In this episode of The Eduleadership Show, I had the honor of sitting down with Kim Marshall, one of our field’s leading experts on instructional leadership. When I was a principal, his book Rethinking Teacher Supervision & Evaluation was deeply formative for me, and I’ve continued to benefit from Kim’s thinking and writing ever since.
A summary of our conversation:
Marshall argues that traditional evaluation systems (lengthy write-ups, pre/post conferences) often become compliance exercises that don’t improve teaching.
His core shift as a principal was to frequent, short (10–15 minute), systematic, unannounced visits followed by meaningful face-to-face conversations.
The post-observation conversation is central; without it, evaluation becomes superficial or demoralizing.
Marshall rejects the “feedback sandwich” and proposes a four-part structure:
Specific appreciation
Get the teacher talking (context, intentions)
A leverage point for growth
A clear, actionable next step
Frequent visits lower stakes and reduce anxiety, allowing feedback to focus on growth rather than judgment from a single high-pressure observation.
Rubric-scoring individual lessons (e.g., Danielson scored lesson-by-lesson) is a structural mistake; comprehensive rubric judgments should occur at the end of the year based on accumulated evidence.
Student learning matters, but large-scale value-added measures were unstable and flawed; instead, focus on lesson-level and PLC-level evidence (exit tickets, quizzes, formative data).
Principals should observe with a simple mental framework (curriculum/purpose, pedagogy, learning), not a checklist.
AI presents risks (e.g., canned, impersonal evaluation write-ups), but Marshall sees three promising uses:
Preparing for difficult feedback conversations
Lesson transcription/analysis tools that surface patterns (e.g., talk ratios)
Immediate AI-generated summaries of feedback conversations (e.g., 150-word summaries reviewed and approved on the spot)
Teacher autonomy should focus on how content is taught, not on freelancing the curriculum; coherence and shared scope/sequence matter.
Effective supervision requires judgment (“taste”): knowing what matters, distinguishing red lines from pet peeves, and focusing feedback on what will most improve teaching and learning.
Links:
Kim on Principal Center Radio discussing The Best of The Marshall Memo
Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder (00:08):
Welcome everyone to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Kim Marshall. Best known as the author and publisher of the Marshall Memo. Kim is also the author of some excellent books on teacher supervision and evaluation, including Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, which made a big impact on me as a principal. And I’m honored to welcome Kim to the show today. Kim, thanks so much for being here.
Kim Marshall (00:35):
Glad to be here.
Justin Baeder (00:37):
Well, you are a person who I’ve had the real honor and privilege of connecting with over the years to talk about teacher evaluation, talk about teacher supervision and supporting teachers’ growth. And this is a timely conversation because as we’ve noted in some of our correspondence recently, a lot is happening in the profession regarding teacher evaluation, teacher growth, technology, AI. There are some things that are now possible that we have to really make some decisions about and think about what is wise, what is the best way to approach teacher growth and just all the processes that we have in place. So just first, to start things off, what are some of the big issues that are on your mind and that you’re seeing as you work with schools around the country on these issues of supporting teacher growth?
Kim Marshall (01:26):
I think the biggest thing is the cynicism about teacher evaluation, the belief that it really doesn’t make a difference, that it’s just a compliance thing that you have to get out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible, which then raises the issue of artificial intelligence being one tool to make it quick and efficient, but without any real aspiration that it’s going to improve teaching and learning and improve the culture and climate, professional climate in the school.
Justin Baeder (01:51):
Right. And it sounds like your belief there is that it really can have a positive impact. It’s not just measurement. We’re not just taking a snapshot, writing a number down and saying there we did it. You actually believe that it can make a difference in teacher growth.
Kim Marshall (02:04):
Well, that was my epiphany as a Boston principal years ago, having for six years worked with the traditional system of lengthy write-ups and pre and post-conference and all that. And then teachers kind of tapping me on the shoulder and basically saying, “Well, we actually don’t read these things that you’re giving us. We just look at our rating.” And it was really kind of a slap in the face kind of thing. And I shifted to more frequent, short visits with face-to-face conversations. And things really began to move at that point. Teachers, it was a tough union school. They’d looked at it critically at first, but then realized this is much better. If he’s in once a month, watching, randomizing what part of the day he’s there, what subject I’m teaching is in elementary school, that he can really then have a conversation. And that was the critical part was the conversation, the face-to-face conversation, ideally in the teacher’s classroom when the kids aren’t there.
(02:56):
Just talking about what was going on, letting the teacher give the broader context, what happened after I left, what happened before I came in, what was going on with this girl who was so excited, all those details of it, and then keeping it quite informal. And then at the end of the year, doing kind of a wrap up of all the impressions that I’d had, not only from the classroom visits, but other points of contact. So I do believe that it can make a difference. And in our school, we really made great progress. There were other things going on, of course, but that was one of the main things I thought was authentic, frequent, real time, and what was really happening in classrooms and having those conversations. I’ve since done some elaboration on that in the three editions of the book that I’ve written and all the coaching that I’m doing of principals now go around the country, but that is the core idea that it can make a positive difference to teaching and learning.
