In a few weeks I will have my first class with a fairly new group of students working on their school administration endorsements.
It got me thinking about instructional leadership? What is it? What is it NOT? What do you WISH they would do?
So let’s hear it from a few of you. What does YOUR principal (or others) do to lead instruction in your school?
What do they NOT do that also shows leadership for instruction. Your comments will be shared and then discussed and commented on in class on this forum.
Tags: instructional leadership · leadership for instruction · principals · school leaders18 Comments
Great question, Mark! I expect instructional leaders to be able to give quality feedback after observations. Ideally, a principal would be able to see my growth as a teacher, be in ongoing conversations with me about my strengths and weaknesses as an educator and keep up on the latest and greatest pedagogical techniques. The instructional leader would also be able to model and suggest new ideas. I see the instructional leader as more of an instructional “coach.” Maybe that’s a good question to ask your students…is there a difference between an instructional “leader” and an instructional “coach”? My school has a principal, guidance counselor and some teachers. Who should be the “head learner”? Who will be the person who is modeling new techniques for others? If it isn’t the principal, who is it?
(Lots of disconnected thoughts, but a topic I, personally, would like to learn more about)
I believe instructional leadership is an endless job. Reports must be completed, and paperwork continues to grow leaving less time for administrators to visit classrooms. My ideal idea of an instructional leader would be to have them come in my room often and provide feedback, encouragement always telling me a way to improve my instruction. I appreciate leadership from an expert who doesn’t see my students every day. When the administrator comes back, I expect feedback on how well I implemented the new strategy. Due to other demands, I think instructional leaders don’t have as much time to be in classrooms. I also believe they need to help run an orderly school, deal with hard situations, and discipline with dignity. Lead and organize committees, involve community members in schools. Ideally they are a great organizer, time manager, and yet personable. It seems endless. I do see a need for instructional coaches because they can share, teach, and demonstrate in a nonthreatening manner. As stated you can see from what I’ve written above, the principal might need a little help. My principal works very hard to be in each teachers class, and I think this is helpful. We also use positive behavior supports in our school. This seems to help students learn how to behave, and when they forget we reteach. Our director of special education has allowed all of us to attend training and provided our district with writing coaches, and reading coaches to ensure we are helping kids. Our students with disabilities show growth and many are able to go on to tech schools or college and be quite successful.
Personally, I do not have any experiences in School settings. However, my experiences that I have gained came from a Native college.
At the college that I teach at, we have a position called VP of Instruction and the person who holds this position is in charge of Department Chairs who are responsible for managing faculty members. So, if we do a short comparison here, between the environments that I am acquainted with and schools’ systems, we can say that the superintendant is the VP of Instruction. The Principles would be Chairs and teachers would be faculty members. Hence, by drawing this comparison, I can visualize how schools’ systems work.
So to answer the question, instructional leadership or we can say instructional leaders are the managers of education. Here these managers are not dealing with capital-money. But, their capital here is different; it is our children’s future.
I don’t have experience working in a school except as a part-time contractual teacher and a mental health community consultant. I teach teen parents at an alternative high school and work with schools in community parterships for at-risk students. I’m also a parent of teenagers. From these 3 perspectives, I have worked with several principals that exemplify instructional leadership. Most importantly, from my perspective, they are exemplary communicators. They connect with students and engage with the students in a positive, empowering manner, treating each individual student with respect. The most excellent principles I have known have the gift of helping each individual student to feel recognized and valued, often using a sense of humor to help put the students at ease. These principals also connect with parents in numerous ways. Meanwhile, these exemplary principals communicate a school image to the community.These principals provide guidance and feedback to their faculty and staff and create a team-oriented climate in the building. Excellent principals somehow meet all of these communication needs while ensuring that student educational needs are being met in an increasingly high pressure environment in education. The most exemplary principals I have worked with are able to meet these standards while also focusing on individual student, teacher, and parent conerns. Such principals are adept at team building to ensure that students with special needs have a team of people to assist them toward achievement. These principals are advocates for their faculty, staff, students, and their parents, often facilitating creative and innovative solutions for unique problerms. I have seen these principals take political risks on behalf of the students to obtain services for them that are sometimes outside the box of traditional thinking. In this way, these principals are important leaders in creating educational and instructional (and community and societal) change. Principals such as these are everyday heroes!
