Leading With Intention

by Jeanne Spiller

  • The student body truly represents the diversity of human experience and each member is being prepared to interact, survive, and thrive as a 21st century learner and world citizen.

  • The culture, educational program, and support services are informed by and sensitive to the student body’s social and emotional needs….

  • The kind of opportunity roadblocks that cause the “haves” to receive more of what education has to offer and the “have-nots” to receive less have been identified and eliminated and all doors are open to opportunities to engage each student in challenging learning experiences.

  • Instructional excellence is the norm, and each member of the instructional team is not just committed to professional mastery but also supported in a way that allows for development and demonstration of such excellence.

  • The student body is motivated and supported to discover their passions and advance toward positive personal, familial, social, civil, and vocational goals and opportunities. (pp. 2–3)

  No matter what challenges students face—what backgrounds and family values they bring to school or their gender, race, or home language—as the school leader, you consider them first in all decisions and priorities in the school. Education should not be a lottery in which the lucky students get the best teachers. Researcher John Hattie (2015) identifies the need to address this most critical roadblock to learning: removing the variability in learning from classroom to classroom. He states that appropriate attention to this problem has not come to bear because it requires uncomfortable examination of the quality of teaching and teachers (Hattie, 2015).

  Reflection

  How can you ensure all students receive the education they deserve in every classroom in your school? What can you do to lead and inspire teachers to have the greatest impact on students?

  Wrap-Up

  Schools exist for students. Ensuring that your decisions, your actions, and all that takes place at your school are about the student is what we want you to think about as you move on to the next chapter. As we have stated, we know that the intentions of many leaders are focused on students; it is aligning decisions and the actions that follow to these intentions that leaders often need help with. We hope to assist you with this task through the reflections in this book. Wrap up your examination of prioritizing the student by completing the “Making an Impact in Eight: Prioritizing the Student” reflections (pages 113–115). In the next chapter, we will take you into the classroom where you will surely want to bring your student-centered focus along with you.

  Making an Impact in Eight: Prioritizing the Student

  The following eight ideas provide opportunities for further reflection and action. We provide five reflections on what great leaders do and avoid doing to gain focus, as well as three considerations for how to make an impact in eight minutes, eight weeks, and eight months to guide your leadership planning and practice.

  Chapter 6

  Leading Instruction

  All great leaders are teaching, and all great teachers are leading!

  —Richard DuFour

  Gone are the days of teachers pulling out the previous year’s laminated lesson plans without a thought of their students’ individual learning needs. The complexity of instruction can be dizzying: differentiating lessons, grouping and regrouping students based on learning needs, providing additional time for learning, reteaching when necessary, and knowing exactly what a student needs to move to the next level of learning are non-negotiable expectations in schools today. We understand how challenging these demands can be for teachers. School leaders must take an active role in leading instruction. During our work in schools, teachers often tell us they are either unsure of how to improve instruction or they don’t know where to go for support. They speak frankly about not feeling confident and competent in their instruction, and too often they are uncomfortable speaking to a school leader about what they need. Without the support of school leaders, teachers can feel the challenges of instruction are insurmountable.

  Focusing on Instruction in a PLC

  In a PLC, collaborative team members work interdependently in a cycle of collective inquiry to answer the four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016):

  1. What knowledge, skills, and dispositions should every student acquire as a result of this unit, this course, or this grade level?

  2. How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?

  3. How will we respond when some students do not learn?

  4. How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient? (p. 36)

  Kanold (2011) reminds us that the intent of building collaborative cultures in schools is the pursuit of improved student achievement through collaborative teacher decisions on what students need to know and learn, how best to assess that expected knowledge, and how to provide a coherent and timely response when students don’t learn. The answers to the four critical questions should be the foundation of teams’ collaborative practice, with the goal of crafting instruction that meets the needs of all students in the classroom. Adding to this foundation, it is essential for leaders to guide teachers using a common language and, as previously stated, clear, non-negotiable (tight) expectations. DuFour et al. (2016) describe the tight elements in a PLC that focus a team’s work:

  • Educators work collaboratively rather than in isolation, take collective responsibility for student learning, and clarify the commitments they make to each other about how they will work together.

  • The fundamental structure of the school becomes the collaborative team, in which members work interdependently to achieve common goals for which all members are mutually accountable.

  • The team establishes a guaranteed and viable curriculum, unit by unit, so all students have access to the same knowledge and skills regardless of the teacher to whom they are assigned.

  • The team develops common formative assessments to frequently gather evidence of student learning.