Justin Baeder (03:46):
Absolutely. And I think that word can there is critical because it does require that we attend to that and not treat it as a compliance process. And if I compare your process that you talk about in rethinking teacher supervision and evaluation to the traditional process, one of the big things that you mentioned that I want to make sure our listeners realize is that these are unannounced visits. They’re not planned, they’re not coordinated in advance with a teacher. You’re not saying, “Okay, on Thursday at 10:00 AM, I’m going to be there.” You’re showing up sort of randomly and definitely unannounced. Is that
Kim Marshall (04:18):
Right? That’s correct. That used to be the first thing on my list as I went through the different parts of the system, but now I’ve made it the fourth thing. So you start with the idea, they got to be frequent because just once a year is obviously ridiculous, especially if it’s a dog and pony show. And then they have to be, if they’re going to be frequent, they need to be short. So now we’re talking 10, 15 minutes. And if they’re going to be frequent and short, they need to be systematic to make sure that you’re not always coming at 10:00 AM. The kids are always on the rug or you’re always in the do now or whatever part of the lesson. And then the fourth thing is, of course, given those three things, frequent, short, systematic. And of course it has to be unannounced.
(04:58):
And if you start with the unannounced, people get a little freaked out. And I always, in workshops with teachers and principals, I always walk through, so what would be you would be nervous about? And people talk about there are like 11 things like, “You don’t know my subject area, it’s a gotcha,” all those other things. So you kind of get past that with the logic of this system, but the frequency is the critical thing, more than the unannounced. People get used to the unannounced. In fact, they actually prefer that. I’m teaching, come in as long as you have the conversation. The worst thing would be you come in unannounced, you catch a bad moment, and then that’s a gotcha rather than, tell me more about that. What was going on? Why were you so testy with that child? Why did you not call on that girl whose hand was raised the whole period?
(05:41):
And there’s a story behind that. She’s been dominating the conversation for the last two weeks. I want other kids to have a chance to talk. Context and respecting teachers, the world that they live in, I think is so critical to this process.
Justin Baeder (05:52):
Yeah. And yet the conversation afterward seems to be something that people are eager to avoid if they can. And I see that most clearly in the desire for a form to fill out. And I did this personally, I’ll be the first to admit, when I was a principal trying to get into classrooms, I made myself various forms. And I thought, if I can just fill out this form, then I don’t really have to talk with the person. They don’t have to talk to me. They don’t have to defend themselves. I’ll just write something and hopefully it won’t be too controversial and I’ll have done it and I can move on. Why do you think we tend in that direction toward a form and toward avoiding the conversation?
Kim Marshall (06:28):
Well, I think one is time. The conversation, both from the principal’s point of view, the supervisor’s point of view and the teachers. The teachers are very, very busy. I mean, both my children are teachers I know perfectly well, how very busy they are. Hardly have time to go to the bathroom, let alone talk to the principal. And then if you have the mindset that it’s going to be a 25, 30 minute psychodrama with the principal, then that’s another reason for avoidance. But then there’s just plain, this might be a difficult conversation from the principal’s point of view. And then the principal’s time. So there’s like four reasons why people avoid this and why you want to ... But again, back to the cynicism, this isn’t going to make any difference anyway. So let’s just get it out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible and then we get to AI or email or other, a note on the teacher’s desk, a little posted, “Great lesson, go tiger, keep up the great work kind of thing without...” So conversations for a lot of reasons are difficult, but they’re so critical.
(07:21):
And I really, in my latest edition of the book, I have now a structure for the way to handle the conversation that I think works well, a four-part structure, which I’m happy to talk about with any encouragement.
Justin Baeder (07:32):
Yeah. Let’s get into that conversation a little bit because I think a lot of people have been taught or have assumed that the way you do that conversation is what I call the feedback sandwich. And in the military, they have a term for the feedback sandwich that we can’t use in this context, but compliment the meat of the sandwich, which is the kind of suggestion for improvement and then another compliment, butter people up, give them the straight talk and then butter them up a little more so they don’t cry as you leave. What’s your take on structure for that conversation?
Kim Marshall (08:02):
Well, it just doesn’t work and people see it coming a mile away. “Oh boy, here we go. “And either they ignore the meat, the criticism, the suggestion, because there’ve been two compliments around it, or they obsess about the meat and ignore the compliments. And either way, they’re walking away without really changing anything. So my four part, my quadrants thing, short circuits that process. I was just in a middle school culinary arts class yesterday in a school in Southern New Hampshire. So the teacher had a planning period right after we were able to bring her in and have that feedback conversation. So the four parts are number one, the appreciation. Okay, this is so well organized. These groups of kids getting the hamburger out of the refrigerator, putting them on the stove, opening the cans of sauce and tomato sauce and so forth. And the way you used your microphone, she had a microphone so the kids could really hear her over the blowers and the thing, just specific compliments.
(08:56):
But the second quadrant, which is away from the feedback sandwich is get the teacher talking. So tell me more about the context of this lesson, what I said to this teacher. How does this fit into the curriculum? Tell me what happened after we left because we were only there for 10 minutes, our group of observers and the teacher then talks and she told a lot of things that we hadn’t seen. For example, they actually prepared the food and ate it by the end of a 45-minute period, very important detail. And so then the third quadrant is the leverage point, something that might be an improvement. It turns out that while we were in there, a girl opening the can of tomato sauce cut her hand, unexpected thing that came up. And so the teacher had to deal with that. She dealt with it very, very well.