Something my principal does that I find interesting is how he prompts the teachers to turn in their lesson plans. In sporadic emails he will ask them to turn in their lesson plans. The reason he states is so that he can see if they have something special planned that he can come in and observe.
Instructional leaders help staff, students, parents and community members focus on the purposes of school by limiting distractions, removing obstacles, and utilzing resources effectively. They model and expect all activity to be centered around students and the work of students with relevant content and engaging work which allows students to learn what schools, parents, and communities expect.
Instructional leaders do not become obstacles and distractions through self-serving behaviors. They do what’s best for students and the organization’s purposes even when they don’t want to personally.
In my experience I have only had one principal that I truly thought exemplified the job of instructional leader. This principal was in the classrooms frequently, providing positive reinforcement to both the students and teachers. This principal was very good at communicating his expectations for the school year at the beginning of the year and following through with all expectations throughout the year. When teachers needed additional training in a particular area, he provided it by having in-services and sending the teachers that struggled after the in-service to additional training out of district. When a teacher was struggling with getting lesson plans in he would send a friendly reminder via e-mail or if he knew the teacher was particularly busy he would go get the lesson plan book from the teacher, go make copies himself and return the book in a matter of minutes. This principal respected EVERYONE including students that misbehaved, he never gave up on any students.
I have also seen horrible instructional leaders who were so wrapped up in making the school board happy that they neglected to help their teachers in a positive manner. In one particular instance the principal sat in his office and rarely left it, he would send out frequent e-mails with websites that the teachers might want to try in their classrooms but he never actually visited the classrooms to see if teachers were using the websites. At no time did this principal handle discipline of students if a student was sent to his office, he would visit with the student then reprimand the teacher at the end of the day because the “teacher had taken the students misbehavior to seriously kids will be kids”. It was well known that if you sent a student to his office you would be written up and the student would be allowed to enjoy their day, even when students were in physical altercations the principal believed that “kids will be kids”—he had no children of his own.
In my opinion an instructional leader must find the balance of making the school board happy and the school happy, this can often be a tricky endeavor, however I know that it is possible. An instructional leader needs to be able to admit their weaknesses and delegate appropriately. I expect an instructional leader to come into my classroom and not judge me but evaluate me, this is particularly important if my principal is not endorsed in my field. If I have a principal that is endorsed in elementary ed, but comes into my secondary classroom I want them to acknowledge that they might not know everything there is to know about secondary ed and ask questions before judging my performance.
An instructional leader will be good at recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses and leading based on those.
One thing that I think is working well for one of my principals is the fact that she allows her paraprofessionals time to meet as a professional learning community, once during our 6-day rotation. These para’s have cleared scheduled for 50-minutes and during their PLC time they discuss student behavior data, achievement data, building concerns, and often even have training on various topics. This has really given them the opportunity to feel that they help with decisions in the building and have a voice. I have suggested it to one of my other principals as an option to help with the problems with communication that occurs.
In addition to the “What Works?” I think that instructional leadership is the ability to lead a staff and students to their highest potential while keeping open and fair communications, having a safe and nurturing environment that is conducive to learning, and one that has the students best interest in the fore front.
Principals can NOT stay in their office, they must be visible to their staff, parents, and students. Informal walk throughs, duties, and other appearances are just as important as business as usual. This is also true with communication. Principals must have an open door policy and be willing to listen to both sides of a story and then come to a fair solution. They will need to follow up with all their decisions too.
I believe having adequate staff and student input is important too and should be considered with many issues. Committees, including interview teams, need to include parents and other stake holders to keep a welcome balance.
Cristy
An Instructional Leader is an individual who guides and provides professional development for teachers on a continual basis. An instructional leader provides support and encouragement. What is NOT an instructional leader is an individual that sits in his office and does not provide professional development for his/her teachers. This individual does not recognize that the principal’s success depends on the teacher and the end product is the students’ success.
At this point, I cannot make a wish list for my instructional leader because he is on target with professional development and so forth. He provides us with the latest research data; he continually gives the teachers the freedom to teach to learn. He explores new innovative teaching strategies, such as Marzano’s Six Teaching Strategies. He is open to new ideas and is very positive with the direction the building is headed.
