On a short walkthrough, it’s not uncommon for a principal to leave feedback that fails to take into account the instruction that took place before or after the observation, and it’s easy to come to snap judgments in order to find something to write down.

One way to avoid this trap is to provide low-inference feedback – to describe what is taking place without drawing conclusions about it, then to ask open-ended questions to prompt further thinking. For example, if you observe that students are completing worksheets, and it seems to you that the task is not very engaging or rigorous, you might provide provide feedback as follows:

Students are working independently on practice sheets, while teacher circulates to answer questions and check for understanding.
Questions for reflection: In addition to personal effort, what factors determine the level of benefit students derive from written work?

This question focuses the teacher’s attention on the task’s level of cognitive demand, but without a judgment such as “This doesn’t seem very rigorous.”

It can be challenging to provide constructive feedback to your best teachers. What do you say to help someone improve their practice, when it’s already at a superior level?

The answer to this question may not be immediately obvious, so one way to address this instructional leadership challenge is to keep a “next steps” list of your staff. List all of your staff members, and keep notes on each person’s previous work and strengths, and note what the next level of work is.

For example:
Abrams – presented at math conference; working on motivating students who aren’t completing homework.
Baker – recently formed new reading groups; working with one group on summarizing expository text.
Childress – new behavior plan for JT; trying to reduce disruptions to rest of the class.
Davidson – Implemented literacy centers last month; trying to build students’ independence.

Recordkeeping is essential. Just as teachers keep anecdotal and formal notes, it’s helpful to physically keep a “next steps” list. A simple two-column sheet, with names in the left column and blank space in the right, should work.

• The crisis zone – ineffective leadership causing major problems for student learning and school operations
• The “warm body” zone – maintaining the status quo, keeping the school functioning the way any moderately competent person could
• The peak performance zone – truly making a difference in student learning

The size of the warm body zone varies from school to school. In some settings, anything but peak effectiveness will create a downward spiral into crisis. In other schools, it’s fairly easy to coast – the warm body zone is large, and it would be hard to derail the success that’s being experienced.

Our challenge is to break out of the warm body zone and into peak effectiveness. Are students in my school learning more because of my leadership? If so, I’m in the top zone, having a positive impact on student learning. If not, why am I here? Is it just to ensure that there’s a warm body in the principal’s office? Or am I driving myself and my school to excellence and results?

In schools where the challenge is to stay out of the crisis zone, reaching the peak performance zone may seem impossible. In schools with a larger “warm body” zone, breaking through to the peak performance zone can seem just as difficult.

My point is essentially this: principal performance matters for student learning. What drives you to excellence?

EdWeek on the 21st century library:

Information literacy, which has long fallen into the realm of librarians, is “no longer an optional literacy,” said Buffy Hamilton, the media specialist at the 1,500-student Creekview High School in Canton, Ga. “It’s a literacy and a form of cultural capital that I think you have to have in order to fully participate in today’s society.”
…
“There’s a lot of debate in the library field about whether you can even be a 21st-century librarian if you aren’t willing to embrace some of those Web 2.0 tools and be very proficient in them,” Ms. Foote said. “There’s a real need for us to be participating all the way through the [creation] process, and we need the skills to be able to do that.”

Joyce Kasman Valenza, the library information specialist for Springfield Township High in Pennsylvania, said that libraries are no longer “grocery stores” where students can go to pick up ingredients, but “kitchens,” where they have the resources necessary to create a finished product.

Read the full article at EdWeek

“Historically, there has not been a lot of will inside the school system to conduct a serious evaluation of employees. There’s been a failure of will to simply make use of the tools the district already had,” [school board member Steve] Sundquist says. “But this administration (under Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson) recognizes something needs to be done. The evaluation piece is critical. It’s front and center in the ways to improve how the district performs on behalf of our children.”

Read more

The article references the National Council on Teacher Quality’s report on the state of the teacher workforce in Seattle, which was recently commissioned by the Alliance for Education. You can download a PDF of the report here.

One of the proposed changes is a four-tier evaluation system. Rather than receive a “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” rating, teachers would be marked unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, or advanced. Similar change are under consideration at the state level.

But you won’t find him at Teachers College or ASCD. Atul Gawande is a surgeon.

In Better, he writes about numerous aspects of improvement in healthcare. In The Checklist Manifesto, he explores the power of checklists to reduce errors in complex fields such as aviation (where checklists are ubiquitous) and medicine (where he hopes to make checklists part of standard practice). I finished these two books in a day or two each, and am working on his first book, Complications, now.

In addition, Gawande writes regularly for The New Yorker.

Here’s Gawande in a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in which he talks about The Checklist Manifesto:

Clearly, there are many parallels between the challenges in healthcare and those faced by educators. I will soon have more to say on The Checklist Manifesto and Better from an educator’s perspective (you can subscribe to email updates using the form in the sidebar of this site).