(09:40):
But then there was the question of just in time or just in case that whole, Peter Lildal talks about this, about do you try to upload everything upfront or do you try to deal with it more in the context? Obviously she had safety rules, but how did she deal with it? We talked about that. And then there was this sort of the takeaway at the end, what’s the actionable next step? So those are the four quadrants, the genuine compliments, get the teacher talking and really listen, then the possible leverage point and then the wrapping it up in the actionable next step. And that sort of four part thing that gets away from the ... The most critical point, of course, is the second thing, is allow the teacher to talk. And I have a series of suggested questions. The most sophisticated one is, tell me something you hoped I would notice.
(10:20):
But a series of open-ended things, let the teacher talk and really listen, then land the plane, but there doesn’t have to be a criticism. It can be a hundred percent compliments. So anyway, that’s the structure and I think that’s working really well.
Justin Baeder (10:32):
Yeah. Well, I imagine it is because it provides so much insight beyond just what you can see yourself in a few minutes. And I think there’s a little bit of a tension around evidence here where we have to get into classrooms and see for ourselves what’s going on. So this is not just hearsay. We’re not just saying, “Hey, how have you been doing this year?” And then basing everything on that. We’re actually getting into classrooms and seeing, but we’re also recognizing that we don’t see everything, both for practical reasons that we can’t be in the classroom that much, that we’re constrained, but also because some of what matters that we’re trying to get at by listening to the teacher is just inherently invisible. The teacher thinking, you really can only get at that by allowing the teacher that space and time to talk and to elaborate.
Kim Marshall (11:21):
You’ve written really wonderful stuff about this, the different kinds of things, the ways of reacting to things that happen in a classroom. I love your approach to that. But back to this structure, if the structure is we’re only doing a couple of visits a year, then you sort of have to draw global conclusions from this observation. And that’s the trap. And so my big thing is we’ve got to change the system. We got to have more frequent visits. So then you can take one thing at a time rather than trying to do this comprehensive analysis of a teacher bringing in a rubric or whatever based on only one or two observations.
Justin Baeder (11:52):
Yeah. And I think the stakes really go down and people really relax when they know, okay, it’s not, this is it. This is my one shot. Everything has to be perfect. People are just a lot more comfortable when they realize after the fact I can say, “You know what? Something didn’t go right today. Come back another time.” And if they know you’re going to be back another time.
Kim Marshall (12:10):
Right. Well, that’s the thing. I mean, the three hardest parts are, first of all, getting out of your office in the first place and getting through that kind of force field around a classroom where you’re coming in, you’re there to judge, you’re there to make evaluated, and then chasing the teacher down and having that feedback conversation. So in each of those, there’s resistance from the busyness and chain to your email to just getting through that force field, to then actually having a conversation. And all those things that I’m working on really hard with the people I’m working with and trying to get them through. And when they get through that, then things really start to happen. Then you have an ongoing dialogue about teaching and learning, which is what you want to have.
Justin Baeder (12:47):
Absolutely. And one of the things I really appreciate about that is that you have perspective for making other decisions. When you know what’s going on in classrooms, the other decisions that you have to make as a school leader about, what do we prioritize in professional development? What do we budget our resources for? How do we staff? All of those decisions can be informed by those classroom conversations and otherwise we have to make those decisions based on other information or a lack of information.
Kim Marshall (13:15):
But the other thing is what the principal knows or the supervisor knows going in broadens their vision. For example, if you’ve been in a PLC meeting, then you’ve seen this fourth grade team struggling with the issue of comprehension or phonics or whatever it is that they’re struggling with. And as Paul Bamrick Sentoio says, when you go into a classroom, it’s like you have 3D glasses on because you know what the issues are that the teachers have been working with. And of course, knowing the teacher’s goals for the year, knowing the context of the teacher’s personal life, all these things make you a better observer when you go in.
Justin Baeder (13:48):
And I think sometimes we forget that because of some of the more system level practices like ... Certainly as a principal, I visited other schools with my supervisor and other principals, we’d go do this big tour, everybody in a suit walking around with their heels clumping on the floor. And it feels like we’re doing something important, but when you’re in another school where you don’t know the teachers, you don’t know the curriculum, you don’t know the students, it is very different that a lot of that context is missing that informs you about just kind of what you’re seeing. So yeah, I feel like-
Kim Marshall (14:20):
I think those learning walks can be informative. I mean, you can learn a lot about a school and the culture and so forth and see cool things going on like here’s building thinking classrooms or here’s a new approach to phonics or whatever it is. So those are useful. I think they’re not completely useless. But in terms of, of course, the thing that bothers teachers is, “Here are all these dudes in my classroom, these suits, what did they think? “ And of course you couldn’t possibly give any meaningful feedback to the teacher. But I think it’s useful for principals to get into other schools. Yeah.
Justin Baeder (14:49):
Yeah. I think it’s good to see. It’s just not enough information to really judge. And I think that gets at an issue that I’m a little bit obsessed with and kind of concerned about. And that is what I call observability bias. The idea that if I see something, then that’s enough and it matters and I should focus on what I can see because it’s visible to me, not necessarily because it’s all that important. So if I can’t see what happened yesterday because I wasn’t here yesterday and I’ve never been in your school before, then as long as I just go really hard on the parts that I can see, then I’m going to have good feedback for you and it doesn’t matter that I don’t really know that much about your classroom. So I think that that problem drives a lot of what we see and a lot of the teacher anxiety about this when we don’t know much and they know we don’t know much and yet we have this kind of high stakes process.