As a matter of fact, I met very briefly today with my principal about a teaching strategy that I will be implementing in my classroom. He listened to my ideas and he constructively gave me ideas on how to present and deliver the lesson. I felt very comfortable knowing that he was sincere and authentic.
I had a very good principal once. This person was not only extraordinary at being a principal, but had PR skills that were out of the roof. I think that PR skill was probably the one thing that made her stand out as a leader. She was incredible in her skill to get others to believe in her and jump on her platform. Her interaction with both students and staff were appropriate and professional in ever way. She was highly visible at work, which I believe give her rapport with every person she contacted. I think as a leader it is important that your personality be much like that of a great politician. I think that this type of personality is a magnet for people’s support and loyalty. She possessed this type of personality. She was able to hold people accountable, even at the expense of making people mad at times, and still hold that person’s trust and loyalty. I think that because of her integrity and great leadership, it is impossible to stay mad at her or betray her.
At the same time of being highly visible and a very involved leader, she did not micromanage. She was very skilled at being able to allow her staff the space that they needed to do their jobs and let their qualities shine. She didn’t involve herself where she didn’t see fit. I think that is something that makes a wonderful leader. She instilled the idea in the heads of her staff that they were valuable and skilled. She made her staff feel valued and intelligent. She did not make anybody feel that it was “her way or the highway”. I think she had a very good understanding and feel for what things to act on as a leader and what things to stay quiet on as a leader. She was very good at bringing out the best in people and making known the qualities of each of her staff.
I think the answer to this question is at the heart of the potential for educational reform in this country. My experience both in the classroom and in district leadership has been that almost all principals have fairly strong training in being managers of facilities, employees, budgets and communities. What they do not share is training or experience in leading learning for all members of their community.
In my work with supporting building leaders with accountability measures there is a feeling of confidence when faced with operational challenges, employee management and student behavior issues. There is a parallel sense of unease with modeling, critiquing, re-aligning or measuring actual classroom instruction.
So my answer to the question is defined more in the negative as what leadership in education currently is not. Education leaders currently do not often enough truly lead learning.
Instructional leadership is the actions that a principal does to promote student learning and success within a school. The main key here is they lead. The best way to lead is by example. Principals would like to create an environment where kids enjoy being there. They have to be seen around the school by many including students, teachers, aides, maintenance workers and janitorial staff. They must show that they enjoy being there and like the people they are around. It is essential that they work diligently at their job demonstrating the importance of quality, meaningful work.
I was extremely fortunate to have such a principal for one year early in my career. This principal did everything to the best of her ability and brought out the best in me. She regarded education so highly that my attitude about everything that I did in the halls or the classroom was elevated. It was this tremendous respect that she had for our educational foundation that transcended into my daily routines. This provided the necessary desire for me to become more as a teacher, coach and ultimately helped in the decision to become an educational leader.