  • The school has created a system of interventions and extensions to ensure students who struggle receive additional time and support for learning in a way that is timely, directive, diagnostic, and systematic, and students who demonstrate proficiency can extend their learning.

  • The team uses evidence of student learning to inform and improve the individual and collective practice of its members. (p. 261, italics added)

  As the school leader, your support of these tight elements has to be part of your intentional focus to improve instruction and learning. Creating the time for teams to collaborate is a necessary first step, and then ensuring that teachers understand the four critical questions and why this work is tight should be part of your leadership plan. Providing your teachers with professional learning and coaching on the PLC process and then supporting the work during team time are necessary.

  When we coach on site with collaborative teams, we start with the four critical questions and assess teachers in their understanding of the process based on their ability to answer these questions. For example, one of DuFour et al.’s (2016) tight elements is to establish a guaranteed and viable curriculum, which refers back to the first PLC critical question, What do we want students to know and be able to do? In order for teams to be tight on ensuring a guaranteed and viable curriculum and answer this question, they have to agree on what it is they want students to master. Identifying which grade-level standards or outcomes are essential, what to expect for proficiency, and how to plan instruction unit-by-unit to ensure this is often where we start our coaching. Once they are tight on what they will teach, we can then move to the second critical question, How will we know if the students have learned it?, and to creating common formative assessments aligned to the guaranteed and viable curriculum. As the school leader, you can use the four critical questions to guide your work with your teachers.

  Reflection

  Consider your current reality with collaborative teams. Is there common understanding
on what they want students to master at each grade level? For example, prior to creating an instructional plan, can they clearly explain to you what their expectations are for students to achieve? How can you support strengthening this tight element? What can your next steps be? Are there other tights elements with which your teams need support?

  Supporting Instruction

  At Fox Elementary School in Columbus, Georgia, Principal Yvette Scarborough has embraced school-improvement work with a focus on instructional leadership (Y. Scarborough, personal communication, September 2016 to June 2018). Principal Scarborough recognizes that to improve student learning and meet student needs, teachers must have better instructional plans and use effective strategies. She cannot assume teachers know how to do this; she must have a plan for leading instruction. Part of Principal Scarborough’s plan was to ensure that her teachers worked collaboratively to meet the needs of her students. She created time in the schedule for common planning and opportunities for teachers to understand the work of PLCs. Focusing on critical question one, she started with instructional planning.

  Principal Scarborough used a lesson-planning template similar to figure 6.1 to create stronger collaborative planning around prioritized standards and next steps for instruction. The template provides a step-by-step lesson plan for carrying out the instructional components.

  FIGURE 6.1: Lesson-planning template.

  Visit go.SolutionTree.com/PLCbooks for a free reproducible version of this figure.

  1. Preplanning: Identify the essential or prioritized standards or outcomes. Unpack the standards or outcomes to deepen understanding and to write learning objectives aligned to the standard. Create an assessment plan, identify the essential questions that students will be able to answer for proficiency, and consider what high-order thinking questions would be used to ensure grade-level rigor and what vocabulary would be included in the instructional plan.

  2. Review and activate: Teachers plan a short introductory activity to intentionally review a previously taught skill or concept that is important background knowledge and add a link to the objective of the next lesson. Purposeful planning should include a hook that will create excitement and enthusiasm for the lesson objective.

  3. Model and practice: Using a gradual release model (I do, we do, they do, you do), teachers plan their instruction to ensure student learning is supported by direct instruction, modeling, and practice. During the we-do, you-do stages, teachers will need to have planned how they will check for understanding and be very formative in their daily practice to ensure that they can adjust their instructional plan to meet student needs. Small-group instruction, flexible groupings, and interventions can be purposefully planned during the they-do and you-do stages.

  4. Closure: Teachers plan an intentional closure to the lesson. This allows for review and alignment back to the learning objectives and clarification of next steps for all students. For some students, this may mean that more time is required in small-group tutorials and interventions. It is also an opportunity for teachers to introduce a connection to the next day’s lesson objective.

  At first, teachers found using the tool to be too much work. It seemed to take a long time to complete the template, and they tackled it out of compliance only (rather than as a way to help them meet student needs). Principal Scarborough believes in “practice before belief”; she realized that teachers had to initially experience the work in order to help them understand and believe in the process. As she explains, she moved to Fox Elementary having experienced past success with the lesson planning and strategies that she was asking teachers to use (Y. Scarborough, personal communication, June 2018). She understood that teachers at Fox did not have these same past experiences; while she wanted to support their common understanding with professional development, she believed that teams really needed to do the work to truly understand the reason that this instructional planning had to be a tight. She also provided teachers with professional development and side-by-side coaching from school instructional coaches and spent many hours in classrooms to support deep understanding of expected effective instructional practices.

