Podcast appearances and mentions of justin baeder

  Download the PDF "How Instructional Leaders Change Teacher Practice" at www.principalcenter.com/3roles Read a sample chapter and learn more about Now We're Talking at www.solutiontree.com/21days Read the article "Classroom Walkthrough FAQ for Instructional Leaders" at https://principalcenter.com/faq Start your free trial of Repertoire at www.principalcenter.com/repertoire About Justin Baeder PhD Justin Baeder, PhD. is author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree), co-author of Mapping Professional Practice (Solution Tree), and creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, which has helped more than 10,000 leaders in 50 countries make a daily habit of classroom visits. He holds a PhD in Educational Leadership & Policy Studies from the University of Washington, and helps senior leaders in K-12 organizations build capacity for instructional leadership

Get the book Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth Contact Heather Bell-Williams via email at ConsultHBW@gmail.com About The Authors Heather Bell-Williams is an experienced teacher, school administrator and consultant, with over 30 years of expertise to bring to her role as Coach and Consultant. Heather holds three bachelor's degrees in arts and education from York University in Toronto and a Masters of Education in Leadership from the University of New Brunswick, as well as several additional qualifications, including Flourishing Coach certification. Heather is co-author of Mapping Professional Practice (Solution Tree) with Justin Baeder, PhD.  Justin Baeder, PhD. is author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree), co-author of Mapping Professional Practice (Solution Tree), and creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, which has helped more than 10,000 leaders in 50 countries make a daily habit of classroom visits. He holds a PhD in Educational Leadership & Policy Studies from the University of Washington, and helps senior leaders in K-12 organizations build capacity for instructional leadership   This episode of Principal Center Radio is sponsored by IXL, the most widely used online learning and teaching platform for K-12. Discover the power of data-driven instruction in your school with IXL—it gives you everything you need to maximize learning, from a comprehensive curriculum to meaningful school-wide data. Visit IXL.com/center to lead your school towards data-driven excellence today.   

This week Jen Schwanke hosts guest educator Justin Baeder, author and veteran instructional leader, and takeaways from his newest book Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth (2022), a book co-authored with Heather Bell-Williams.  Justin shares his practical takes on accountability and the careful dance of driving school improvement. Discover […] The post PMP407: Supporting Teacher Growth with Justin Baeder and Jen Schwanke appeared first on Principal Matters.

Today is a first experiment of the spotlight series. This will be a series on this podcast where we highlight individuals who are making a difference in the world of education. Today, we turn the spotlight on Doctor Justin Baeder, a former principal turned administrator mentor, who is helping principals become better leaders. We delve into one of his thought-provoking Tiktok videos regarding the push for teachers to also become therapists. Check it out! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Don't forget to subscribe to the show! If you'd be so kind as to leave a rating and review, that would help tremendously!   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Book Kevin to speak at your school or event!   Learn more about Kevin's speaking programs here! Download the 3 part video series to learn all about Kevin's decision making framework for students.   Follow Kevin on social! Facebook Instagram Linked In Tiktok Twitter  

Get the book Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth Contact Heather Bell-Williams via email at ConsultHBW@gmail.com Contact Justin Baeder via email at Justin@Principalcenter.com  About the Authors Heather Bell-Williams is an experienced teacher, school administrator and consultant, with over 30 years of expertise to bring to her role as Coach and Consultant. Heather holds three bachelor's degrees in arts and education from York University in Toronto and a Masters of Education in Leadership from the University of New Brunswick, as well as several additional qualifications, including Flourishing Coach certification. Heather is co-author of Mapping Professional Practice (Solution Tree) with Justin Baeder, PhD.  Justin Baeder, PhD. is author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree), co-author of Mapping Professional Practice (Solution Tree), and creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, which has helped more than 10,000 leaders in 50 countries make a daily habit of classroom visits. He holds a PhD in Educational Leadership & Policy Studies from the University of Washington, and helps senior leaders in K-12 organizations build capacity for instructional leadership

Learn about the Instructional Leadership Challenge at www.PrincipalCenter.com/challenge  About the Author The Instructional Leadership Challenge was created by Justin Baeder, PhD, Director of The Principal Center. Dr. Baeder has been a full-time author and consultant since 2012. He is the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree), the leading book on classroom walkthroughs, as well as Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth, with Heather Bell-Williams. Justin served his entire career in public education as a principal and teacher in Seattle Public Schools. He holds an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction from Seattle University and a PhD in Educational Leadership & Policy from the University of Washington.

Hard to handle behaviors can lead to teachers and students leaving the classroom! How should we address it? Tune in for more perspectives with Justin Baeder and I.

