Do you feel like a first responder working day-to-day putting out fires, triaging issues, mediating conflicts, or defending ineffective or outdated practices? Do you ever get to the end of the school day and wonder where time went, noting that you haven’t eaten or used the restroom once, nor been in a single classroom? Are you exhausted at night thinking about what you need to address in the morning? If so, you are likely an assistant principal.
As an assistant principal there are two primary responsibilities to your work to ensure a safe, secure and productive learning environment: building culture and leading learning. If we don’t intentionally focus on these two priorities, we will continue to spend our days and nights reactivating to problems verses changing the odds for student success. 3 powerful levers to intentionally build culture and lead learning while minimizing daily need for crisis management are collaboration, problem solving and continuous improvement.
Research has found that when there is a sense of collective efficacy at a school, or a belief that teachers working together can positively affect learning, students perform better (Donohoo, Hattie & Eells, 2018; Visible Learning, 2018, para. 1). These environments are places where leaders and teachers collaborate, problem solve, and take risks to get better together.
Recognizing teachers are the number one school level factor on student learning, and that collaborative work matters for student learning, middle level administrators need to set intentional conditions for how teachers experience the collective process of studying problems of practice together. As middle we
Collaboration
In schools with collective efficacy, teachers and leaders collaborate on a regular basis with a firm focus on the link between student learning and what they can do about it. In these settings, teachers study meaningful student work in the context of standards and high-quality instructional materials. They consider together what that student work says about what students can do and what they are on the verge of doing well. They plan for changes in instruction based on what they see in student work. While many schools have structures and protocols for collaboration in place, often this collaboration does not result in improvement in teaching and student learning. Sometimes collaboration is focused on getting important tasks accomplished instead of examining the relationship between student learning, behavior and teaching practice.
Questions to consider
- What is the current state of collaboration in your school? How are teachers collaborating?
- What is the focus of that time? What role do teachers’ instructional materials play? What are the teaching practice and student learning outcomes of that time, and how do you know?
- How can leaders in your setting collaborate within and innovate around the structures of a school day and year to create more space for collaboration?
Leadership recommendation
Invest time in studying how teachers are currently collaborating. Observe that time, survey teachers, and take stock of what is being accomplished and how.
Problem Solving
In schools where there is collective efficacy, problems of student learning – both chronic and acute – drive the work of all staff members. In fact, it is these challenges of student learning that become the focus of teacher collaboration. They work together with a bias toward action as they analyze the needs students present in their work/behavior and frame the issues they see as problems they can solve. Teachers might collaboratively examine student work/behavior and identify a common need, then generate and test solutions to see what best supports student learning. They then might rigorously study their solutions to see which is having the greatest effect and what adjustments still need to be made. In many schools, individual teachers have this problem-solving stance, but in schools with collective efficacy, teachers engage in this work together for even greater impact.
Questions to consider
- How do teachers and leaders currently work together (with and without support) to understand problems of student learning?
- How do you ensure students are the starting point and remain the ongoing focus of your professional learning?
- What is the function of the behavior that is interfering with learning?
- Which of the the 3C’s need to be addressed to improve conditions for teaching and learning? With whom? How?
- Connection: How and where do I belong?
- Competence: What is my skill and/or current cognitive level with what I am being asked to do?
- Control: What is in it for me in relation to choice, flexibility, and outcome?
Leadership recommendations
- Engage teachers and leaders in exploration of pressing common problems of student learning at their grade level and how they know those are problems.
- Develop a shared understanding of a problem of student learning you are trying to solve. This may require an action plan for gathering more data.
Getting Better
Ultimately, if schools are going to transform students’ experiences, educators need to take a stance that they can improve and get better all the time. Ideally, as educators collaborate and identify problems of student learning to tackle, they also identify areas of teaching that can be refined. We know that improving teaching practice, like improving anything, requires an openness to learning as well as technical support in how to improve. In schools with collective efficacy, teachers expect to receive coaching and feedback as they experiment with their teaching practices. This coaching and feedback will result in improvements in teaching that lead to improvements for students. A culture and process for getting better is critical to collective efficacy.
Questions to consider
- To what extent is there a culture of getting better in place at my school?
- What are the structures and processes we have for supporting teachers in improvement of teaching practice?
Leadership recommendations
- Assess the ways in which teachers are supported when they are attempting new practices. When and how do they receive real-time coaching and feedback as they work on the “how”?
- Determine/utilize processes for feedback that help teachers examine the impact of their practice by connecting what they do to the effect it is having on students (e.g., “When you did ________, students were able to … ”).
Where Middle Level leaders might start
- Gather a team of leaders (teachers, coaches, students, parents, administrators) to start to study the most pressing problems of student learning at the school.
- Analyze, along with your team, the structures and culture of teacher collaboration and learning that is in place now.
- Consider the relationship currently between student learning problems and the teacher professional learning and collaboration you have.
As you assess the current state of collaboration, problem solving and continuous improvement within your school, know that you are not alone. MASSP has been a first responder advancing learning for over 100 years. We welcome the opportunity to serve as a thought partner, executive coach, or consultant to support you in building culture and leading learning.
Written by Colin Ripmaster, MASSP Associate Executive Director