Did that teacher just get significantly better at something?
Do they know their next steps?
Have I put systems in place to hold them accountable?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, we know the meeting could have been more impactful.
As you read on, and as you reflect on your own teacher development program, I invite you to consider those questions as well. My hope is that if you currently have a no for any of the three, that you’ll have a yes for each one by the end of this book.
2
Expertise is Everything
I’m so much more gratified by my life now that I have an expertise.
—Angela Duckworth
People who have expertise just love to share it. That’s human nature.
—David Baldacci
If you are committed to driving the instructional vision of your school, it’s immensely important that you are and are seen as an expert. Teaching is the hardest job in the world. It’s like trying to file papers while falling out of an airplane. And while I’m sure being a brain surgeon is hard as well, I’m pretty certain that as the brain surgeon is about to make the first incision in the patient’s head, nobody calls out, “Can I go to the bathroom?!”
Teachers are absurdly busy, managing a dozen things at once, so making sure that your feedback to them is precise and accurate is of the utmost importance. Otherwise, you risk disinvesting the very people charged with educating the students.
I’m fortunate enough to get to observe, speak with, and spend time with teachers all over the country. They’re different in so many ways. Some teach every subject. Some teach one. Some teach students who come up to their knees and others teach students who tower over them. Some are the only teacher of their grade and subject in a small school. Others are one of a half-dozen who teach that grade and subject in a school with north of 1,000 students.
What they often have in common though, is this: many don’t see their bosses—meaning principals, assistant principals, deans of instruction, etc.—as a value-add when it comes to what’s happening in their classrooms. And often, they don’t respect the instructional expertise of the person who’s leading their schools.
Put more simply: teachers don’t think their bosses know what they’re talking about.
This is damning. And it’s happening all over the place.
To be clear, teachers sometimes like their bosses. They often say they’re nice and supportive, but when it comes to seeing their bosses as experts who drive the instructional vision of their schools, they rarely view them as such.
To know why, I’d like to take you on a brief journey into the past, to the first of my two jobs washing dishes and sweeping floors at Italian restaurants on Long Island. My boss was as nice and as friendly as they come. But he’d casually stroll in around dinner time and have the bartender pour him a glass of red wine. He’d sit at the bar, drinking his wine and eating the day’s specialty, even as the evening rush picked up. When customers had issues, he dodged them, often leaving it to less-senior members to handle. On one occasion, when the pizzamaker was out sick, the boss left me to make pizzas for the day. But I’d never done this before and he’d never taught me how to do it (despite telling me for weeks that he would), so my “pizzas” were misshapen, undercooked, and, I’d imagine, pretty gross to eat. He’d show up late, change the menu last-minute without reason, and pay us when it was convenient for him, but certainly not on a regular schedule. And on the rare occasions when he’d come into the kitchen, all I could think was, “Get out of here. You’re in the way. You don’t know what we do every day. So leave us alone so we can do our work.”
The way I felt about this boss is what many teachers express about their school leaders. They express the opinion that they’re successful (to whatever degree they are successful) not because of the school leader and their support, but in spite of them. In spite of their misaligned feedback. In spite of their cancelled meetings. In spite of their disconnect to the content. In spite of their unhelpful PD. In spite of their lack of follow-up. In spite of their infrequent visits to their classrooms.
This makes sense when you think about what happens at a typical school. The school year begins in the summer with some in-service training, usually around school and classroom norms, school culture, and content. Sometimes there’s goal setting and a revisiting of school values, with time to set up classrooms mixed in. Then students come, and in a lot of ways, teachers are then on their own. Even in schools with a lot of teacher coaching, where school leaders see each teacher every week for meetings and observations, teachers are still doing most of their work alone. And that’s in a school where the level of coaching is high. In most schools it’s significantly less than this. I recently had a teacher tell me, in March, that her principal hadn’t observed her all year. While most leaders see their teachers more often than this, for teachers, even an average amount of visits can feel really infrequent. Think about this: if a school leader is observing every teacher in her building nine times per year, which is once a month from September through May, and that teacher teaches four blocks of math a day, that means that teacher is teaching 720 blocks of math a year (four blocks multiplied by 180 days of school), 711 of which she’s teaching without feedback or direct coaching.
The point is, teachers are used to doing things on their own. Even in schools where support is sky-high, where a school leader does fifty or seventy-five observations a year per teacher, teachers still do the overwhelming majority of their work solo.
So, what often happens is teachers begin to see their school leaders as nuisances. As people totally out of touch with what’s actually happening in classrooms. This is why some teachers push back on evaluations (or want them eliminated altogether). Because it can feel like the person evaluating them doesn’t know what they’re doing. Leaders pick up on this, but they’re often not sure how to address it. So, they default to doing two things: hiding and high-fiving.
First, they spend a lot of time “hiding” in their offices. People like to feel successful, and school leaders are no different. They can feel the icy stares from teachers when they enter their rooms. They can see their feedback isn’t being implemented. So, they sit in their offices, responding to emails, meeting with parents, handling operations issues, and in some cases, spending the entire day with a student who’s gotten into trouble. These leaders are not visible throughout the day, choosing small victories with a handful of parents and students at the expense of positively impacting the larger school community.
Other school leaders decide to pull back from anything instructional at all. They know their feedback isn’t valued. They can feel that they’re in the teachers’ way. So, they become cheerleaders for the school. They circulate the building, patting people on the back, checking in to make sure people are okay, and “high-fiving” everyone they see, all the while, handing over the instructional reins to teachers. These leaders are usually liked by their teachers, which is what they’re striving for. But almost no one takes them seriously when it comes to impacting student outcomes.
In some of our trainings, we ask school leaders to write a job description for themselves. Not what they actually do every day, but what they believe they should do every day. Their answers are surprisingly aligned. They usually write something like this: “To positively impact students by coaching and supporting teachers.” But so many aren’t doing this. They’re either hiding or high-fiving.
To clarify, handling operations issues and meeting with parents are important parts of a school leader’s job. And a leader who has strong relationships and celebrates teachers is a great thing. What I’m suggesting is that doing only these things, out of lack of confidence or to simply avoid the pressure and inevitable discomfort of being