Walkthrough forms and rubrics are tools we are sometimes pressed to use as leaders. Yet these tools do not facilitate teacher growth alone. It is the conversation between professionals, supported by classroom evidence, that actually leads to improvement.Justin Baeder, author of Now We’re Talking: 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership, gives leaders a clear pathway toward our shared goals. I recently had a conversation with Justin on the subject, including:why dialogue is more effective as feedback than only leaving notes,the many benefits we see when we make classroom visits a habit, andwhy it is essential that faculty are clear on effective practices.If trying to faciltiate professional growth has felt out of reach, check out Now We’re Talking. It is a solid approach to supporting teachers in the classroom. Take care,MattP.S. Share this post on Twitter and include my handle in the tweet (@ReadByExample) to enter a giveaway for a free copy of Justin’s book!Recommended Reading and ResourcesJustin also runs The Principal Center, a website with many resources for leaders to explore for their school.Student engagement is one area of instruction that garners a lot of attention. I along with other educators wrote about engagement for Education Week.One of my favorite learning experiences is when students help organize the classroom library. Check out my brief video presentation (along with three other educators) for Choice Literacy on empowering choice. I discovered this interesting leadership profile about President Biden from last year (The Daily Beast). Biden is known for having both high expectations and a high tolerance for mistake making, which has led to strong loyalty from his staff.I have an upcoming course on Literacy Walks for Choice Literacy. Full subscribers - stay tuned for further details.Full TranscriptMatt Renwick (00:04):Welcome to the podcast. We're happy to have you here and be here. I've had the pleasure of working with you through our local educational organization on instructional leadership. It's been very informative for me to watch you lead groups and just learn a little bit more about what principals need and how we can use, I wouldn't say simple, but I would say very practical strategies to be just more effective and making me think about ways to rethink my days. So a lot of this work is based on your book, Now We're Talking: 21 Days to High Performance Instructional Leadership, but you also have The Principal Center and you do a lot of work out of there. And you work with many principals from what I understand, can you just say more about The Principal Center? What it's about? What do you do and how do you help leaders?Justin Baeder (00:55):Absolutely. So at The Principal Center, it's our mission to build capacity for instructional leadership and a big part of that has always been around helping school leaders regularly get into classrooms because I believe that that's where the true work is being done. Right. You know, if we are to be instructional leaders, it only makes sense that we would spend a significant amount of time in classrooms where the instruction, where the learning is taking place. So that's a big part of what we do. And through all of our programs through the book, as you mentioned, it all comes down to those key interactions between instructional leaders and the teachers that work with.Matt Renwick (01:34): In the title of your book as it's suggested, professional growth occurs through conversation around practice. So how do frequent visits to classrooms help these discussions?Justin Baeder (01:50):Yeah, that's a great framing there that professional growth occurs through conversation because you know, it makes sense. We nod our heads and kind of agree with that, but a lot of instructional leadership really isn't based on that assumption, a lot of what's out there of what's being done in the name of improving teaching and learning is much more along the lines of directive feedback, or kind of drive-by feedback or, you know, feedback that's left on the doorstep or left on a sticky note or left on a form rather than a true conversation. So I think to have a true conversation adds a human dimension that really gets at how we change, how we make decisions as humans. So I don't want to understate the importance of the conversation aspect there, because it is something that often we overlook, we think, "Well, I'm the principal, of course, they'll listen to me."Justin Baeder (02:42):It can be a one-way conversation, but really, if we want people to truly be open to change, we have to be open to listening as well, and it does have to be a conversation. So to your question about how does our practice of getting into classrooms more contribute to that? I think a lot of it comes down to context, right. As a principal, you're required to be in classrooms X number of times a year, and X is usually a pretty small number, right? The one or two formal observations. And I have to ask Matt, when you were a teacher, did you ever get visited much more than that, or was it pretty minimal when you were a teacher?Matt Renwick (03:22):It was pretty minimal and, to be fair to my leaders, that was just the standard practice. I mean, I think walkthroughs are just coming into prominence. But it was once, maybe twice a year. Yeah.Justin Baeder (03:35):It's my experience as well. And I think that's the experience of almost everyone that you just don't see your principal or assistant principal who evaluates you all that often. And of course that's because they're busy, right. There are a million other things to do. There are fires to put out, metaphorically speaking, and sometimes literally, and there's just so much else that instructional leadership is always one of those important but not urgent kinds of things. But I think when it's always not urgent, we lose the frequency that makes it not really true that we can have quality over quantity. You know what I mean? There is this idea that like, "Oh, if you spend quality time with your kids, you know, it's not about the quantity." Well, I mean, to a certain extent, maybe quality matters more than quantity, but you can't really have quality without quantity.Justin Baeder (04:24):You know, if I'm going to spend time with my kids, I want it to be frequently, right. I want it to be all the time, not just a little bit here and there, but very high quality. I'd much rather have a lower stakes, more frequent opportunity to get into classrooms than just that big once a year everybody's prepared for it, we've protected against any interruptions. I would rather run the risk of being interrupted or getting sidetracked or not seeing something that's all that interesting by coming more often and having more chances because it's in that frequency that you get the context that you need to really understand what you're seeing to be able to put it all in perspective rather than just be kind of a stranger to the classroom. Just like, I don't want to be a stranger to my kids and say, "Hey, I'm, I'm here for some quality time." We really got to invest that time in the relationship and in building the awareness of what's going on in every classroom, what's going on with our curriculum, knowing our students and what they're working on as learners. So I think all that context is hugely relevant for the feedback that we provide to teachers in those conversations.Matt Renwick (05:29):That's a good point you make is, I'd rather be interrupted while I'm in classrooms and at least I'm making the time, prioritizing that. And if I have to be pulled away, so be it, but at least I'm making that attempt. And as you mentioned, you value efficiencies of getting in there frequently, as well as the effectiveness. They seem to work hand in hand, the more times we're in there, the more context we receive. How did you arrive on three visits per day?Justin Baeder (06:01):Yeah, I think three a day just seemed to be the sweet spot for me. It's not impossible to keep it in your head, like you can kind of tell if you've done three visits a day. It's enough that you have to really strive for it. It's not going to happen that easily. You have to really push yourself to get into classrooms three times a day, but it also gets you around to each person on a pretty regular basis if you have about 30 teachers, I think 30 is a typical kind of average. Some people have 45 teachers and some people may only have 15 that they supervise. But if you think about an average number of teachers that a given administrator supervises, you can get around to everyone roughly every two weeks, if you visit three people a day. Sothat to me is what makes it the sweet spot andgoing two weeks without seeing somebody it's not too much and it's not too little. They're not sick of you if you've dropped by every two weeks, but you also are not a stranger to the classroom.Matt Renwick (06:56):That's exactly, I have 30, around 30 in my school. And especially during the pandemic I've noticed when I have not been there as much because of just the situation, I feel a little like I'm missing out on what what's happening. We don't have an instructional pulse as they call it. So in order to have these conversations be productive, we were talking before about school-wide expectations and having clearly spelled out practices or strategies, a framework to be able to have conversations around. So what strategies do you find effective? Not just for clarity, I think is important, but also for commitment of everyone to say, "Yeah, I, I hear what you're saying but also that I agree with that practice and I'm going to try it."Justin Baeder (07:44):Yeah, I think establishing a common vocabulary really is the first step. And sometimes we think we have a common vocabulary, but what we really have is common buzzwords or common terms without common definitions. I think the biggest opportunity in most schools is to simply get more familiar with the existing evaluation language. You know, it's easy to be reminded to pull out the evaluation rubric at the beginning of the year for goal setting and at the end of the year for writing the final evaluation. But if that's the only chance we have to use that language as our vocabulary, when we're talking about practice, it's just not going to be that familiar to us as leaders. And certainly not to teachers. You know, if they're only using this language for a two hour window every year, then it's just not going to reach that level of a shared vocabulary, a shared understanding.Justin Baeder (08:39):So I encourage people to look at their existing evaluation criteria. If you have a rubric like Charlotte Danielson's very high quality rubric that describes very clear criteria, you know, very clear areas, it's broken into domains and components. Those are all broken out very, very neatly. And then there are levels of performance for each component. And when we use that language on a frequent basis, we look at that rubric and we say, "Okay, I see this word is in this column to describe this practice," we start to sharpen our vision and get on the same page in a conversation so that we're not just using a common buzzword. We're not just saying, well, we both use the term differentiate. So we know what that means. We're using language in a more precise and leveled way because we're drawing from that common document that serves as our shared framework.Justin Baeder (09:31):And then I think we can also establish that kind of language that's unique to our school. You know, there are certainly things in every school that distinguish your school from other schools that make it a unique place. And being able to describe that in specific terms, if you think in terms of that Danielson framework format, if you can break an expectation into components and then describe levels of performance for those components, you're going to be in great shape and you're not going to be limited to just the buzzwords. And I think that's the key thing is to really be specific about what you mean. And I think the commitment comes just from having input, having a voice in developing those expectations.Matt Renwick (10:11):So you can take some of that language and make it your own thing, is what you're saying, as long as it's aligned with how we're being evaluated, but