Gawande will be in Seattle on May 3 if you’d like to hear him live.

The book that rose to my attention is Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn’t Report to You: A Project Manager’s Guide, by Tom Kendrick of Hewlett-Packard. This book is written from squarely within the corporate world, and while Kendrick’s examples focus on the types of project work that you might expect to take place in a company like HP, I found it easy to make connections with the world of education.

I resonated with Kendrick’s experience of leading a cross-functional team, with many members from other departments. I have at least 7 employees in my building who don’t report to me, but to a central office supervisor. We must work together on numerous aspects of school operations, from student support programs to coordinating evening family events. While principals naturally have a certain amount of authority even over employees they do not directly supervise, the strategies Kendrick uses are very helpful for avoiding the overuse of positional power, which can damage relationships and result in minimal compliance.

Kendrick outlines three primary ways to influence and guide a project to ensure that you get results:

1. Control through process – articulating and gaining agreement on how the work will be done (including how it will be monitored)
2. Control through influence – using vision, relationship-building, rewards, celebration, and other non-coercive means of getting everyone on the team to do their part
3. Control through project metrics – closely monitoring critical indicators of project health, and making adjustments when these indicators reveal a problem

Kendrick has a chapter on each of these aspects of controlling projects; these chapters are probably the most worthwhile for school leaders. There are are also chapters on project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure, but I found that these chapters got into details that don’t apply as directly to school leaders’ work.

However, one benefit of reading widely – beyond the field of education – is that one encounters concepts that are valuable to professionals in other lines of work. Thinking about these concepts from Kendrick’s book may help me better define what needs to be done for a given school initiative. For example:

• Deliverables – clearly defined products or documents that will be the end result of the project, e.g. a piece of software, a written manual, or a physical object that will be manufactured to exact specifications. In education, a deliverable might be a curriculum document, a service delivery model and schedule, or a written plan.
• Control – Kendrick uses the term control not in the sense of power or authority, but in the sense of manageability; to control a project is to keep it from spiraling into an unworkable mess. Making sure the work is realistic (in terms of timeline and budget) is essential for control.
• Metrics – specific measurements that indicate whether a project is trending in the right direction. While schools almost universally focus on “data,” the way Kendrick describes the use of metrics is much more diagnostic and linked to planning rather than judgments of success or failure. Are we on schedule to meet our next deadline? Is something costing much more than we anticipated?
• Sponsorship – in order to succeed with a project that may require more authority than you have, it’s essential that the project have an executive sponsor who can insist that you get the support you need. In a small district, this will likely be the superintendent; in a larger district, it may be another central office executive leader. The sponsor needs to know the purpose and plan for the project, and to needs to be kept in the loop as the project unfolds and changes.

Should you read Results Without Authority? Kendrick’s chapters on process, influence, and metrics are probably worth reading, even if it takes a bit of effort to make the connection between corporate PM and your work as a school leader. The rest may be worth skimming, as the remainder of the text is not particularly easy to get through. Kendrick gives good examples from actual projects, and the book features helpful diagrams, but it’s a fairly technical read.

Here’s another review of Results Without Authority, with detailed summaries of each chapter.

Regardless of whether Results Without Authority makes it onto your bookshelf this year, I highly recommend taking time to read widely within and beyond the field of education. You will doubtless find, as I did, many helpful concepts and insights that you’d never have encountered otherwise.

• Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage. Poorly written, but essential, especially for email and calendar sync with Exchange Server.
• OmniFocus for keeping track of tasks
• Evernote – my virtual file cabinet, for effortlessly keeping track of all information (text, photo, and otherwise)
• iTunes – essential for backing up the iPhone
• Firefox – increasingly the web browser is where work is done, and Firefox is the best.
• TweetDeck – the best Twitter client.
• OmniOutliner – a powerful outlining tool – much better than Microsoft Word. I will need to manually copy this, as I’m also upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard, but it’s not included
• VLC Media Player – a free, universal media player. More useful than QuickTime.
• Aperture, reluctantly – it’s out of date, but it has all of my photos trapped inside. Waiting for Aperture 3 to come out to upgrade.
• Fetch – FTP application.
• Caffeine – keeps the computer from going into “sleep” mode when you don’t want it to.
• UpOneLevel.app – a little script that adds a folder navigation keyboard shortcut for Finder.
• Curio – a great project planning tool, like a digital creative space. I use it for planning professional development.
• JungleDisk – for accessing backup data stored on Amazon Web Services.
• Skitch – a quick screen capture utility. Lets you annotate and publish/export screen captures very easily.
• Skype – I’d like to start using Skype to talk to people around the world, but I haven’t done so in years.
• TextWrangler – the best text/html file editor, capable of handling just about any plaintext file.
• Transmission – for managing large file transfers.
• Handbrake – for converting video from old to new formats.
• Quicksilver – a keyboard-based launching utility. They just released a Snow Leopard-ready version, after a long time without any new releases.

