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The Leader's Role in Improving Teacher Practice

chapter EIGHT

he previous chapters have provided a variety of case examples, illustrations, and tools for school leaders in their effort to improve the quality of teaching. The purpose of this chapter is to examine more broadly the roles and responsibilities of school and district leaders in their collective work to improve teaching practice. Specically, we will revisit the concept of reciprocal accountability as it relates to an instructional improvement agenda and then introduce a nal framework to help leaders at all levels of the organization engage in the kind of ongoing inquiry practice necessary to improve teaching and learning for all.

RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY The idea of reciprocal accountability provides a particularly useful construct for school and district leaders who are intent on improving the quality of teaching and learning. Reciprocal accountability simply means that if we are going to hold you accountable for something, we have an equal and commensurate responsibility to ensure you know how to do what we are expecting you to do (Elmore, 2000; Resnick & Glennan, 2002). Practically speaking, this important concept means that accountability must go hand in hand with organizational capacity building with a specic focus on ensuring that teachers and leaders have the expertise necessary to ensure high achievement for all

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students. Lets examine how the concept of reciprocal accountability should play out from the classroom to the district boardroom. Reciprocal accountability has usually (not always) been taken for granted in the classroom. The whole idea of schooling implies that teachers are responsible for ensuring that students learn prescribed subject matter. This means that teachers must know deeply each of their students as individual learners, differentiating their instruction accordingly so that each student meets the stated standard regardless of the students starting place. As we discussed in previous chapters, this sophisticated and complex art and science of teaching requires a clear through-line linking together the ve dimensions of purpose, student engagement, curriculum and pedagogy, assessment for student learning, and classroom environment and culture. Implicit in the act of teaching is that we cannot hold students accountable for something that has not been taught. Of course this is where the breakdown often occurs. Teaching something once, in one way, to all students is usually not sufcient to then hold students accountable for learning. To ensure that students learn, we need to do more than disseminate content. The truth is that reciprocal accountability in the classroom exists only to the extent that subject matter is taught well as embodied by the vision statements in the Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning framework. Excellent teachers know and understand that student learning is ultimately a measure of their own teaching. Although the lions share of attention is focused on the relationship between teachers and students as the critical variable in student learning, the concept of reciprocal accountability provides the same useful lens to examine the relationship between teachers and principals. To start this examination, it is instructive to contrast prevailing expectations of teachers and principals. As we discussed previously, it is generally expected and assumed that teachers will get to know their students as individual learners. Teachers will use a variety of assessment tools and techniques to know students strengths, weaknesses, learning styles, and needs. Again it is assumed that excellent teachers will use their thorough assessment of student learning needs in relation to state and national standards to shape their teaching point and instructional strategies. Although principals dont take this relationship between teachers and students for granted, they often fail to recognize the similar reciprocal nature of their role with their own teachers. Just as teachers need to know their students as individual learners, principals need to know their teachers as individual learners. Excellent principals

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also use a variety of assessment tools and techniques to know teachers strengths, weaknesses, learning styles, and needs. We have illuminated a variety of strategies, frameworks, and tools in previous chapters to help principals with this effort. However, it starts with a fundamental awareness and understanding that as a school leader, if I am to hold my teachers accountable for high-quality teaching, then I need to ensure they have the knowledge and expertise necessary to do what I am expecting them to do. In our experience the extent to which principals understand and practice the reciprocal nature of their role as an instructional leader varies widely. Many principals indeed embody the essence of reciprocal accountability in their daily practice, yet some principals do not know their teachers as individual learners, engage in pro forma classroom visits at best, and are generally absent in the important work of improving teaching practice. Even in cases in which principals try to provide relevant feedback, it is often isolated from any kind of strategic improvement effort. For example, we have observed this typical interchange between principals and teachers dozens of times. A principal observes a portion of a ninth-grade language arts teachers class during a formally scheduled observation visit. During the course of the observed portion of the lesson the principal notes that the teachers questioning strategies of students requires a rather low level of student thinking. Specically, the principal notes that the teacher asks eleven questions during a twentyminute review of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Each one of the eleven questions required students to only recall information or retrieve information from their text. The principal then seizes on this insightful observation to provide written feedback to the teacher complementing the teacher on several aspects of the lesson, provides feedback about the low level of questioning, and suggests that the teacher begin to use higher-level questions that require the students to infer, analyze, and synthesize information and ideas. Absent is any kind of connection between the feedback and what the principal is or has been doing to support teachers professional learningin this case how to develop a repertoire of questioning strategies that require much higher levels of student thinking. The more expert instructional leader might go back to the dimensions of purpose (standard and teaching point) and curriculum and pedagogy to question the purpose of teaching a whole class novel in the rst place. However, with respect to questioning strategies in particular, the truth is that if the teacher knew how to employ higher-level questions and help scaffold students thinking in order to answer
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higher-level questions, the teacher would already be doing it. Teachers work at the limits of their pedagogical and subject matter content understanding every single day. Simply providing written feedback to teachers pointing out something they should improve on without actually teaching them how to do so generally falls short of actual improvement. If principals want teachers to teach differentlyin any way, shape, or formthen they must guide, support, and nurture teacher learning just like we expect teachers to do for students. Lets imagine school principals approaching their instructional leadership work as one would expect a teacher to do so for his or her students. We should expect the principal to have a detailed assessment and accounting of each teacher including but not limited to the following criteria:


How each student is progressing in the teachers class along with particular problems of student learning that have emerged What the teacher is doing to address problems of student learning What the teacher does well as measured by an instructional framework for high-quality teaching such as the Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning Where the teacher needs to develop more expertise according to the same instructional framework What the principal is doing to develop that teachers expertise including the trajectory of improvement and benchmarks by which the principal will measure the improvement

 

Imagine this kind of detailed assessment and accounting for each teacher as an individual learner and performer in contrast to the typical school improvement plan that is commonplace in schools across the country. In the typical school improvement plan process, principals lead their staff in a careful review of data designed to surface specic improvement goals for the school. Although this process is not bad in so much as the review of data is an important component of inquiry work, its that the resultant goals tend to lack the granularity necessary to improve individual teaching practice. For example, a typical school improvement goal, after months of data review and hours of staff discussion and consensus building, may read something like this:


Third-grade students will show a 15 percent gain in mathematics as measured by the state test of academic prociency by the end of the academic school year.

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The school improvement plan may go on to link specic professional development strategies such as a common book study in inquiry-based math teaching or lesson analysis and so on. Again there isnt anything inherently wrong about this process except that it stops far short of getting to the heart of the matter, which is how each individual teacher is supposed to go about improving his or her own teaching practice. Just as with students, teachers are also at different starting places in the depth of their subject matter and pedagogical expertise. Improvement of individual teaching practice requires the same kind of differentiated instructional leadership as improvement of student learning requires differentiated instruction. This is the nature of reciprocal accountability in the school. If principals are to know their teachers as individual learners and to orchestrate professional learning in ways that help each of them improve their teaching practice, then it is equally important to examine the role of central ofce leaders in support of school principals. As long as school districts continue to be an instrumental unit under the governance of an elected board of directors or a local mayor, then it is critical to create a coherent system that actively supports high-quality teaching practice in every school. This is the difference between a true school system, responsible for systemwide improvement, versus a system of individual schools left on their own to gure out how to improve. Some continue to argue that school systems as we know them are largely incapable of supporting high-quality teaching practice for all students, thus the only sensible reform effort should be to use prevailing market forces to create private school choice in the form of independent and other types of charter schools. Although we are not opposed to a thoughtful integration of charter schools into a larger system of public schooling we believe deeply that there is a fundamental role for school district central ofces in support of high-quality teaching and learning. The fact that so many school district central ofces have not risen to this role is not necessarily an indictment of the school district or central ofce as a critical unit in support of teachers and leaders. We believe that the historic inability of central ofces to ensure high-quality teaching for all is less of a structural issue and more of a paradigm issue. The very idea of a central ofce in the early history of public education in the United States was to provide material supportgoods and servicesand basic management functions for schools. Central ofces were never designed to provide instructional leadership. Even by todays higher
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accountability standards many central ofce leaders fail to recognize the reciprocal nature of their role as instructional leaders. However, a growing body of educational research has noted the important relationship school district central ofce leaders play in supporting student learning across the system (Copland & Knapp, 2006; Honig, 2008; Wahlstrom, Seashore, Leithwood, & Anderson, 2010). Looking at it through the lens of reciprocal accountability our question is, What do central ofce leaders need to know and be able to do in order to help principals improve their instructional leadership practice so that teachers in turn improve their teaching practice? Just as we noted in Chapter Four when we introduced the three types of observations, there must be a clear and purposeful connection among the work of central ofce leaders, principals, and teachers in service of improved practice. Although we believe that central ofce leaders must play a role in improved teaching and learning, there is a question of what this should actually look like in terms of their daily leadership practice. University of Washington researchers sought to answer this exact question (Honig & Copland, 2010). Studying several prominent school district central ofces that fundamentally transformed its leadership role in support of schools and situating these ndings in the larger body of school district instructional improvement efforts Honig and Copland captured actual practices that central ofce leaders employed in service of improving teaching and learning. In short they noted that true central ofce transformation must be measured not by organizational structures, reporting relationships, managerial titles, and functions but by the actual practices central ofce leaders engage in every day to support teaching and learning. In CELs growing work with school district central ofce transformation, Honig and Copland have expanded on this research in the development of the Five Dimensions of Central Ofce Transformation found in Table 8.1. We use the framework to help central ofce leaders examine their practices and ensure that their daily work is measured ultimately against the standard of improved teaching practice as evidenced by improved student learning. Just as the Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning framework serves to develop a shared vision of high-quality instruction and prompt specic instructional leadership actions, the Five Dimensions of Central Ofce Transformation serves to identify and prompt specic central ofce leadership

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