also really how it's related to success for kids as well. But you can parse out that language too, to make it work within the identity of your own school. So it's not just lockstep with an evaluation tool.Justin Baeder (10:32):Yeah. And I think people should feel free to add to it, not to say that we have different standards here, but we have unique things that we care about here that are more directly applicable to what our teachers are teaching. You know, like one thing to keep in mind about Danielson and other evaluation frameworks is that they're designed to cover everything for every subject, every grade, K through 12. And that means that they're easier for us to use as administrators, but they're not very specific as to what teachers are doing. So if you have a math department or if you have a kindergarten team, they are going to be doing things in particular ways that are worth getting on the same page about that are worth establishing common expectations for, but it's not the level of detail that you're gonna find in an existing rubric, like the Danielson framework. So being able to develop that in-house is just an incredible professional development exercise. And then you have an asset that you can use for improvement. It's a great tool to have developed internally.Matt Renwick (11:27):And that's where the ownership comes in because you're absolutely creating an agreement around those kind of terms, but on your terms. In Your book, you note this too and I could definitely relate. You said as expertise grows and you've addressed some of that low-hanging fruit right away, they're more easy wins, leaders sometimes feel this sense of urgency to be critical. And that's not always the best approach. How do you resist that stance in what should we do instead?Justin Baeder (12:00):Yeah. Great question. So this is a hill that we're all going to encounter in our climb to get into classrooms more, you know, the first opportunity is that low-hanging fruit, right? Like if maybe you're new to a building and your predecessor did not get into classrooms very much at all. Well, you start getting into classrooms, you're going to see some opportunities for quick wins that have been missed for years, and you're gonna be able to provide feedback that makes a big difference right away. And that's going to feel great. You're going to feel like a true instructional leader. Your teachers are going to be hopefully pretty happy about it. Maybe you've had to shake some things up a little bit, and people have gotten the message that they're not just going to be totally ignored and left alone, but after you've taken advantage of those quick wins, you're in a slightly difficult position because it's like, what do you do next?Justin Baeder (12:47):Do I continue to just kind of ratchet up the pressure? You know, if the next opportunities are a little harder one, if it's not going to be quite so easy to make those improvements, because we already solved the big problems we already took advantage of the easy opportunities. Do we just get more critical? And I think especially for experienced teachers, it can be really hard to find something that would constitute a big improvement. You know, we can make a little suggestion. "Hey, have you thought about doing this instead of that," but often the teacher has thought about doing this instead of that, they're an experienced professional. They've been down this road before. They've tried a lot of the things that are going to occur to us to try, and it can start to feel a little bit like we're just trying to find fault.Justin Baeder (13:32):And I think that's especially true when we don't have expertise in or experience in the same grade level or same subject area as the teachers we're working with. They can feel like our well-intended efforts to lead continuous improvement are just an unending kind of ratcheting up of the criticism. So I think that's a challenge that could on the one hand encourage us to kind of back off and give up. But I think it's an opportunity to get more curious and to say, "You know, the problem is not that teachers need to worry about smaller and smaller things and I needed to be more and more critical. The challenge for me now as an instructional leader is that I need to get more curious and I need to be willing to go deeper into our curriculum, deeper into the pedagogy of subjects that I've never taught." So that my feedback that I have is going to be based on a deeper understanding than I had before. It's not that we need to be more critical; it's that we need to go deeper to really understand the kinds of decisions teachers are making once they've solved those kinds of low-hanging fruit issues.Matt Renwick (14:38):I was just in a first grade classroom. I don't know if it was first grade; it was a primary grade that they were doing some letter writing and they had scaffolded parts of the letter. And I had never taught primary. It was intermediate. And so maybe in the past, I would've said, "That's too much scaffolding," or not enough. And I just instead asked, "How do you decide how much scaffolding, how many sentence stems do you decide?" How do you decide that? And she went into just a very great explanation of, we've been out for a month and a half, and I felt like I've had to increase my scaffolding so kids can be successful right away. She was able to explain that and explain her thinking, but maybe she'll walk away and say, "You know, maybe the kids are ready sooner." I don't know. But I liked that suggestion of being curious. I also liked the suggestion in your book of clustering your classroom visits, at least in the beginning around a grade level or department. And you mentioned before creating context, and how does that work when you're in the same subject area or age level, and how does that help your visits?Justin Baeder (15:44):So a lot of it is context and some of it's just efficiency, right? If you are heading out of the office to go visit classrooms, in most schools, there's some sort of geographic clustering. You might have a first grade wing or a science building. If you're on a large high school campus, you might have a fifth grade hallway, so just geographically, it's easier to go from one room to a room right next door to it. But it also does provide context in the sense that often teachers are teaching the same subject at the same time. So you can see one part of a lesson in one classroom, and then the continuation of that same lesson in a different classroom. And you'll know more about both clips of instruction that you saw, so to speak, because you were in that other classroom, you can see an entire lesson. Sometimes it would work.Justin Baeder (16:32):It doesn't always work out this way, but sometimes it works out that you spend 45 minutes visiting three classrooms, you see an entire lesson, you just see a different part of it taught by three different people. And that gives you, you know, it saves you the difficulty of being in the dark about where this was going, or what happened before, earlier in the lesson. You have three times as much context for the lesson that way. I would say the other thing that it allows is more direct comparison between the approaches of different people, because when you see side-by-side, same curriculum, same age group of kids, same day. It allows you to see more clearly the contrasts between different people. And sometimes your feedback can just be advising the person to do what you just saw there. You don't even have to tell one person that you're getting this from their teammate next door. But it really helps with the specificity of the feedback, because you can see those, you know, those comparisons between classrooms.Matt Renwick (17:30):That's kind of had an influence on professional learning communities, for example, when you're then meeting as teams and you're a part of that community, that collaboration versus using their time to have them explain to you what what they did, and you can let me get kind of a continuation. The last question I had is, it's just an ongoing debate of whether informal classroom visits should be evaluative or non-evaluative. I've always tried to approach it myself, as what I write up, my notes are not going into your evaluation. I mean, you could put it in there as an artifact and you walk and teachers have, but-one teacher said, but you can't unsee instruction. Right? And you can't forget about it. I mean, that has to influence your judgment, and she's not wrong. So where are you at, on this issue right now with walkthroughs and where it falls along, the support versus judgment spectrum.Justin Baeder (18:33):That's just it, right. That you can't unsee something. Once you know, it, it's going to factor into kind of your holistic judgments. You know, even if it's not a specific criteria that you evaluate someone on, if you develop a concern or if you see something really great, you're going to remember it, it's going to affect the way that you pay attention. It's going to affect what you notice and how thoroughly you document. So I advise administrators to never say that their visits are non-evaluative. Like, never say that anything is not evaluative because truly nothing really is not evaluative, if you're aware of some facts are going to factor in. But what we don't want is for everything to feel high stakes, right? We don't want every single walkthrough to feel like the teacher is on trial. And part of the whole point of getting into classrooms more frequently is to avoid this problem of those one or two formal observations, being "it" right? Feeling like this is a high stakes opportunity. This is my one chance to show that I'm competent for the administrator. This is my one chance to give the teachers any useful feedback. Like the frequency is inversely proportional to the stakes, right? The more we're there, the lower the stakes. The less we're there, the higher the stakes of each individual visit. So I feel like those go together.Matt Renwick (19:48):That's a good point too. You're going to see a lot of good things too. And those could be also a part of someone's portfolio of artifacts, if that's something that you have to collect. And so it does go both ways, but I do like that point too, just the more you're in there. And I have noticed that too, people are just used to me coming in and it really is lower the stakes when I'm actually coming in with the formal observation. It's just, "Oh, it's Matt again." No more different. It's just another day. And he's been in here how many times? So the book is Now We're Talking: 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership. I've been applying these ideas myself working with Justin. I have found them very helpful. And where do you find The Principal Center resource? And you have a lot of nice resources on that site.Justin Baeder (20:40):Yeah. We have a lot of free resources. If you just go to theprincipalcenter.com, and down at the bottom, one in particular that I think would be for your listeners is the note cards, just for keeping track of classroom visits. And we have software and everybody's got software they use for this, but I found that a lot of people really liked just having a physical note card. So we have a note cards template that you'll see there, at theprincipalcenter.com/notecards, where you make a note card for each teacher and you take three of those note cards every day, you visit those three teachers, write down the date and then put those note cards on the bottom of the stack every day, you've got your three teachers to visit and you keep that consistent rotation. However you want to organize them by team or department or whatever. It's a great way to make sure that you don't skip anyone. There are some feedback questions on the back. So highly recommend checking those out.Matt Renwick (21:27):And the principals in our group have been using those. And they've said that same thing, I feel like I'm in the classrooms more and they liked that quick opportunity for feedback. Really it's kind of an accountability system just to make sure I'm getting in classrooms. Well, thanksJustin. This was great. Thanks for being here.Justin Baeder (21:47):Well, thanks, Matt. It's been a pleasure. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com