I think that I have had the opportunity to spend five of the years that I have been teaching in a very productive elementary school and one that is lead by a leader that always puts the children’s educational needs first, demands excellence from all, and endlessly provides and encourages training for her staff. Ofcourse everybody has their weakness, but her strengths far exceed her weaknesses and I think the progress the school has made proves this. She is a leader that asks nothing of her staff that she would not do herself. As some would say she is in the ditches with us everyday. She is not there to be anybodies friend so when she is making tough decisions she never makes that decision based on whether one will like her or not. I actually think that my principal’s strongest strength is her leadership for instruction. She has spend many hours to organize our school so that the teachers and staff are being used to their max potential and time is not wasted, but used efficiently. She created a master schedule that schedule ALL the staff including all support staff. There are “no zones” that no child is to be pulled for anything and the teacher is able to do 90 minutes of reading with the entire class. Small reading groups are not an option, they will be done and every group will be seen. Any child that is not at grade level benchmark is has a running record done by the classroom teacher monthly and it is turned into our principal and stored in our AMP notebooks. She demands that every teacher that works with a child know where they are functioning at an instructional level. One of the important things too, is that she sets the vision that every child in the school is all our responsibility and we work as a team to achieve our goals. Interventionist do pull for small reading groups so that the students at risk are double dipped and getting as much reading as possible. This is scheduled strategically so that those students are missing NO instruction while out of the classroom. Math and writing flooded groups are formed so that minimal if any pull out is done in those subjects. The lowest groups are flooded with teachers. The classroom teacher, special education teacher, and title one or interventionist. At times there are multiple adults from an area within that classroom. She also tries to put adults in the classrooms with the most needs that have specific trainings and experience. The paras and aides are scheduled as well. They participate in all interventions and working with a child or group takes priority over any copying or bulletin boards. Teacher’s that will utilize their aides to assist with instruction get priortiy over teachers that are not. Our principal brings in trainers to our school, constantly buys professional development books and has book studies go on, puts in for travel. 99% of the time she is right there in the trainings with us as she wants to stay current and know what is going on in the classrooms. As a staff we identify our weaknesses and schedule our professional development around those weaknesses so that we can get better. The success we have had is because of the expectations that our principal has set, her knowledge, and her drive to make sure the students are getting everything they need. Ofcourse she has weaknesses as all of us do, but her weaknesses do not effect her leadership in instruction. What I hear out of her mouth the most is, “I’m glad we are 90% proficient in an area, but we still have 10% that are not.” After reading the first few chapters of our book, my principal fits what they say a good leader of instruction is. I am just glad I am experiencing and learning from her everyday. I challenge anybody to walk into our school and ask our principal where any child is instructionally or behaviorally and she could tell you. That is amazing to me.
When I think of what our leaders do to lead instruction, I think of their abiltiy to connect with people. They must constantly try to build a purposeful community with the people who are essential to the learning of our students. They must be strategic in how they plan, how they execute plans, and how they engage the people within the plan. I really believe that it comes down to what the leader believes. The actions of the leader will show what those beliefs are, and if the leader believes in sound instruction, then he/she will do everything to make that happen.
One area of instructional leadership that I would put on my wish list, would be more interaction with the master-teachers that are already doing great work as educators. This simple opportunity to watch great teachers in action can have a great impact on new educators. As a prospective administrator I am interested in tapping into the strength and experience of veteran master teachers to assist in the instructional quality of the school as a whole.
I believe building level administrators should truly be the instructional leader in their building. If learning is the ultimate goal, then I think being the instructional leader only makes sense. However, the influence a building administrator has in this area is really dependent on a wide variety of factors. I have personally been in a situation where I was stretched so thin wearing other hats as an administrator, that my ability to be an instructional leader was hampered to say the least. I am in a position now where I have enough administrative support in the building where I can actually give instructional leadership the attention it deserves.
I think district level administrators and school boards need to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to instructional leadership. If you want your principal or assistant principal to be in the classroom most of their time and truly impacting the learning environment, then don’t put them in a situation where they are spread too thin doing other job responsibilities.
Also, I think it is important for the instructional leader to have the support of the district with a district adopted evaluation system that is comprehensive. The days of one page, satisfactory and unsatisfactory, evaluations need to be gone forever. I am in a district now that has a very comprehensive evaluation system and it allows me as an administrator to provide meaningful evaluations to teachers. One fourth of the evaluation tool deals soley with professionalism and professional responsibilities. It is wonderful.
The principal has the responsibilty of being a manager, an administrator, instructional leader and curriculum leader at different points in a day.
Flath 1989 cited that instructional leadership are those actions that a principal takes, or delegates to others, to promote growth in student learning. An Instructional Leader is not a ‘boss’. A boss passes out rules, she sits back and watch the staff works and often times take credit for all the work done. The leader on the other hand is a team builder. She/He seeks advice and collaborate with staff before making decisions that will affect the staff.
The principal at my school, seeks advice from staff members about activities and other issues which affects the school. She is quite a professional. She is strict on lesson planning and is one who believes in an honest days work for an honest pay. She is also a socialable person, not one who is stuck up but will come down or go up to the levels of others to socialize. She is kind to students and staff members alike. There is one thing that I would love to see her work on though is her memory. She will agree with me that she cannot remember where she puts things att times but that is where helpful staff members come in to remind her that what she is looking for is ‘right there’.