Kim Marshall (15:39):
And the big thing there is if you shoot from the hip, if based upon this very fragmentary thing, it could be a full lesson, but if it’s a short thing and you draw conclusions, that really annoys teachers. It gets their backup. Even if they have a union maybe and they don’t have a strong ability to push back, still it leads to cynicism and discouragement and maybe even leaving the profession.
Justin Baeder (16:03):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I’ve always appreciated about your work is the respect for teachers and the respect for the work of teaching that you show through this process of actually talking with someone, not just filling out a form and filling out a rating and saying, “Here you go, have a nice day,” but actually caring what the teacher says, what the teacher’s thinking and their perspective.
Kim Marshall (16:24):
Which doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t say, “I never want to see that in this school ever again.” I mean, you can be very, very clear and firm based on stuff you see that is just not good for kids and mean or whatever.
Justin Baeder (16:36):
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a big fan of the Bob Newhart School of Instructional Leadership that sometimes you just have to say, stop it and move on from there.
Kim Marshall (16:44):
Right.
Justin Baeder (16:45):
You know the Bob Newhart sketch, the Stop
Kim Marshall (16:47):
It Skit. I had not associated that with him. Please send me a YouTube clip if you have one.
Justin Baeder (16:51):
I’ll put it in the show notes. I love it. It’s where he plays a therapist and his whole gimmick as a therapist is somebody will tell them their problems, they’ll tell them their behavior patterns that they’re falling into that are ruining their life and he’ll just say, “Stop it. “ And I think sometimes it’s not any more complicated than that. Usually it is, but sometimes it’s not. Well, let’s talk a little bit, if we could, about AI because certainly a lot more is becoming possible now. And similar to the observability bias problem where when we see something, we tend to fixate on things that are available to us. There’s kind of an availability heuristic that can send us in the wrong direction. We face a similar temptation with tools that like now we have all these very powerful tools for writing, for analysis. We can do all of these things that before we had to do manually that were slow, that were time consuming, that were mentally taxing, and often we just didn’t get to or didn’t feel like we always did a very good job of.
(17:43):
What’s your take on the current landscape with AI tools?
Kim Marshall (17:47):
Well, you’re right about the power and a lot of principles kind of sub Rosa sometimes at home using ChatGPT or something, they’re using AI to take their notes and to write up teacher evaluations. And I ran into some people just a couple of weeks ago in a graduate course here in Boston, teachers who were just upset that they were getting this clearly canned AI generated pablum on their lessons. So that’s a really bad use, I think. But I think there are three use cases that are very promising and very interesting. One is preparing a principal for a conversation with a teacher. “Here are my notes, here’s some background information about this teacher, here’s some those I had in a classroom and so forth. Here’s my general sense of this, what’s going on here. Give me a script, give me some talking points, give me a way of approaching this.
(18:32):
“That can be very helpful. I’ve talked to teachers, especially with difficult conversations. AI can do a brilliant job of sort of walking you through it, put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath. The second use case is that there’s a guy in Switzerland, an American in Switzerland, Tommy Malvoy, who’s developed on his own nickel, a thing called InformEd ED is capitalized. And what it does is listen to a whole lesson, transcribe a whole lesson. The computer does this. And then based upon some very sophisticated stuff that he’s put into it, it creates an analysis of the lesson like who talked more? What was the level of questioning? How much teacher talk to student talk, girl, talk, boy talk, and level of questioning from very simple to more sophisticated discourse. And for a teacher to be able to look at an analysis like that, I mean, an algebra teacher between periods could say,” Oh my gosh, I’m talking too much, “or whatever.
(19:27):
And this product, and there may be others, is very sophisticated and very helpful. It could also be, as a supervisor, I would be very curious to see that too, but not to fall into the trap of using that to evaluate. Having that as the basis for analysis and conversation about teaching and learning. The third use case, which I just used yesterday and also last week is something that when you have the conversation with a teacher, a 10 minute conversation going over as I did with this culinary arts teacher, then immediately right on the spot summarizing it. And we did this yesterday after a 10, 12 minute conversation, quite substantive as we talked through this taco preparing lesson, I then stopped the transcription. I’d gotten the teacher’s permission, of course. And by the way, this has to be private. It has to be within the AI system so it’s not going up to the internet with private information.
(20:14):
So we pushed a button and there was 150 word summary of our conversation. I had the teacher read it out loud and there were several other people in the room who’d been watching this thing and it did a brilliant summary. That is useful. That is really useful because what’s the alternative? A principal goes back to his office or her office and writes it up. The teacher waits for a week for that. The teacher disagrees with part of that. We read it together and we could make edits. So then we literally sign off on it. Okay, this is an accurate summary of the conversation we just had. So that just, I think is a terrific use of AI. And I’m quite excited about this particular product because I think it’s just a boon to the principal, a boon to the teacher and it respects the teacher because right then and there, immediately after we had the conversation, here’s this summary.
(21:01):
Now, of course, the AI had to be trained to do this properly, to constrain it to 150 words, to use a certain structure to the feedback. And these guys have done a good job with that, but that I think is a brilliant use of AI.
Justin Baeder (21:14):
And it sounds like the use of AI there was transparent to the teacher, right? The teacher is fully aware that the summary-
Kim Marshall (21:20):
And there would be teachers who would say, “Nope, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to have AI listening in on our conversation.” And so then the principal has to write it up afterward. And I don’t have any data on how many teachers would choose door A or door B. I just don’t know. We’ll find out.