Justin Baeder, PhD is Director of The Principal Center, where he helps senior leaders in K-12 organizations build capacity for instructional leadership. A former principal in Seattle Public Schools, he is creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, which has helped more than 10,000 school leaders in 50 countries around the world: Confidently Get Into Classrooms Every Day Have Feedback Conversations That Change Teacher Practice Discover their best opportunities for school improvement Dr. Baeder is the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership and host of Principal Center Radio, a podcast featuring education thought leaders. In this episode… Dr. Justin Baeder applied to his doctoral program and for his first position as a school principal at the same time...and got them both! It's difficult to add a new professional position to one's life. It's difficult to add a new educational pursuit to one's life. When you try to do both simultaneously, at least one invariably suffers. In this episode of An Unconventional Life, Dr. Justin Baeder shares the challenges he faced in his dissertation journey, the key to his eventual success, and the opportunities his doctoral degree has provided. Dr. Baeder has gone on to become a published author, podcast host, and successful owner of his own business. This is a can't-miss episode for anyone who wants to leverage their doctoral degree as a trusted expert and authority figure!

Justin Baeder: Leader efficiency (no. 18)

Justin Baeder: Leader efficiency (no. 18)

In 2017, Justin Baeder, from Principal Center Radio, invited me as a guest on his show to talk to me about my book Messaging Matters: How to Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students, and Reach Communities. Justin was gracious enough to allow me to repost the interview with my readers and listeners. This week I want to share that […]

A conversation with The Main Idea's Jenn David-Lang and Justin Baeder, the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership Jenn David-Lang of The Main Idea returns to the show and we talk with Justin Baeder, the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership.  Justin discusses his model for turning daily classroom visits into a powerful habit for instructional improvement.  He offers a practical approach to mastering this high-leverage technique for helping teachers reflect on their practice and grow as professionals.   Now We're Talking! is available everywhere, and you can learn more about Justin and his work at http://www.instructionalleadershipchallenge.com/. You can reach Jenn through her website for The Main Idea (www.themainidea.net).  She's offered to send listeners of this episode a free summary of Now We're Talking! if you send her an email at J.David-Lang@TheMainIdea.net. Send your comments, questions, and show ideas to mike@schoolleadershipshow.com.  Consider rating the podcast in iTunes and leaving a comment.  And please pass the show along to your colleagues. If you or someone you know would like to sponsor the show, send me an email at mike@schoolleadershipshow.com.

Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksVisit the Visible Learning websiteAbout Dr. John HattieJohn Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential Visible Learning series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta-analysis studies related to achievement. Dr. Hattie is Professor, Deputy Dean, and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and Associate Director of the ARC-Science of Learning Research Centre.[expand title="Show Transcript"] Announcer:  [00:01] Welcome to "Principal Center Radio," bringing you the best in professional practice. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and champion of high‑performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder.Justin Baeder:  [00:12] Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. John Hattie. Dr. Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential "Visible Learning" series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta‑analysis studies related to achievement.[00:31] Dr. Hattie is also professor, deputy dean, and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is chair of the board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and associate director of the ARC Science of Learning Research Center.[00:48] Most of our Principal Center Radio listeners know Dr. Hattie primarily as a researcher and author. We're here today to talk about his new book, "10 Mindframes for Visible Learning ‑‑ Teaching for Success."Announcer:  [01:00] And now, our feature presentation.Justin:  [01:03] Dr. Hattie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.John Hattie:  [01:05] It's great to be here talking to you, Justin, and to the listeners.Justin:  [01:09] Thanks so much. Let's talk first about what you saw happening in the profession, perhaps in reaction to some of your previous work. How did you arrive at the conclusion that teachers' mindframes are so important? What was it that led up to this particular book?John:  [01:25] Since I started on the whole visible learning notion, which actually I started in your old state, Washington, way back in the early 1990s, was trying to answer the question about how everything in our business seems to work. How come every teacher says they're above average and every school has evidence that they're doing a good job? Yet from the perspective of a student, that doesn't always make sense.[01:48] What I've tried to do is change the conversation from what works ‑‑ because almost everything works ‑‑ to what works best. As I've done in the book, trying to take the many, many thousands ‑‑ tens of thousands ‑‑ of research articles that are done in everyday classrooms and trying to answer the question about what does work best.[02:07] In the early books, I was grappling with 150, now 250 different influences. I published the book and I take the responsibility here. Sometimes that lead table, that list of factors, gets in the way of the story. It took me 20 years to write that first book to understand what that story is.[02:26] What this current book is about is it concentrates entirely on that story. What it turns out is it's not really what teachers do. We could have two teachers, Justin, using exactly the same strategy and one of them implements it well. One of them has got good diagnosis and [inaudible] for their class. One of them modifies it on the fly, and one of them doesn't.[02:51] It's not the strategy. It's their thinking in the moment‑to‑moment, day‑by‑day process that teachers use. It really was not so much what they did. It wasn't really who they are in terms of whether what kind of training they have, how many years' experience, whether in Arkansas, whether in Washington, whether in Melbourne. What matters is how they think.[03:10] What I tried to distill in this book is the 10 most important ways about how teachers think. My argument in the book is that's what we need to worry about with our profession, that expertise that relates to how teachers think. It's very profound. It's very dramatic. It's incredibly powerful when you see it happening. It's not uncommon at all.Justin:  [03:29] I couldn't agree more that teacher thinking, teacher cognition is so critical and so powerful. I wonder if you've seen what I'm picking up from a lot of our profession, this focus on teacher behavior.[03:45] People will take a list like your book, "Visible Learning", the big study, and say, "I want to see teachers doing this, that, or the other thing." We go around to classrooms. We bring the clipboard, and we say, "Well, you're doing this. I think you should be doing that instead." We focus very heavily on teacher behavior.[04:03] I've seen very, very little focus in our profession on teacher thinking, and the decision making that teachers do, and the ways that teachers think about their work and think about their students. I'm very excited to see you direct the attention of educators to thinking, to those things that happen behind the scenes.[04:23] We have a frustration as administrators ‑‑ I work primarily with administrators ‑‑ that thinking is not very visible. Of all the things that we can influence, thinking is one of those that happens beneath the surface or behind the scenes.[04:36] As you have probed this topic to think about how we can get at teacher thinking, what have been some of the main indicators to you of how teachers think and how that matters in the classroom, how that matters for students?John:  [04:51] The theme is absolutely correct. This is too strong, but I almost don't care how teachers teach. The whole debate we have about best ways to teach, about best practice, about resources, apps, all that kind of stuff is killing us as a profession. It's not how they teach. It's the impact of that teaching on the kids.[05:11] In the same way as you said, when you go into classroom with those clipboards, you take the Danielson and the Marzano's, and you sit in the back, and you record them all. It doesn't really matter. I've struggled to find any evidence that doing that makes a difference. Only a fifth of the items in the Danielson relate to the impact of the teacher on the kid.[05:30] Now if you talk do Danielson, she'll say that your instrument wasn't invented to use it in the kind of accountability way your country's obsessed with. I care about that impact on the kids.[05:40] When you go into a classroom, it's a sin to watch another teacher teach. All you do is tell that teacher how to teach better like you. What you should do is watch the impact on the kids.[05:50] We know from [inaudible] work that 80 percent of what happens in the classroom, a teacher doesn't see or hear. Why would we care about the teacher reflection on that 20 percent? Help the teacher understand that 80 percent. A lot of our work at the moment is trying to help teachers see what's happening in that other percent.[06:06] I take the private lives that kids talk about in the classrooms as teachers are talking. Teachers talk an incredible amount of the time. It's not as if kids are sitting there passive. They have a whole private world that goes on in that classroom. How do we help the teachers understand and use that to the beneficiary?[06:21] Then it comes to your point, Justin, about...You're right, it's hard to see the thinking, but it's not impossible. If you can get teachers talking to each other about the decisions they're making, if you can get kids talking to each other about the ways they're thinking, and in great classrooms, this happens.[06:39] Hearing kids think aloud is really powerful, in the same way, hearing teachers think aloud in the staff room. Close to 80 to 90 percent of the time, kids and teachers are sitting there quietly absorbing the material. The only way, and you can imagine ‑‑ this is hard for me ‑‑ the only way you can do this is learn to shut up.Justin:  [06:58] I'm very excited to hear you say that conversation is the way we get at that thinking. That's an idea that has captured my attention for the last couple of months, this idea that so much of teacher practice is hidden beneath the surface.[07:12] If we go in and observe, and take notes, and then just talk at the teacher, we're going to have a very limited ability to actually impact their practice because, again, most of their practice is that thinking that if we're doing all the talking as administrators, we're not even beginning to get at.[07:30] In the book, you give a number of different mindframes, 10 different mindframes for looking at how teachers think and for teachers to reflect on their own thinking. One of the first that you have in chapter one of the book is "I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning."[07:49] I wonder if you could talk for just a moment about why that rose to the top as one of the key mindframes for teacher thinking.John:  [07:56] Justin, it's easier than that. If you want to save yourself time reading the book, just read that one chapter because the other lines are variants of that same theme.[08:04] It all comes back to when you walk into a classroom, and you say, "My job here today is to evaluate my impact," then all the good things follow. If you walk into a staff room and say as a school leader, "My job here today is to evaluate my impact," now of course that's going to mean you have to have a discussion, an agreement, an understanding of what impact means. That's probably the most important thing that happens.[08:29] Why should it be that every time a kid hits a teacher, if their teacher's conception of what a year's growth looks like is very small compared to one down the corridor where that year's growth is very large, that's going to have a profound impact on your learning that year.[08:43] How do we get that discussion of what does a year's growth look like? What does it need to be good at, year 5 English, year's 10 panel meeting? Those are the kinds of discussions we have to have, not why are you teaching and how do you teach it, but what do you mean by growth?[08:56] Bring along two pieces of kid's work three months apart and have a discussion. Do you agree this shows three‑months growth?[09:02] It's all this notion about what do you mean by impact. It means that you're going to have to have an understanding of how you go about assessing them. You do it through listening to student voice. What does it mean to learn on this class? Ask the kids that. What does it mean to have growth?[09:17] We're working on another book now looking at student assessment capabilities where we're trying to point out that students are actually very, very smart about whether they're learning or not, or whether they're growing or not. How do we use them in the conversation?[09:30] This whole notion about as an evaluator, I evaluate my impact. I go in there to see who I have impact on, what I have impact about, and what my magnitude is. Quite frankly, that's the whole theme of the other nine. We thought just having one is probably risky, so we'll have nine of them saying the same thing.Justin:  [09:50] For so long in our profession, we've been asking the question am I using best practices. I know that one of the reactions to your work sometimes has been that we don't really read the whole book. We just look at the list and say, "Well, I should be using these top practices," and as you said, ignoring all the rest.[10:09] You also say in the introduction to this book that it's almost as if students learn despite us sometimes. Students learn no matter what. Everything works. This question of what is my impact that I'm having, I think often we ignore that question. We just look at whether students are learning.[10:29] We've had a big obsession with data and with measuring student progress. That's an incredibly important question to layer on top of that is what is the impact that I am having.[10:42] Let's talk a little bit more about assessment. What are some of the mindframes or some of the strategies that teachers can use to look at student work, to look at some of the results that they're getting from perhaps more standardized assessments, and really get a sense of that?[10:59] I think we all have this sense as educators that we're doing the very best we can day‑to‑day. We're trying to implement the latest and greatest strategies, and yet, we always have students who are not doing as well as we would like them to be doing. We want every student to be at 100 percent proficiency on everything we teach, but the reality is we never quite get there.[11:20] What are some points where we can gain some traction on that question of how to evaluate our own impact?John:  [11:25] Don't get me wrong. There are higher‑probability interventions. The law of probability interventions. Yes, I would want teachers to use higher‑probability interventions. It's all looking backwards. It's all rear‑vision mirror stuff. I look at the research of what's happened in classrooms.[11:40] When you look at what happens, these things tend to work better than those things so they're high‑probability ones. What really matters is when you implement it, the fidelity of your implementation, the ability of you to make those adaptive expertise comments and changes as you go through, the ability you have of great diagnosis.[11:59] Then coming to the last part of your question, again, the mindframe that we want you to have, particularly around assessment, is assessment is feedback to you about your impact.[12:10] So often we think of assessment as feedback to students about their learning. I challenge every teacher out there to give a kid a piece of work, give them an assignment, give them a task, and ask them before they start, "What grade do you think you're going to get?" They are stunningly accurate.[12:30] You got to seriously ask what do they learn from assessment. They just confirmed what they already know. Surely, our job's to mess that up. Our job is to find attributes and expertise in the kids that they don't think they have, not just to confirm that you're a C student, you're a B student, you're an A student.[12:44] By age eight, most kids know where they fit in that distribution. As I say, our job's to mess it up.[12:49] The mindframe we get across in the book is that I interpret an act of feedback given to me. Every time you give an assessment, at the end of it, or an assignment, say, "What did I learn about my impact? What did I learn about what the kids think my concept of impact is, my magnitude of impact?"[13:07] That's how you learn what your impact is, is by looking at the kind of tasks kids do, the assignments they do. Assessment has an incredible, powerful value if you can learn from that to then decide what the next steps are.[13:21] In the same way, if we could teach kids to be assessment‑capable so that they learn from their assessments so they know what to do next, not waiting for us always to tell them and see what the grade is.[13:29] Sometimes the grade is just an indication the work's over. Sometimes teachers think and confuse marking and think sometimes it has something to do with feedback. Not necessarily.[13:39] We have to be, again, active thinkers about the impact that we're having. Assessment is an incredibly powerful way to do it if we see it as about us, not so much about the kids.Justin:  [13:50] I wonder what you think about the issue of teacher evaluation when it comes to mindframes. This has probably happened to you over and over again in your career as an author and researcher that you will share something, share a new idea or share a new finding in a book, and then as practicing educators, we immediately misinterpret and misapply that.[14:12] I heard Charlotte Danielson when she worked with us in Seattle public schools, express frustration at the way that many teacher evaluation systems that were based on her framework were developed with a lot of just punitive and unsound measures, and processes, and procedures built into them.[14:29] She said, "That's absolutely not the intent, but if you bring that kind of punitive and negative kind of approach to my framework, you will end up with a system that's punitive and negative."[14:40] I wonder what kind of cautions you have for us in applying this idea of mindframes. If we know teacher thinking is so critical, if we know getting teachers to reflect on their impact and assess their impact is so critical, what do you think are the most likely ways that we're going to mess that up?[14:58] I'm sure, again, this has happened over and over again with your work where we don't actually read your work closely enough. We play a telephone game with it. I know somebody who knew somebody who read your book, therefore, I think what we'll do is we will start evaluating our teachers based on their mindframe.[15:14] Give us some kind of words of caution on the teacher‑evaluation side.John:  [15:18] You're absolutely right. I've talked to Charlotte, and Bob Bazalo, and many of the people who develop these instruments, and they're horrified at how they're misused because it's all about the use and interpretation.[15:29] Certainly, my background as a researcher, I'm a measurement statistician so I see this all the time in the measurement community.[15:37] I would be horrified if we now developed a measurement mindframes to come up with some kind of punitive measure. [inaudible] , we have developed measures of mindframes. We have in our own work, trying to find out better ways to understand how teachers talk or think to each other.