Now We're Talking. Justin Baeder

Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009; Teitel, 2013). Though definitions and practices vary, learning walks usually involve groups of staff—including professionals other than teachers’ direct supervisors—visiting classrooms together. In some cases, other teachers, parents, and students may also participate in learning walks. After a learning walk, the visiting team may debrief with or without the teachers it observed, and may or may not provide feedback.

      The goal in all learning walk models is to learn from classroom practice, and this is an admirable goal.

      The goal in all learning walk models is to learn from classroom practice, and this is an admirable goal. If you can organize a learning walk in your school or district—or better yet, schedule regular learning walks in each school—you are likely to find them valuable. Consider the following points.

      

Learning walks should be explicitly nonevaluative—a team with very little context about a teacher’s practice is not in a position to fairly evaluate that practice (City et al., 2009).

      

Teachers should receive advance notice that the team may visit during the learning walk, simply as a professional courtesy and to avoid wasting time if, for example, students will be taking a test during the given time slot.

      

The team’s focus should remain on its own learning, not providing feedback to teachers or evaluating their practice, and it should communicate this focus clearly to teachers in advance.

      

All teachers who are observed during the learning walk should receive some type of encouraging comment or acknowledgement, such as a thank-you note.

      

While the learning walk team may generate questions for inquiry and discussion (such as, “Did the teacher consider doing X instead of Y?”), no one should pose these questions to teachers on the spot in order to avoid putting them on the defensive.

      A more specific and well-defined model that has gained traction, driven by the work of Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, and their colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the practice of instructional rounds (City et al., 2009). In this model, central office leaders take a purposeful and systematic approach to learning walks, seeking to glean organizational insights from their time in classrooms. In the instructional rounds model, the focus is on system and cross-system learning and decision making more than individual learning. Because the individual instructional leader and teacher are not the primary focus, instructional rounds may not include feedback to the teacher or a conversation with the teacher.

      In contrast, the high-performance instructional leadership model is designed to provide an individual leader with a deep understanding of each teacher’s practice and decision making through repeated observations and conversations. Given these distinct purposes, you may find instructional rounds to be a useful complement to the high-performance instructional leadership model.

Hybrid Models

      You will no doubt use a combination of these models under various circumstances, such as when you visit classrooms with a leader you work with, and when you conduct formal evaluations of the teachers or leaders you supervise. Follow the high-performance instructional leadership model closely, and modify it only when you have a specific reason for doing so. For example, when you typically visit classrooms, you may take notes and have a follow-up conversation with the teacher later in the day. During a learning walk with your peers and supervisors, though, you may choose to visit each classroom without taking notes and chart your observations as a group later. Regardless of your approach, strive to match your process to your goals and avoid unintended consequences by preparing carefully.

Day 3 Action Challenge: Review Your Instructional Leadership Models

      Make a list of the instructional leadership and supervision processes you currently use in your school. You may want to consider the following questions for reflection as you review the models you’re currently using.

      

How do your current instructional leadership processes overlap and interact with one another?

      

How do they impact teachers, and how do teachers perceive them?

      

If you were to implement the high-performance instructional leadership model with perfect fidelity, how would that impact the other models in use in your school or district?

      4

      Conducting Your First Two Cycles of Visits

      Now that we’ve explored the high-performance instructional leadership model in depth, compared it to other models, and identified the role it can play in your larger work, it’s time to take action. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to plan your first two cycles of classroom visits—two rounds of visiting every teacher you supervise. It’s critical to begin with the full cycle in mind rather than start to visit classrooms without a solid plan, because how you start determines how successful you will be—which, in turn, will determine whether you abandon your attempts or turn them into a powerful habit. This chapter will help you develop a realistic plan for your visits, as well as set expectations and communicate your intentions to teachers. We’ll then discuss how to conduct your first cycle of visits and highlight how this process will develop into your second cycle.

Consider Planning Issues

      If you’re a school administrator, there’s a good chance you’ve already resolved and attempted to make regular visits to classrooms a core element of your leadership practice. If you’re like most administrators, though, your attempts have been short lived and less impactful than you’d have liked. Using the strategies in this book, every administrator can—and should—visit classrooms upwards of five hundred times per year (three classrooms a day for most—if not all—days of the school year), but make no mistake: it’s a challenge. And as with any challenge, success requires a solid plan.

      There are two key planning issues to consider. First, you’ll want to develop a realistic schedule that creates time for classroom visits, and a plan to handle the additional work they create. Second, you’ll want to plan what expectations you’ll communicate to staff about your high-performance instructional leadership visits, as well as how and when you’ll communicate about them.

      Develop a Realistic Schedule and Plan

      If you’re excited about the idea of getting into classrooms more, you may be tempted to set an unrealistic goal such as visiting every classroom every day. Instead, let your commitment and enthusiasm spur you toward realistic planning and diligent follow-through. On the other hand, don’t aim too low or try to ease into the habit; like medicine, classroom visits require a certain dose to have any meaningful impact, so if you decide to visit only one classroom a day, you won’t have a noticeable impact on learning and won’t get the positive feedback that is essential for forming habits.

      Plan to visit three classrooms per day, every day. If you share teacher evaluation responsibilities with other administrators in your school, plan to visit only the teachers you evaluate. Most administrators evaluate approximately thirty teachers, so making three visits per day should take you to every classroom every two weeks or so. If you supervise a large number of teachers, you may not make it around to each teacher quite as often, but having a sustainable,