in classrooms.” A common result is a school leader who visits classrooms, does not offer constructive feedback.

Maybe they’re polite and at least teacher is not annoyed but still notices that she’s hearing platitudes; maybe the leader is uninformed and haughty (double trouble), and focuses on a random “input” (does the bulletin board look nice) and misses the key education moments.

As they say in medicine, first do no harm.