[15:54] I want to go back a step, Justin. I want to go back to one of the things I've said in each book that sometimes is often missed that if you look at the research both in invisible learning work, and if you look at the work as I've done when you had No Child Left Behind, when you look at Nate, I think I can say with some confidence that probably 60‑plus percent of schools and teachers in your country are already [inaudible] those kids to gain a year's growth or year's input.[16:20] That's impressive. Excellence is all around us. One of the major themes in "Invisible Learning" is have we got the courage to recognize the excellence that's there now. It's not a matter of running around with clipboards to drum up change and say that you've got to change. You got to change. Why would you change the excellence that's there?[16:38] One of the things I would argue right upfront is are we prepared to acknowledge excellence? It may not be with our 30‑year veteran. It may be with our five‑year‑out teacher. Are we prepared to build a coalition of success around the excellence that's already in our school? Are we prepared to privilege that way of thinking and to get that kind of thinking out there?[16:56] If we're not prepared to do that, no system of evaluation is going to make one iota of a difference. That's the first one.[17:05] The second is yes, there are ways that you can look at teachers' mindframes, but it's very, very dependent on the particular kids, particular subject, particular year group, particular age group. It's all about that kind of detail. All education is local.[17:19] Try and see how teachers think about diagnosing where their kids are at, how they go about making decisions about where to go next, how they understand what the concept of impact is. These are incredibly difficult things to evaluate.[17:34] Here in Australia, I have a political job. I'm employed by the federal government so I oversee a Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. One of its roles is to provide resources for the teachers in schools to do this.[17:47] We provide it, and it's free, available to all your users at the actual website. We provide them with an incredible amount of apps and resources for them to understand how they're doing. A lot of it is self‑reflection, relative to standards. We know it's incredibly used. We know we have a million hits from Australian teachers and principals to our site a month.[18:07] Creating that conversation in the school is really critical. Step ‑‑ this is the one you're worried about ‑‑ is when you then start to say, "We're going to measure it, some kind of performance review." Let's for us pause and say, "You tell me any other sector that doesn't."[18:23] This is the job of school leaders, to make those decisions, to make those decisions that are much more nuanced, use a balance of judgment across the different kinds of measures. No one measure's ever going to do it. I'm not resigning from the fact that it can be done. It can be done.[18:37] I'm being a little resistant to a simplistic way of coming up with a checklist, coming up with a tick box, having someone sit in the back of the room. It's not going to work. Yes, I think it can be done, and we should do it. We have to project expertise, or else we're going to lose it. The expertise is how we think.[18:54] If you look at the book, you look at the 10 of them, you'll see they're quite varied. Most of them, you can't see them. You have to shut up. You have to listen. You have to create scenarios. You have to look at what expertise means. You have to go back to the work that David Berliner did in your country in the 1990s looking at expertise and say, "That's the kind of work we need to do."Justin:  [19:12] I love a comment that you made earlier about shifting our focus from the question of "what works?" to the question of "what works best?" I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of a competency trap.[19:28] As administrators, we often have a preferred strategy, a new strategy, a new curriculum that we have heard or we know through our connections in the field and our professional reading that this approach would be better than what our teachers are currently doing.[19:43] I hear from a lot of administrators who want to help teachers change from maybe a more outdated way of doing something ‑‑ say, teaching reading ‑‑ to a more up‑to‑date, more cutting edge, and more research‑based or well‑established, cutting‑edge approach.[19:59] What I heard in terms of resistance from teachers often centers around this idea of the fact that they're good at what they're currently doing. They're not yet good at what they're being asked to do, what they're being asked to switch to. I think of that as a competency trap, where people feel stuck in their desire to do the absolute best they can, knowing that they will do a better job with the old way than with the new way.[20:31] When we're thinking about change and thinking about stopping one practice, or switching from one practice to another that's not as familiar yet, that we don't have that same level of skill, experience, and proficiency with yet, what are some of the mindframes that can help teachers navigate those changes?[20:48] And figure out, "How am I going to handle this change in a way that I feel good about, that I can pursue with integrity, and pursue with confidence that, ultimately, it is going to get better for my students?"John:  [21:01] Justin, let me start by saying you've got to beware of educators who have solutions. We have a tendency in our business to look for the latest bauble on the Christmas tree and say, "We've got to introduce this in our school," whether it be a new curriculum, a new teaching method, a new whatever.[21:17] That's one of my frustrations in the business. Why don't we start with acknowledging and recognizing that we do have excellence all around us? Why would you take a teacher who uses a method that you may not like, who uses a method perhaps out of the 1970s, but they're having an impact on their kids, why would you change that?[21:36] When I was living in North Carolina, I worked for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. One of my jobs was to look at the thousand videos at the time of the best teachers across your country. One of the things that's remarkable when you look at videos of a thousand‑plus superb teachers is you find very little in common about how they teach.[21:56] It's the whole theme of the book. It's their thinking that's behind it. When I heard school leaders who come up with this latest "gee whiz" thing they want to do, and all their teachers in their schools have to adopt this new whatever, whatever, whatever, it drives me crazy.[22:12] Sometimes you are destroying the very excellence that are there. No wonder some of our teachers sit there with their arms crossed saying, "No, I'm not going to do it." I'm not defending incompetence. I'm not defending those who have low impact. I'm saying start by acknowledging whether you have teachers already doing good things. Why would you change them?[22:31] In fact, I think the biggest problem we have in our profession is we have no debate. We have no literature on how we scale up success. In fact, I'm not bad at literature searching, Justin, and I could only find six articles that have ever been written on how you scale up success. All the time, we want to change.[22:47] The first thing I want to do is say, "Let's be careful about this new thing. Let's have a look and see what's working well, first." The second part of it is that sometimes you do need to change. If you're not getting that year's growth, absolutely you must change.[23:00] I look at our business again and say, "How good are we at implementation?" We work on the assumption that if the principal comes up with idea, they're going to implement it. We don't have a lot of implementation science, a tiny bracket at the Carnegie Corporation, one that's been in South Carolina. They've got some study models of how you do change and how you do fidelity of change.[23:24] Certainly, if I was running a course in your country on principals, I would be worried in talking to them about, "What does program logic look like? What does getting to outcomes look like? How do we go about the implementation?"[23:35] Sometimes, it's implemented so badly, with the principal standing up front saying, "We are going to do this. Here's the script. Here's the resources. Go and do it." No wonder it fails. You wouldn't do that in any other profession. You would be continually worried about the fidelity of our implementation.[23:49] I start from the work of Hess. Acknowledge the excellence there. Some of those teachers with their arms crossed in the back of the room don't need to change. Some of them do. Your first job is to work out which camp are they on.[24:02] Second thing is what I want principals to be very, very good at is evaluating their own implementation, how they go about, when they introduce something to the schools, to know where it's working, when it's working, how it's working, the magnitude that it's working.[24:16] I make a very strong argument that it's about principals and teachers as evaluators of what they do. That's the major theme that I want to worry about there. How do you get that implementation? How do you get that good diagnosis? How do you get principals helping teachers where to go next in [inaudible] ? That's what all the visible learning work look like.Justin:  [24:38] I think a lot about implementation, I think a lot about fidelity of implementation, and I think you're absolutely right. So often, we focus on a shallow teacher‑behavior level of fidelity. Honestly, as instructional leaders, we're often afraid to get into the thinking.[24:56] We're afraid to say, "Well, this could look different in different classrooms," and, "I don't know exactly what it should look like in every classroom, but this is what the model is about. This is how we can talk about practice."[25:09] I keep coming back to the idea of conversation as so critical for leadership, critical for understanding where teachers are in their thinking, critical for making decisions at the school level about how to proceed, about where we are, and what we need to do next.[25:27] I really appreciate your take on that. It is not a simple task to say, "I have my clipboard, I have my rubric, and I'm going to see you implement this strategy or this approach." I appreciate your comments about noticing the good that's already there.[25:45] I think about the idea of appreciative inquiry, this approach to research that says, "Let's find what's working. Let's find the good and build on that." I think the Hippocratic Oath for instructional leadership would be something along the lines of, "Don't break something that's working and replace it with something that's not going to work as well."[26:10] I appreciate that medicine has that philosophy or that value. It just struck me, as you're speaking, that we need the same thing ‑‑ to appreciate, first, the value of what's working and to be careful to protect that. Thank you so much for those comments.Justin:  [26:25] Just to make a comment on that, Justin, the biggest power of a school leader is they can have a major decision of what the narrative in the school is. I just want the narrative to be about impact, not about what we do.[26:39] In the same way, we're doing a lot of work here in Australia of networking principals, getting principals to work across schools. It's very, very hard, but it can be done, because we're doing it, is to relentlessly make sure that the conversation when principals come out of schools and talk to each other is also about the impact their teachers are having on kids.[26:57] They do want to talk about the resources in the school, about the wonderful things they're doing, about the policy, about the curriculum. But it's sometimes very hard to get them to talk about that impact. It means you have to create a pretty safe, trusting environment. In our work, sometimes that takes six months to eight months to even get that environment before you can get principals talking about impact.[27:17] I don't want make it that simple, but it is that simple. You have the power to tap the narrative about impact. Do it.Justin:  [27:27] That gets to my last question here. If you could wave a magic wand and get all of us in the instructional leadership business, if you could get all school leaders everywhere to do one thing, just by a wave of the magic wand, what would it be?John:  [27:41] That's easy. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about how you do it. Stop talking about the students. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about your curriculum. All I want you to talk about, all I want you to privilege is the notion of expertise.[27:59] As a professional, sometimes we deny our expertise when we say, "Ah, the kids did the work. The parents did the support. I had the right resources. I had the right curriculum." We have to stand up, as a profession, and say, "No, kids learn because we are very, very good at what we do. We are brilliant change agents," and we are.[28:17] I look at your country and my country and I see the demands of expertise. I see all the amateurism coming in. I see everyone say, "Oh, anyone can be a teacher." It requires an incredible set of skills and mindframes to do it.[28:29] I'd challenge any parent that's listening, probably not to your program, to imagine taking a group, 20 to 30 five‑year‑olds, and teaching them every day, four or five to six hours a day, every day of the year. That requires skill and expertise.[28:43] Can we, as a profession, please acknowledge kids improve? Our educational system is very good because of our thinking, of our expertise.Justin:  [28:55] The book is 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning ‑‑ Teaching for Success. Dr. Hattie, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.John:  [29:02] Pleasure. Thank you, Justin.[29:04] [background music]Announcer:  [29:04] And now, Justin Baeder on high‑performance instructional leadership.Justin:  [29:09] High‑performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with John Hattie? I think there is so much that we are doing, as a profession, that diminishes teacher thinking, that diminishes the importance of teachers' own cognition, reflection, and judgments about their practice and judgments about what their students need.[29:30] As I said to Dr. Hattie, I think we've done a tremendous disservice to our students by focusing so much on teacher behavior and on the observable aspects. I want to encourage you to commit to yourself that you will get at teacher thinking.[29:47] The best way to get at teacher thinking is simply to talk with teachers and, as Dr. Hattie said, to have a conversation. In those conversations, I really appreciated the fact that Dr. Hattie emphasized the importance of teacher expertise and highlighted that teacher expertise is not a rare thing.[30:07] We have enormously talented, experienced, knowledgeable, expert teachers in our profession. I think it's been a terrible thing in the last couple of decades that through accountability, through data, we have made all these attempts to reduce the importance of teacher expertise and to treat teachers as if they're the bottom of the totem pole in our profession.[30:28] Teachers are the front lines and they are the primary decision‑makers. I want to encourage you to have conversations with teachers that get the teacher to do the talking. As Dr. Hattie said for us, as leaders, to zip it and to just listen, and get teachers talking about their thinking, talking about their impact, and reflecting on their practice.[30:49] I want to let you know about our flagship, free program for helping you get into classrooms and talk with teachers. That program is called the Instructional Leadership Challenge.[31:02] We are giving it a complete overhaul. We've had more than 10,000 people go through the Instructional Leadership Challenge from about 50 different countries around the world over the past three or four years. We are doing a total reboot to help you get in the classrooms on a consistent basis and have those conversations with teachers. You can check that out at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com.[31:24] I also want to let you know about our in‑depth training program called the High‑Performance Instructional Leadership Certification Program. This is available both to individuals and to districts to help administrators get in the classrooms and have evidence‑based, framework‑linked conversations with teachers that actually lead to improvements in practice.[31:47] One of the reasons I was so excited to talk with Dr. Hattie today is because he kept saying things...[31:52] [background music]Justin:  [31:52] that have been resonating with me for the past year or so as I've been developing this program, developing the certification program.[32:00] So much of what we talked about today, you will find in that program because that approach to conversation and getting at those invisible aspects of teacher thinking and teacher decision making really designed into the high‑performance instructional leadership model.[32:16] You can check that out at principalcenter.com/district if you're interested in learning more about bringing the High‑Performance Instructional Leadership Certification Program to your district. You can also read about the model in my book, "Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High‑Performance Instructional Leadership".Announcer:  [32:32] Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com/radio.Transcription by CastingWords[/expand]