  Principal Scarborough would be the first to admit she did not win over every teacher with her thinking, in fact, even when their hard work paid off resulting in higher student achievement and the school’s removal from the state’s at-risk school list. Some teachers transferred out of the school. Principal Scarborough believed that, for many of the teachers, the intensity of the instructional expectations and the focus on tights were still challenges that they did not want to accept. Despite practicing the work, they still did not believe in it or were not willing to accept the expectation that this was not an option at the school (Y. Scarborough, personal communication, June 2018).

  Fortunately for the students at Fox, many of the teachers did begin to believe, and they started to talk about planning in a different way. When Karen conducted a needs assessment following the second year of the improvement initiative, one teacher exclaimed, “I don’t know how I planned before!” The teacher recognized that by collaborating around prioritized and unpacked standards to actually determine instructional strategies that matched the rigor of the standard, she was doing much more to provide instruction to help the students work at and actually master grade-level work.

  Mike Schmoker (2011) supports efforts such as those of Principal Scarborough. In Leading With Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, he states:

  Despite their limitless differences, effective lessons share the same well-known core structure. Though terms may differ, the essential parts of a good lesson include a clear learning objective with some effort to provide background knowledge or create interest in the topic, teaching and modeling, guided practice, checks for understanding/formative assessment, and independent practice/assessment (which can be one in the same). (pp. 52–53)

  Additionally, Schmoker (2011) references the research of Madeline Hunter, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, Robert Marzano, James Popham, Dylan Wiliam, and John Hattie to further support the elements of a good lesson and the impact of these simple elements of good instruction. In addition, Schmoker (2016) states:

  We can’t expect lessons that embrace these elements to become the norm until leaders understand and communicate their outsize importance and are able to adequately execute sound lessons themselves. (p. 46)

  Principal Scarborough demonstrated her understanding and willingness to learn by leading professional development on her instructional expectations, and when she was not leading, she participated. She modeled her willingness to be a continuous learner working side by side with teachers and being open to support and coaching from Karen and others. Through this work, teachers developed a stronger understanding of the elements of an effective lesson and the instructional importance of lessons being well-planned.

  Reflection

  What is your current instructional expectation for lesson planning in your school? Is it tight, and do teachers have a good understanding of the elements of an effective lesson? What can your next steps be to increase the impact of this work?

  Supporting Instruction in Struggling Schools

  In our school-improvement work, we are often asked to support turnaround schools; they may have received federal, provincial, or state grants and are working to increase student achievement in very difficult situations. One common thread among these low-performing schools is that their leaders and teachers find it challenging to speak specifically and deeply about student needs. Student needs are so great and so widespread that they often overwhelm the staff, so there is little hope for improvement. It is almost as if educators have given up because the task seems so great. In many situations, what we see missing is clear, actionable information about exactly what students need. A deep dive into the data and student work to determine individual and collective student needs skill-by-skill is necessary and will focus the team on immediate action steps. We have seen overwhelmed teams unsure w
hat to do find hope and clarity after digging deeply into the student data. School leaders can support this work by helping teams with structures and protocols to guide them as members dig for specificity and clarity regarding student needs (see chapter 4, page 83, for specific information on making data-driven decisions). Reminders from leaders about high expectations for all students, a “yes we can” attitude about student learning, and the team’s ability to make a difference for their students no matter what their challenges or obstacles are critical to this process.

  Reflection

  How can you, as a leader, help your teachers develop a “yes, we can” attitude despite challenging needs? What will you commit to in order to develop this mindset?

  Supporting a Positive Classroom Environment

  In classrooms, the environment is either conducive to learning or gets in the way of learning. During one walkthrough with a principal, Jeanne experienced the latter. It was clear from the moment she walked in that despite a solid instructional plan, the teacher was struggling with procedures and management. Transitions were difficult, and simply getting the students’ attention was a challenge for the teacher. Jeanne and the principal reflected on the situation after leaving the classroom. The principal recognized the problem but was not sure how to address it with the teacher. He asked Jeanne, “Now what? What is the best way to approach this with the teacher?” This question led them to reflect about the importance of strong procedures and management to support instruction. They discussed many approaches, including one-on-one professional learning related to high-quality instructional planning, consideration of the strategy the teacher would use to elicit the attention of the students, effective transitions, and a clear instructional learning progression. Other approaches included coteaching and modeling sessions with an instructional coach, learning walks to other classrooms to see models of the desired practice, ongoing visits to other classrooms with discussions prior to the visit to develop a clear plan, and postvisit reflections with the principal.