There are of course tons of other applications on my computer now, but I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of reinstalling them unless I had a specific reason.

What applications – Mac, Windows, or otherwise – do you find essential? If your computer was erased tomorrow, what would you reinstall immediately?

We typically think of physics as the ideal science – it is consistent, universal, and predictable. An experiment conducted in France can be replicated in Mexico or the United States, and the same results can be expected. If teaching is a science, why isn’t there a similar level of predictability?

This question has enormous implications for both instructional leaders and for policymakers. In the October 2009 issue of Educational Researcher (AERA), Pamela A. Moss, D. C. Phillips, Frederick D. Erickson, Robert E. Floden, Patti A. Lather, and Barbara L. Schneider take up the question of quality in education research in their article “Learning From Our Differences: A Dialogue Across Perspectives on Quality in Education Research” (38: 501-517).

Erickson explains why educational research is constantly (and unfruitfully) compared with natural science research:

The reason social science has suffered from physics envy is the assumption that the social world is basically like the natural world. What makes physics and chemistry work is an assumption of the uniformity of nature—a unit of force, or of heat, or a chemical element is the same in Britain as it is in France or on the face of the moon or in the most far-flung galaxy.
…

In the 19th century, as the social sciences were developing (looking over their shoulders at the mathematical physics of Galileo and Newton), there was a serious argument over whether social sciences should model themselves after the natural sciences or try for something else.
…
Adherents of what became the meaning-oriented approaches to social inquiry, the hermeneutical approaches described by Moss (2005b), took a position that meaning differences made such a difference between one social setting and another that there was in effect a nonuniformity of nature in social life (as I called it in my 1986 article on qualitative research on teaching; see Erickson, 1986). The notion was that it is local meaning that is causal in social life, and local meaning varies fundamentally (albeit sometimes subtly) from one setting to another. One of the consequences of this notion is deep distrust of the possibility of any generalization at all in social research…
…
Close descriptive study of a setting, based on extended participant observation and interviewing, doesn’t try to generalize directly from that setting to others…what happens in Miss Smith’s first grade is fundamentally different as a local ecology (subtly different, despite surface appearances of similarity) from what happens in Miss Jones’s room across the hall in the same school building. (Parents know this—that’s why they fight to get their kids into Miss Smith’s room, away from Miss Jones.) Nor is what happens in Miss Smith’s room quite the same as what happens in Miss Robinson’s room in the next school district. It follows that policy evidence for “scaling up”—trying to get everybody to adopt “best practices”—no matter how well produced technically—just doesn’t tell us what we need to know as educators. Best practices, as specific behaviors, don’t travel intact across the hall in one school building, let alone across the country. (p. 508, emphasis added)

Erickson’s extended argument implies what we, as instructional leaders, have long known: good teaching can’t be measured simply by checklists of “best practices.” Some of our best teachers don’t use the best practice du jour, and some of our most compliant adopters of new best practices are unable to pull everything together to create powerful and coherent learning experiences for students.

This suggests that instructional leadership is going to remain a labor-intensive, and inherently local, endeavor. If we want to improve the quality of teaching and learning in every classroom, we will need to be in every classroom. We will need to know the research, but the research will not save us. It may give us direction and help us understand what is taking place in our classrooms, but it does not (and cannot) provide a recipe for high-quality instruction.

In order to understand what is happening in a classroom and whether it’s good for kids, we need to adopt what Elmore (in Instructional Rounds) calls a descriptive-analytical-predictive approach. Briefly, we must ask three questions:

1. What is taking place in this classroom?
2. What dynamics does this create?
3. What learning do we expect this set of dynamics to cause?

After asking these questions, we can consider what next steps will improve the teaching and learning taking place in the classroom.

How do you see social science research influencing your work as an instructional leader?

If you keep a to-do list, a common problem is that the list gets too long, and it becomes harder to sort through it. When you reach this point, do you break it into multiple lists, and if so, on the basis of what criteria?

David Allen, in his bestselling book Getting Things Done, recommends collecting tasks on a “next actions” list, and only splitting it into separate project when you actually have multi-step projects.

I find it tempting to subdivide my lists by topic, even when a set of tasks isn’t actually a project – for example, when I have a number of tasks that are all about staff evaluations, but are in fact discrete tasks rather than a coordinated project in the sense that, say, planning a trip is a project. This isn’t a good idea.

The problem with creating too many lists is that they create too many places in which your tasks can hide.

How do you keep your tasks organized and visible, so you can keep track of them and make sure you complete them?