Justin Baeder is Director of The Principal Center, where he helps school leaders build capacity for instructional leadership in their organizations. His online program “The Instructional Leadership Challenge” has helped more than 10,000 school leaders in more than 50 countries make a habit of getting into classrooms and providing evidence-rich feedback for professional learning. He is the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree), and speaks regularly at district, state, and national professional development events.

Feedback matters from both sides and expert Justin Baeder has great suggestions for school administrators

Feedback matters from both sides and expert Justin Baeder has great suggestions for school administrators

Justin Baeder is Director of The Principal Center, where he helps school administrators build capacity for instructional leadership. Justin is the creator of the Instructional Leadership Challenge, which has helped more than 10,000 leaders in 50 countries around the world get into classrooms and improve teaching and learning in their schools. He is also the host of Principal Center Radio and the author of Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (Solution Tree).   Justin Baeder Show Highlights The story behind his new book Now We’re Talking! Overcoming obstacles and taking action Why 3 classrooms a day matters … The power of a consistent target Do you give feedback after observations? Observations = Communication Keys to taking observation debriefs to the next level 10 Questions for Better Feedback Should we discontinue walkthroughs?   Justin Baeder Resources   Join and/or Help Justin Improve the 21 Day Challenge … Take the Survey   10 Questions for Better Feedback   Listen to Justin’s Podcast   Buy Justin’s New Book   Connect with Justin on Twitter   Join my hybrid group coaching & leadership development community Text BETTERMASTERMIND to 33444 Create winning cultures Focus on the essential Lead with courage & integrity    BECOME A PATRON OF THE SHOW FOR AS LITTLE AS $1/MONTH DID YOU LIKE THE SHOW?  iTunes SUBSCRIBE HERE! SHOW SOME LOVE: PLEASE LEAVE A 5-STAR RATING AND REVIEW Grab your FREE 15 Phrases of Effective School Leaders  Text PHRASES to 33444 or click the link above.   Website :: Facebook :: Insta :: Twitter :: LinkedIn   SHOW SPONSORS: SCHOOL SPIRIT VENDING Hassle-free, year-round fundraising for your school. With School Spirit Vending, we do all the work, you just cash the check Increase school spirit with custom stickers for your school and raise funds at the same time -no upfront costs, no volunteers, no selling Sick of the same old ways of raising money for your school? Let School Spirit Vending's hassle-free, year-round fundraising program supplement the other fundraisers you're already doing. SSV is also giving away the Top 10 School Fundraising Ideas for 2017. Download the guide here.     Copyright © 2017 Better Leaders Better Schools    

Tamara Fyke joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss her customizable curriculum: Love In A Big WorldInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksVisit The Love in A Big World Website »About Tamara FykeTamara Fyke is an author, speaker, and expert on social and emotional learning, and she's the creator of the customizable curriculum, Love In A Big World.

Patty Alper joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss her publication: TEACH TO WORK: How a Mentor, a Mentee, and a Project Can Close the Skills Gap in AmericaInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Teach To Work: How a Mentor, a Mentee, and a Project Can Close The Skills Gap in AmericaVisit the Teach To Work WebsiteAbout Patty AlperPatty Alper is president of the Alper Portfolio Group, a marketing and consulting company, and is a board member of both the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and US2020, the White House initiative to build mentorship in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you walked into your child's room at home, looked around, Continue readingPMP:086 Now We're Talking – Interview with Justin Baeder The post PMP:086 Now We're Talking – Interview with Justin Baeder first appeared on Principal Matters.

Justin Baeder, of the Principal Center As instructional leaders there is no better way to lead than to be in classrooms. It is tough to find time and make it into classrooms. Being in classrooms that much sounds ridiculous and impossible. Start small. Just show up. * #everyclassroom challenge, be in every classroom within a 5-day period. * Build up the practice over a period of cycles. * Just keep track of the order you visit people in, and visit them * Systems to keep track of visits. * Write the date you visit on their note card. * Repertoire - app for keeping track of visits. * The way we schedule to get into our classrooms is important. * The way of doing it must fit your style. * Buy the Book: Now We’re Talking Special Interview about writing a book. Get the interview here * How long it took. * What to get clear on. * How to determine what belongs in this book and doesn’t. * How to sell your idea to the readers and publishers.  

      Matt Renwick joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss his publication: Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student WorkInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student WorkVisit Matt's WebsiteAbout Matt RenwickMatt Renwick is principal at Mineral Point Elementary in Wisconsin, and the author of several books, including Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student Work.

Kimberly Tyson joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss her publication: Blended Vocabulary for K-12 ClassroomsInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Blended Vocabulary for K-12 Classrooms: Harnessing the Power of Digital Tools and Direct InstructionVisit Kimberly's WebsiteFollow Kimberly on Twitter @tysonkimberlyVisit Angela's WebsiteFollow Angela Peery on Twitter @drangelapeeryLexipediaLingroPadletPoppletThinglinkFlashcardstashAbout Dr. Kimberly TysonDr. Kimberly Tyson is a former teacher, administrator, and literacy consultant, and is currently an education specialist with Solution Tree. She's the co-author, with Angela Peery, of Blended Vocabulary for K-12 Classrooms: Harnessing the Power of Digital Tools and Direct Instruction, a valuable resource to help classroom teachers and leaders use effective vocabulary strategies in classrooms and integrate digital tools and apps for instruction, practice, and review.

Chris and Courtney Daikos join Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss their work with Continua Consulting Group, where they help schools and their communities implement trauma-informed multi-tiered systems of support.Links and ResourcesVisit the Continua Consulting WebsiteAbout Chris and Courtney DaikosChris and Courtney Daikos are the co-founders of Continua Consulting Group, where they help schools and their communities implement trauma-informed multi-tiered systems of support.

Ken Spero joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss his work with Ed Leadership SIMs: Training Simulations for School LeadersInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksLearn more about Ed Leadership SIMs at Edleadershipsims.comAbout Ken SperoKen Spero is CEO of Ed Leadership SIMs, established in partnership with the Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn GSE). With more than 30 years of experience designing simulations across a variety of industries, Ken currently works with districts, universities, and other organizations to strengthen their leadership pipelines and reduce leadership churn.

PJ Caposey joins Principal Center Radio host, Justin Baeder, to discuss his publication: Making Evaluation Meaningful: Transforming the Conversation to Transform SchoolsInterview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase PJ's book Making Evaluation Meaningful: Transforming the Conversation to Transform SchoolsAbout PJ CaposeyPJ Caposey is a speaker, author, superintendent, and former high school principal in Illinois. He's the author of numerous articles and three books, including Making Evaluation Meaningful: Transforming the Conversation to Transform Schools

Sam LeDeaux joins Justin Baeder to discuss The Snowball Effect: How I Visited Classrooms 1,173 Times in One School Year. Interview Notes, Resources, & Links Follow @sledeaux84 on Twitter About Sam LeDeaux Sam LeDeaux is a junior high administrator in the Chicago Metro area.The post Sam LeDeaux—The Snowball Effect: How I Visited Classrooms 1,173 Times in One School Year appeared first on The Principal Center.

Last month, Justin Baeder, from Principal Center Radio, invited me as a guest on his show to talk to me Continue readingPMP:076 Messaging Matters–How to Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students and Reach Communities The post PMP:076 Messaging Matters–How to Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students and Reach Communities first appeared on Principal Matters.