Justin Baeder (21:38):
But I think part of the trust there is the transparency that both of you participated in the conversation. You presumably have the transcript if you need to look at what you actually did talk about. So when you’re reading that summary, it’s not just a black box that prints out a slip of paper and it’s an oracle that you just have to take at its word. It’s kind of traceable.You can see, does this line up with what we talked about?
Kim Marshall (22:03):
Well, yeah. Now, interestingly, with this product, the transcript is deleted as soon as it generates the summary. So again, from confidentiality purposes, we might have said some things that were awkward and so forth, but the proof of the pudding is the teacher’s right there, I had to read it out loud and she said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s just what we ... “ And people in the room, the principal, by the way, the principal was in the room of this middle school, his eyes lit up. He said, “Oh my gosh, you mean we might have something like this that will save me all the ... “ Because it’s not easy to write up a summary of a 10, 15 minute conversation. That’s not easy. And you want to give compliments, you want to acknowledge if there’s a leverage point, you want to say that in the right way, as we discussed.
(22:47):
So this thing is programmed literally to say, just to do the pivot, compliments as we discussed, this is something you’re going to consider trying, and I look forward to seeing it, that kind of thing. And so this is a really ... AI can do that very well if it’s trained properly. So that’s a good thing.
Justin Baeder (23:04):
Yeah, I think that’s a great use case. And I would agree that the time and the mental effort to write a summary, honestly, this is just a good return on investment. And I think we don’t lose really anything by having to do that as long as we put the thought in, we have the presence, we check it, we make sure that it’s what we want to say. And interesting to hear that from you, the person who has written, I’m sure more summaries than anyone else in the world,
Kim Marshall (23:33):
Marshall- Well, no, okay, that’s summarizing a research article or a David Brooks column or something, but this is, and I’ve tried some of these. And by the way, the idea of constraining it to 150 words, about a thousand characters is an absolutely brilliant idea because you can easily write a page and a half about a conversation with a teacher, even if it’s a short one. So these guys down in Tennessee, Ray Fugate and some guys down in Chattanooga, Tennessee came up with this idea years ago of limiting the principle to a thousand characters. And that is just right there as a time saver. But also, I think it was Blaze Pascal who said, “I’m sorry I didn’t write you a longer letter, a short letter, I didn’t have time.” Because constraining it just forces you to ... And it turns out a thousand characters, 150 words is just right.
(24:22):
It’s substantive, but it’s something that it’s a package that’s more portable. And also for the superintendent’s point of view, or head of school’s point of view, you can more quickly review, so what are my principles talking to teachers about? So that would be obviously another advantage to this.
Justin Baeder (24:39):
Yeah. And that brings me to a topic that people may be surprised to hear me bring up here, but it is taste. And I think one of the main reasons that people subscribe to the Marshall Memo is not just the summaries that you write, which are excellent. You’ve written probably tens of thousands of individual article summaries at this point, but the fact that you decide what to include, you decide what sources to read, and then you choose from everything that you read in a week, what to mention in the Marshall memo. What are some of your thoughts on that role of deciding what matters when it comes to teacher supervision and working with teachers?
Kim Marshall (25:20):
Well, maybe in the back of your mind is the question, could AI do that? And I would think at this point, my answer to that is no, AI could conceivably do the summaries. I’ve tried that and I’m not going there. I can’t trust AI to do a good summary of a complex 40-page research article, but back to the question of taste. So I spend all day Sunday, every week doing the reading. It’s about eight hours and I read or skim like 150 different articles. So what am I choosing is your question. And there’s certain things that I just can’t do like breaking news, like Ed Wheat does that very well, the online platforms, ASCD, SmartBrief and so forth. So I’m not doing breaking news. I’m not doing puff pieces, just a super duper, trickly kind of thing of this wonderful principle in Alabama who’s wonderful, but it’s not a critical analysis of what they did and the stumbles and so forth.
(26:12):
I’m not doing things that don’t go anywhere. There’s a lot of the stuff I read, these research articles that come to basically no conclusion. There’s a null impact of this program. I’m not doing highly political stuff. There’s this magazine, I think you must have known it in Seattle, Rethinking Schools. It’s sort of a lefty magazine, really good, but a lot of their stuff is highly political, Ukraine, Gaza, that kind of stuff. So I’m staying away from that. And so what I’m looking for is stuff that is really about the change process, about how did this sixth grade teacher deal with this situation? How did this school reschedule to get more teacher meeting time? How did this principal deal with this thorny situation? How did this school get these amazing ... I’m a big fan of Karen Cenowith, the latter day, Ron Edmonds, who’s written about the beat the odd schools, the schools that are against the odds are getting great results.
(27:02):
So what are the key factors? I’ve been fascinated about that since Ron Evans wrote in the 1970s. So those are the things. And I think behind your question also is the thought that there’s some personal preferences to this. A different person doing this would choose different articles. I think there’ll be a lot of overlap, but that is really the key thing is my judgment about what matters and what my readers, because I have readers in 65 countries all over the world, people are reading this and pay money for it for the Marshall memo, what is it that they might be interested in? And every issue I’m sure is, you skim through every issue, there’s certain things that you’re not interested in. I’m probably not going to read that one, but here’s something for my librarian. I want to give this to my librarian or here’s something for my history teacher or something, or here’s something for me to ponder because it’s something that I haven’t done well.
(27:49):
So that is every week I’m making those judgements on Sunday. And then on Monday I do the hard work of writing the summaries, which is just plain hard work. I mean, it’s trying to do a good job of an intellectually responsible job of summarizing this so that the very busy people who are reading it don’t have to read the full article.