Sam LeDeaux joins Justin Baeder to discuss The Snowball Effect: How I Visited Classrooms 1,173 Times in One School Year.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksFollow @sledeaux84 on TwitterAbout Sam LeDeauxSam LeDeaux is a junior high administrator in the Chicago Metro area.

Matt Miller joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book, Ditch That Homework: Practical Strategies to Help Make Homework Obsolete.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Matt's book, Ditch That Homework: Practical Strategies to Help Make Homework Obsolete. Follow Matt @jmattmiller on TwitterVisit the Ditch That Textbook websiteAbout Matt MillerMatt Miller has spent more than a decade teaching technology-infused lessons in public schools. As an author, blogger and education speaker, he encourages teachers to free their teaching and revolutionize their classrooms with mindset, techniques and curriculum to serve today's learners.

Mark Wu joins Justin Baeder to discuss his work in helping create Answerables.com, an immersive virtual classroom.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksVisit Answerables.com to learn moreAbout Mark WuMark Wu is a veteran educator who has served as an administrator, classroom teacher, and special education teacher. He's the co-founder of Answerables, an immersive virtual classroom.

Bill Ziegler joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book Future Focused Leaders: Relate, Innovate, and Invigorate for Real Educational Change.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase the book from Corwin and enter the code N17C12 to receive 20% off your purchase of Future Focused LeadersVisit Bill's WebsiteFollow Bill on Twitter @DrBillZieglerLearn more about Ed Leadership SimsAbout Bill ZieglerDr. Bill Ziegler is an award winning high school principal, author, and speaker. He was recognized as the 2016 Pennsylvania Principal of the Year and the 2015 National Association of Secondary School Principals Digital Principal Award Winner. He is the co-author of Future Focused Leaders - Relate, Innovate, and Invigorate for Real Educational Change.

The Transformative Leadership Summit is going to be amazing this year. I hope you enjoy this short teaser. Please sign up here: Click Here to Learn More

Naphtali Hoff joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book Becoming the New Boss: The New Leader's Guide to Sustained Success.Interview Notes, Resources, & Links Purchase Naphtali's book,Becoming the New Boss: The New Leader's Guide to Sustained SuccessDownload a sample chapter of the book "Becoming the New Boss"About Naphtali HoffDr. Naphtali Hoff of Impactful Coaching and Consulting is an executive coach, organizational consultant, and sought-after trainer and lecturer. A former head of school, he is the author of Becoming the New Boss: The New Leader's Guide to Sustained Success.

Richard Kincaid joins Justin Baeder to discuss his work with EcoRise Youth Innovations.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksVisit the EcoRise WebsiteFollow Richard @RKTheEcoNerdAbout Richard KincaidRichard is the chief innovation officer for EcoRise, and a former educator and curriculum director in a number of different school districts in the state of Texas.

Dr. Tonya Goree joins Justin Baeder to discuss Impact Now: How Principals Can Use Video-Enhanced Coaching to Grow Teachers and Raise Student Achievement.About Dr. Tonya GoreeDr. Goree has over 26 years of experience in education, with seven years of experience as principal.

Michael Toth joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book Who Moved My Standards? Joyful Teaching in an Age of Change.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksGet the book Who Moved My Standards? Joyful Teaching in an Age of ChangeLearn more about the SOAR RubricFollow Michael on Twitter @MTothLSIAbout Michael TothMichael Toth is the founder Learning Sciences International. The author of numerous books, including Teacher Evaluation That Makes a Difference, which he co-authored with Robert Marzano, his mission is to partner with educators and school districts to draw on the most current research and best practices in K-12 education in order to steadily improve student achievement and restore the joy of teaching and learning to all classrooms.

Steve Reifman joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book 10 Steps to Empowering Classroom Management: Build A Productive, Cooperative Culture Without Using Rewards. Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksGet Steve's book 10 Steps to Empowering Classroom Management:Building a Productive, Cooperative Culture Without Using RewardsVisit Steve's WebsiteFollow Steve @stevereifmanAbout Steve ReifmanSteve Reifman is the author of numerous books for teachers and students. A National Board Certified Teacher with more than 20 years of classroom experience, Steve helps teachers and parents empower children, build character, and help students become more enthusiastic, more intrinsically motivated learners.

William Parker joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book Messaging Matters: How School Leaders Can Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students, and Reach Communities.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase William's book Messaging Matters: How School Leaders Can Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students, and Reach Communities Learn more about Messaging Matters from Solution TreeVisit William's WebsiteAbout William ParkerWilliam D. Parker is principal of Skiatook High School, and was the 2011 Oklahoma Assistant Principal of the Year. A nationally known speaker, he is the host of the Principal Matters podcast, and the author of two books, including Messaging Matters: How School Leaders Can Inspire Teachers, Motivate Students, and Reach Communities

Joy Kirr joins Justin Baeder to discuss her book Shift This!: How to Implement Gradual Changes for MASSIVE Impact in Your Classroom.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Joy's book Shift This!: How to Implement Gradual Changes for MASSIVE Impact in Your ClassroomVisit Joy's BlogFollow Joy on Twitter @joykirrAbout Joy KirrJoy Kirr is a National Board Certified Teacher and one of the profession's leading evangelists and workshop facilitators on Genius Hour. She currently teaches 7th grade English Language Arts.

Chris Walsh joins Justin Baeder to discuss the dynamic school scheduling platform: Abl.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksLearn more about Abl at Ablschools.comAbout Chris WalshA former teacher, Chris has worked for national education organizations, and has led several successful ed-tech startups, and was the co-founder of the Google Teacher Academy. Chris is currently is Head of Growth and Impact for Abl, the first dynamic school scheduling platform.

Click here for Instructional Leadership Intensive with Justin Baeder

Jessica Johnson, Shira Leibowitz & Kathy Perret joins Justin Baeder to discuss their book The Coach Approach to School Leadership: Leading Teachers to Higher Levels of Effectiveness.Interview Notes, Resources, & Links Purchase The Coach Approach to School Leadership: Leading Teachers to Higher Levels of EffectivenessDownload the first chapter of "The Coach Approach" for freeVisit Jessica's WebsiteVisit Kathy's WebsiteVisit Shira's BlogFollow Jessica on Twitter @PrincipalJFollow Kathy on Twitter @KathyPerretFollow Shira on Twitter @shiraleibowitz

Host Justin Baeder discusses how to turn your school's strategic plan into a focused agenda for 2017-2018, so your change efforts result in organizational learning, not just more activity.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksRegister for the 2017 Instructional Leadership IntensiveAbout Justin BaederJustin Baeder is Director of The Principal Center and host of Principal Center Radio.

Rick Stiggins joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book Defensible Teacher Evaluation: Student Growth Through Classroom Assessment.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksPurchase Rick's book Defensible Teacher Evaluation: Student Growth Through Classroom AssessmentVisit Rick's WebsiteListen to Rick's Principal Center Radio interview on The Perfect Assessment SystemAbout Rick StigginsRick Stiggins, PhD is founder of the Assessment Training Institute and the author of Assessment for Learning and several other books. Dr. Stiggins is one of the profession's leading authorities on assessment.

In a rare solo episode of Principal Center Radio, Justin Baeder describes a plan for building career ladders into the teaching profession.Interview Notes, Resources, & LinksBecome a Pro Member of The Principal CenterAbout Justin BaederJustin Baeder is Director of The Principal Center and creator of The 21-Day Instructional Leadership Challenge

Jon Saphier joins Justin Baeder to discuss his book High Expectations Teaching: How We Persuade Students to Believe and Act on “Smart Is Something You Can Get”. Interview Notes, Resources, & Links Purchase Jon's book High Expectations Teaching: How We Persuade Students to Believe and Act on “Smart Is Something You Can Get” Visit the […]The post Jon Saphier—High Expectations Teaching: How We Persuade Students to Believe and Act on “Smart Is Something You Can Get” appeared first on The Principal Center.

The Rock Stars are back with a hot episode full of fun and edu-awesomeness! Article Review: Delaying Kindergarten to Age 7... by Valerie Strauss from the Washington Post A Word from Our Fake Sponsors: The PA Principals' Association State Conference 10/18/2015 to 10/20/2015 Featuring James Strong, Justin Baeder, Mike Schmoker, Jay Paterno Special Segment for Our Friends at PaTTAN: Social Media Basics