Justin Baeder (28:07):
Right. And I see some parallels there between knowing your readers and what they’re going to find helpful and knowing your teachers as an instructional leader and figuring out not necessarily just what are the facts of this situation, what are the opportunities for improvement, but like, what does this person need from me right now, which may be different than just kind of an objective brute force analysis. We can get AI to do that. If I ask AI to tell me three things this teacher could do better, I can get those. But the taste issue to me is that may not be what that teacher needs to hear next.
Kim Marshall (28:44):
Yeah. Well, speaking of taste with principals, there’s also the issue of pet peeves. Everybody has pet peeves. For example, one of mine is, I don’t like to see a teacher walking around a room with a cup of coffee, like drink your coffee before the lesson, but that is never the most important thing to talk about. I don’t like teachers addressing kids as you guys when they’re girls and boys in the room, but I just got to let that one go all over in a school district yesterday, all over the school district, everyone was talking about you guys and to teachers too. It drives me crazy, but it’s part of American kind of culture at this point. So the taste issue, not just with small things like that, but I ask audiences or principals, what are your red lines? What is the thing that you absolutely will do that Bob Newhart kind of thing of stop doing that.
(29:33):
I don’t want to see that anymore. And people need to think through that. What are the things that are just absolutely unacceptable in their school? And what are the things that are a matter of taste? I wouldn’t have taught it that way, but it seems to be working. And by the way, the issue, and you’re probably about to ask about this, is what about student learning? Because some of the teacher evaluation stuff in the Obama era was trying to use test scores, student performance as a main way of evaluating teachers. So Do you want to talk about that?
Justin Baeder (30:02):
Yeah, I’d love to talk about that because I felt like we put a lot of effort into that over many years and just don’t have a lot to show for it.
Kim Marshall (30:10):
Well, more than that, it turns out it was really just, I think you summarized this very quickly the other day. It’s simply because of blips in class assignments and other things, it’s extremely unstable. So the whole value added movement and student learning objectives, SLOs for kindergarten and phys ed and stuff like that, methodologically it’s extremely problematic. And thank goodness at the end of his administration, Obama in 2015, the ESSA legislation, they took that away. Nobody needs to use student achievement as a significant part of teacher evaluation anymore. But I think Obama had a point. Whether the kids learn it or not, it’s important. You taught it. They didn’t learn it. Did you really teach it? That was ineffective. And so I’ve been struggling with how can you really get to the issue? Because there was a meeting in the Oval Office in January 29th, 2009, right at the beginning of the Obama administration when a gentleman that I know persuaded Obama to do this.
(31:07):
And the persuasion was we have to hold teachers accountable for student learning. It’s not enough to just watch them teach and give them good grades on their lesson. Did the kids learn it? And so I’ve pivoted on that one. I said Obama had that right. It was just the methodology that was wrong. And so my answer to that is let’s look at student learning, but let’s look at it lesson by lesson. Let’s look at a PLC meeting by PLC meeting. You taught that. Let’s look at the exit tickets. Let’s look at the polling. Let’s look at the test that they gave, the quiz. And if they didn’t learn it, let’s talk about that, not in an accusatory way, but in a way of saying, okay, let’s think about a better way to do that. Or if they did learn it really well, let’s celebrate that.
(31:51):
So all the time talking about student learning, but much more at the granular level because the other way won’t work.
Justin Baeder (31:58):
Yeah. And that gets to something we’ve been talking about recently around grain size and rubrics that often the rubrics that we’re using for teacher evaluation are very, very broad. They cover a K-12, they cover every subject, they cover every teacher and are usually somewhat contractual that this is what you’re evaluated on. But that may be very far removed from what’s actually happening on a Tuesday that we talk about in our PLC on Wednesday. Take us into some of your thoughts on that kind of granularity issue.
Kim Marshall (32:29):
Well, so I do a lot of work in the New York City public schools. For 21 years, I’ve been down there a lot coaching principals, working with groups and so forth. And under the Joel Klein administration a few years ago, they made the fundamental conceptual error of trying to Danielson score each lesson.
(32:47):
And that is just, I mean, these are very smart people who meant well, but they just took this fork in the road. And as soon as you do that, one teacher said at one point, as soon as it becomes part of my rating, it stops being meaningful because now we’re arguing, was that developing? Was that proficient? Was that distinguished and so forth? And so you’re taking your term, the wrong grain size. You’re taking in a comprehensive description of the teacher’s entire work and trying to fit that into one lesson or even one part of one lesson. It’s ridiculous. And New York City and a lot of other districts, Chicago and others have been doing this for a long time contractually. And it seemed to make sense. But again, the structural problem is if you’re only doing one or two lessons a year, then you have to rubric score them.
(33:33):
So you got to restructure the whole thing. You got to get to short frequent unannounced visits, systematic visits. You got to take one thing at a time and then do the rubric at the end of the year because I do believe there should be a comprehensive rubric analysis of the teacher at the end of the year. I think that makes sense. It’s much better than a narrative. The rubrics are good. Danielson is good. I think mine is better. Mine is free, by the way. And I’ve gone through 17 revisions of it. But basically you need to deconstruct teaching and then you need to at the end of the year with teacher input. I mean, the best format is the teacher fills it out, the principal fills it out. You compare and you discuss disagreements and then you talk about evidence, but you don’t make the mistake that Chicago public schools made and are still making, which is for everything in the Danielson rubric, we need evidence.
(34:17):
So that’s like if you’re going to the Supreme Court, if you’re firing the teacher, yeah, you need evidence. But for 98% of the teachers who are either solid or need some improvement, you don’t need that. You need to have the ongoing conversations and coach and prod and poke and motivate and inspire and PLC and all these other things to help improve the actual teaching on a day-by-day basis. So we got to get away from this rubric scoring of individual lessons. If there’s a new chancellor in New York City, I’m really hoping that I might be able to persuade him to change the system. I
Justin Baeder (34:50):
Wonder if we could, if we have enough time left for this, I know we’ve got to wrap up soon, but I wonder if we have time to discuss the idea of instructional purpose and if there is potential for rubrics that are more designed to look at a smaller unit of instruction because I’m currently, I think, kind of undecided on this. I think there’s possibly potential here, but there’s also the issue of, we’re always going to be collecting data in specific ... We’re collecting evidence in specific circumstances, but those specific circumstances don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of the whole school year, the relationships, the curriculum, all the things that teachers are doing that that big rubric describes shape what’s happening in that small slice of time that we’re observing. And I’ve had the idea recently of looking at instructional purpose and saying, okay, rather than take that giant rubric and decide how you did in 22 different criteria based on these 10 minutes I was in your classroom, what if I just look at what you were trying to accomplish during that time and bring a rubric to bear on that?
(35:59):
What’s your initial reaction to that potential? Because I don’t have one. I’m not proposing that everybody should use one, but I’m interested in your thoughts on the idea.
Kim Marshall (36:07):
So I love the idea of what were you trying to accomplish. And so with the culinary arts lesson yesterday, they’re trying to teach kids how to cook safely and produce this taco thing that they were doing. And that comes out either from seeing the lesson plan in advance or from figuring it out in the classroom or from asking the teacher afterward, “What was your intended learning outcome?”That’s a good quadrant two question, right? Open-ended question of the teacher to explain. So that is at the core of everything. And of course, it’s one thing at a time. It’s the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s the division of decimals. It’s medieval Europe, whatever it is that they’re studying. And the purpose should certainly be part of the conversation, whether it’s the micro purpose of this particular lesson or the bigger purpose of this unit, or this unit on European history, or this unit on South America, whatever it is.
(36:55):
And so that’s where certainly unit planning. And I’m a big believer in understanding by design, the Wiggins & McTighe, backwards design thing of knowing what are the essential questions, what are the big purpose. So purpose is everything. And of course that goes to results as well, like did you get your results according to your purpose? But I’m an anti-checklist person coming into classroom. So what I come in with is like this, just a low tech, little pad of paper or even a card. Yesterday, I just had a little note card and jot down that wonderful student thing that the kids said that was so wise and clever or that funny thing the teacher said, or maybe take a picture sometimes of something on the bulletin board, but low tech and capture a few things for the conversation. But to your bigger point, what’s in the back of your head as you do that.
(37:47):
So at one point I developed a five-letter acronym for what to have in your head: SOTEL. So safety, objectives, teaching, engagement, and learning. Learning being the big one, did they learn it? And I thought that was pretty clever. I developed it with a group of graduate students, principals and training, and it seemed safety, psychological, and physical, classroom management, objectives like you’re thinking like, where’s this lesson going? The actual teaching, the pedagogy itself, is it appropriate? The engagement, how engagement are the kids, and then the actual evidence of learning. Thought it was clever. And then I found out that the Springfield public schools in Massachusetts were using it as a checklist. So they were coming in with a checklist doing SOTEL. And I was horrified at that. I don’t know if they’re still doing it. So I tried to simplify it even more. And my current thinking is three things in the back of your head.
(38:39):
First of all, the curriculum, and that’s your thing, the purpose. What’s going on here in this French class? The second thing is the actual teaching, the pedagogy. So is this small group work? Is this standing up at the whiteboards? Is this batteries and bulbs experiment, hands-on? Is this the best way to get to that purpose? And then the third one, of course, is learning. Okay, you did it, but did they learn it? And often you can’t see that in a short observation. You need to ask the teacher, you need to look at the exit tickets, whatever. So I’m for low tech, but focused on that big picture. Back to your thing, what’s the purpose? And then most important, did it work? Did the kids actually learn? Does that make sense?
Justin Baeder (39:21):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m thinking of a couple of issues that that raises that present a little bit of a challenge for us. If you as an observer come in after the tacos are made, after the tacos have been eaten, when they’re cleaning up, to some extent, the teacher’s purpose during that time is just the cleanup. There’s no learning objective, maybe how to clean up is part of it.
But sometimes we come in during those kind of management times of a lesson and we think, okay, there’s not really anything super substantive. The teacher does not need three points of feedback from me on how the students are cleaning up necessarily. That’s not where a lot of opportunity is. We don’t need to make a rubric for everything. And then the other side of that is the autonomy. Sometimes if we’re looking at questions of curriculum, sometimes the teacher didn’t come up with a curriculum.
(40:09):
Sometimes the teacher does not have any control over what lesson they’re teaching today and what’s in that lesson. And we expect teachers to follow an established curriculum. So any kind of final thoughts on those questions of just
What you might see in autonomy?
Kim Marshall (40:22):
Yeah. Well, with coming in for the cleanup thing, the principal could make the decision, turn around and come back another time. Or in the conversation with the teacher, tell me what happened before we came in. How did that taco thing go? And then you got the teacher’s account of that.
You haven’t seen it firsthand, but it’s so important to randomize during a lesson. You need to see the launch. Sometimes you need to see the middle part, you need to see the closure, you need to see the group work.
And principals need to be systematic. I don’t know if that’s autonomy or not, but systematic about seeing different parts of lessons and elementary teachers teach math, English, social studies, and science. So we need to see the different subjects. My daughter, as a seventh grade teacher, taught five lessons. We need to see at least three groups of lessons.
(41:07):
But am I answering your question about autonomy? Are you talking about the principal’s autonomy or the teacher’s autonomy?
Justin Baeder (41:12):
Well, the teacher’s autonomy from the perspective of curriculum that if I’m going to give the teacher feedback on something, I need to make sure that it’s actually something that they get to decide.
Kim Marshall (41:21):
Oh, well, that kind of autonomy. So I taught sixth grade in Boston in the 1970s. I was at this middle school for 11 years, and at that point it was the Wild West. I mean, as long as my kids were reasonably well behaved and there were no parent complaints, I taught a lot of cool stuff, the Bermuda Triangle, Eldridge Cleaver. I mean, all this stuff that was cool and entertaining, and I cannot defend that looking back on it.
So that kind of teacher autonomy is just, I don’t think is the right thing. To me, we’ve done a much better job in the US over the last 10 years of deciding, okay, so when do we teach the Holocaust? Okay, that’s going to be eighth grade. When do we teach Egypt? Okay, that’s going to be sixth grade. When do we do division of fractions? That’s fifth grade, whatever it is.
(42:04):
So having a roadmap that makes sense. So you don’t get the situation of this thing that I had in the Marshall Memo a while ago of a teenager listening to some adults talking about Pearl Harbor. And the teenagers said to them, who’s Pearl? There’s certain things that people need to know like Pearl Harbor, Tulsa in 1921, just stuff that they need to know. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job with Common Core and then the adaptations of it and IB and all these other things of kind of mapping out the K to 12 curriculum.
And I don’t think there’s teacher autonomy on that, but I think the teacher autonomy should be how it’s taught. I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to talk about bold, persistent experimentation. We’re constantly trying different ways of doing things. And in our PLC, Justin, you taught it this way, I taught it this way, the common objectives, but we try different things.
(42:57):
And then the proof of the pudding is, well, Justin, your kids did better than mine, so what did you do? And we begin to think about what is the best way to approach this. So autonomy with the how to, but I’m pretty clear on for my own grandchildren and we need to be systematic and it isn’t a question of teacher autonomy of what gets taught. Does that make sense?
Although I will tell one story if we have another minute for it. So one of my favorite all- time articles that I summarized in the Marshall Memo was an article in Rethinking Schools by Alana Goldstein, a woman, a third grade teacher up in the Northwest of the US. She might’ve been in Seattle who decided that she was going to teach about wealth distribution in the United States as part of her fractions unit. And she had the kids bring in dried macaroni, lot of dried macaroni.
(43:48):
They put them into baggies with a hundred in each baggie. So then they had 90 baggies with a hundred in each. And on the rug, she displayed and she divided the rug into five quintiles, how the wealth was distributed in the United States. And you might imagine what it looks like. The poorest quintile is nine individual pieces of macaroni out of 9,000 proportionally. The second one is 18. The third is 150. The next one is 900, so nine baggies, and the richest quintile in terms of wealth distribution is 79 baggies. So it’s like this. And those kids will never forget that. So that’s an example of teacher autonomy. She’s teaching fractions. She’s putting in a little bit of a bigger picture. Now is that appropriate to third grade? What would you as a principal think of seeing that in a third grade classroom? I’ll put you on the spot, Justin.
Justin Baeder (44:42):
Well, it’s a topic that is broader than the math lesson and that people may say, is wealth inequality a topic for third graders? And I think that’s a fair question to ask.
Kim Marshall (44:52):
Yeah.
Justin Baeder (44:53):
Definitely.
Kim Marshall (44:54):
But there’s an example of a teacher freelancing, right? If she saw it in San Francisco, I guess the exploratorium, she saw this exhibit and she decided I’m going to do that. But I think it’s pretty cool. But maybe junior high school, maybe high school, but that is a provocative example of teacher autonomy versus the set curriculum. She’s trying to have it both ways, right?
Justin Baeder (45:14):
Kim, if people want to find out about the Marshall Memo, get a subscription to that or find out about your books, your teacher valuation rubrics, where’s the best place for them to go online?
Kim Marshall (45:23):
It’s marshallmemo.com, a Marshall with two Ls. So the Marshall Memo does cost money. It’s cheap, but it does cost money. But there is a free website that we put together with support from a foundation called the bestofmarshallmemo.org. And that has like 26 super curated collections of articles in these specific areas like race inequality and differentiation, time management and so forth. So that’s totally free. So you just go to bestofmarshallmemo.org and you can access those for ... They’re also recordings of each one. So there’s a professional recording. So that was our pandemic project, Jenn David-Lang and I.
Justin Baeder (46:01):
Wonderful. Great resource. Great resource. Well, Kim, as always, I could talk for hours about this stuff and could talk about anything with you for hours, but thank you so much for your time today and I hope we can talk again soon.
Kim Marshall (46:13):
Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks so much. A real pleasure.
