Podcasts about readbyexample

Hello colleague,I wrote this post at my city’s local laundry mat. Our dryer decided to stop working on Memorial Day weekend. Perfect timing with our two teenagers navigating between friends’ houses, end-of-year school events, soccer games, and trail biking. The dirty clothes pile up quickly.Anyway, this is a good time to a) review what this space is about for new subscribers, and b) talk about the upcoming summer book study.This SpaceIn 2012, I started a blog on Wordpress titled “Reading by Example”. It can still be found at readingbyexample.com. The goal was to chronicle my journey as a new elementary principal and emerging literacy leader. Previously I taught in the classroom for seven years and served as an assistant principal/athletic director for four years at a secondary school. I quickly learned as an administrator how complex this work was, and that writing about it helped me make sense of the complexity.In 2018, I started using Substack as a newsletter tool in addition to the blog. I found it to be a better writing platform, so I started writing posts here and retired the original blog. For a while, I offered a paid version of this space but ended up pausing it. I didn’t feel like I could offer enough value for what was being charged. Maybe someday I will restart it, but the circumstances would need to be just right.In 2020, I migrated all of the content from the original blog to this space. The former still serves as an archive for all of the past articles, including curated lists of posts written by contributors for previous book studies. Other teachers’ and leaders’ writings around a common professional resource have always been the most popular posts. It’s an honor to host their reflections; they provide a sorely needed perspective within today’s dialogue around teaching readers and writers in ways that affirm students for who they are and who they might become.This Year’s Book StudyWith that, I am happy to announce that this year’s book study selection is…Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning.Yes…my book. It came out this past March through Corwin. I admit that it felt a bit odd to position it as the subject for our study this summer. Yet after talking with a few colleagues and contributors, they were very supportive of putting it front and center for people to read and respond to in July.The core of the book is: formal leaders do not need to accept their current roles as they are presently constructed. More specifically, principals, district administrators, department heads, and educators in any leadership role can expand their positions to include a coaching stance within it when working with teachers.I am not the first person to recommend a more mindful approach to school leadership. Regie Routman wrote about it in 2014 within the context of literacy in her book Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success. (By the way, Regie’s book is a key influence in Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., and it’s not a coincidence that she wrote the foreword for my book.) What I offer is a theory of practice for integrating coaching skills within our more formal positions. If I have learned anything in my fifteen years as an educational administrator, it is that there is a direct correlation between student success and teacher empowerment. They need supportive and present leadership that goes beyond traditional supervision and evaluation, including the development of their capacity to lead in the school.To help clarify these ideas, I created a framework with the word “coach” to help leaders remember the key strategies for success and to provide a clear pathway for engaging in this work:Create Confidence through TrustOrganize Around a PriorityAffirm Promising PracticesCommunicate FeedbackHelp Teachers Become Leaders and LearnersIt is these ideas in which practicing educators – teachers, leaders, coaches, and consultants – will write about this summer here. I’ve asked them to center their reflections around their own work first, and then use the ideas from the book to help validate their thinking they so generously offer to us.As readers of this site, you can also participate in a variety of ways:Read contributors’ posts and support their efforts with a like.Write a comment around their articles to validate their thinking and extend the conversation.Share these reflections on social media so more people can participate in this discussion.Post your own writings on your blog or newsletter related to the book.Let me know what you’re sharing and writing through #leadinglikeacoach and tagging me @ReadByExample.However you decide to engage in this space, please know that your readership is appreciated. We look forward to learning with you!Take care,Matt 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

I spoke with Steve Barkley, educational consultant and coach, for his podcast Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud (found here).We discussed:The importance of instructional leadership,Balancing evaluation with professional learning, andThe five strategies from my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. (Corwin, 2022).Thank you for listening!PODCAST TRANSCRIPTSteve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello, and welcome to the teacher edition of the Steve Barkley Ponders Out loud podcast. The complexity of teaching is both challenging and rewarding. And my curiosity is peaked whenever I explore with teachers the multiple pathways for facilitating student engagement in the exciting world of learning. This podcast looks to serve teachers as they motivate coaches and support their learners.Steve: 00:28 Leading like a coach. Joining our podcast today is Matt Renwick, an elementary school principal from Wisconsin and the author of a new book titled, “Leading Like a Coach.” A description of Matt’s book has this statement in it: “Matt reframes the approach to school-wide change from a leader acting alone, to a leader working with a community, a community in which each member contributes their strengths and ideas to improving instruction.” When I read that statement, it sure aligns with the mantra that I’ve been on for years that teaching is a team sport. So Idropped Matt a note and he agreed and was happy to say he is with us here today. So welcome Matt.Matt: 01:17 Thank you, Steve. I’m glad to be here.Steve: 01:20 So Matt, would you start off by giving us a little introduction to your background and the role that you’re in at the school today and I’m kind of wondering how that led to you taking on the task of writing this book?Matt: 01:34 Yeah. I found it interesting you shared your experience as a fifth and sixth-grade teacher in an open concept experience. That was actually a similar experience I had in a multi-age classroom. We did natural looping, and we designed thematic units integrated units together and it was very project-oriented and it was just a lot of fun.Steve: 01:57 Was that in Wisconsin?Matt: 01:58 It was in Wisconsin. Yep. Rudolph, Wisconsin – central Wisconsin. And I noticed, as I progressed through my teaching career, standards became more prominent, testing evaluations all became much more a part of the school and experience and I felt kind of, maybe some of the joy leaving it too. And that kind of prompted me to think, how could I maybe influence at a school-wide level, have more impact in protecting that joy and that learning experience in a way that teachers and kids can be a part of. And so that’s why it got me into the principalship. And once I was there, I don’t know if it was a rude awakening, but it was definitely a realization that you can’t just put out some kind of a goal and offer some professional development and monitor progress and then expect outcomes. It’s just school change and improvement is not linear in that sense as we might put it on paper. And so that led me to learn more about coaching, instructional coaching in particular, and really trying to embed it into my practice, working with teachers, working with staff, even working with colleagues. How do I talk, how do I present myself? And really, as you said in the description of working together to get collective goals.Steve: 03:18 Yeah. I’m real big on the concept of team and I describe that very frequently, what a lot of schools call teams are really what I would call franchises. So I got a group of teachers that come to a franchise meeting, they exchange tips and strategies, but they still go back and run their own classroom versus people coming together as a team, which is that they really got a combined responsibility for student success.Matt: 03:54 Yeah. Seeing, I can’t do this job without you.Steve: 03:59 Yeah.Matt: 03:59 And that’s what I realized as a principal. I couldn’t do this job without the teacher’s input and understanding their decision making and trying to stop coming in and judging. And not that there’s not a place for that as a part of a supervisor, but it really has become a fraction of how I spend my days now. I’m now coming in daily, just learning, just coming in with kind of getting rid of my biases as much as I can and trying not to make assumptions and just coming in and noticing what’s going on, trying to notice what’s going well, communicating that with the teachers and eventually leading into conversations around their instruction, which is where, as I’m sure you see as well in your work, is that’s where the impact happens, is learning together. And it’s so much more effective than like I said, that very technical way of trying to get people to improve. And that just doesn’t get you very far.Steve: 05:03 At best minimum competencies.Matt: 05:06 Yeah.Steve: 05:07 We can evaluate whether minimum competencies are in place or not, but we can’t grow out of that evaluation process.Matt: 05:13 That’s 100% correct. And that’s where evaluations can be effective. You get people to a minimum area, minimum level, like you said, but where go from there? And that’s kind of what I felt a decade ago, which is where kind of the idea for this book came about is, what is my role beyond getting teachers to a standard level of instruction? And I even wrote a blog post about it a decade ago, “can a principal also be a coach?” So the seed was planted there. 10 years later, we’ve got the book and I’m hoping to get it into the hands of leaders, not just principals, but coaches and superintendents and anyone who’s a leader, teacher leaders, I think can find this book helpful.Steve: 05:55 I can tell you that a whole lot of years ago – so it was in the 80’s that I began to work in the area of coaching and way back then people would raise the question, can the administrator be an evaluator and a coach? And we responded to the fact that not only can they, but they really need to. Because at a minimum, they needed to model the behavior you wanted teachers to take on in the classroom. So most of the time the teacher’s a coach. There comes that day that the teacher puts on the evaluator hat and does the assessment. And then the next day, the teacher’s back in the coaching role using the outcome of the evaluation or the assessment to assist in jumping back in and working with growth. So I’ve always had the thought that it’s critical that an administrator, in effect, takes on both roles. And then a whole lot of years ago, they introduced that term of instructional leadership and I responded that if you really thought that the principal was an instructional leader, then part of the administrator’s evaluation would be looking at the growth that the teachers made as they worked with that principal.Matt: 07:19 Yeah, I wish I would’ve gone back even farther and explored your work, just learning more about it here. And I’ve even had teachers when you mentioned, how can a principal also be a coach? I’ve even had a teacher say, I don’t think you can because you’re an evaluator. How can you also coach? There seems to be some rigidity where they just need these things to be siloed. What I try to do with this work is really kind of embrace that complexity and really be kind of fluid and shift from one of the other, just kinda like you said, with the teachers of one day, it’s evaluating other days, it’s really coaching. And I appreciate you noting too that this has a kind of bootstrapping effect too when you’re talking with teachers and you’re using coaching strategies like paraphrasing and posing questions and pausing.Matt: 08:08 I remember a teacher last year coaching one of her first graders. He was writing all of these topics on camping, but he didn’t have a title. And she just said, “take a look at all of what you’ve written, all your topics, your table of contents, and what do you think would be a good title?” And he’s like, “fun and camping.” And she’s like, “yes,” and he totally owned it and there was a lot of pride with that process. And later on, I just said, I couldn’t help but notice you using paraphrasing and some of the things we’ve talked about in our staff meetings and coaching. I hear you doing it. And likewise, I’ve tried it myself, so it absolutely can work.Steve: 08:52 Critical modeling.Matt: 08:53 Yeah. And there’s even research too. My background is in cognitive coaching. I’m not a cognitive coach, but I’ve had coursework on it. And there was one research study where they looked at three different people working with teachers – an administrator, a coach, and a peer, and they were all trained in coaching and the result was, it didn’t matter who coached you, improvement occurred. And so that’s one of the studies I listed in the book to just really kind of break that myth that as an evaluator, I can’t also support learning.Steve: 09:32 Would you say that the support comes from – the two words that come out to my mind are conversation and reflection and they kind of go back together. So in effect, what that teacher did, was she used a question to cause the first-grade student to do some reflection and that led to the student’s thinking. And so it doesn’t matter which of those hats I have on, as long as I can cause reflection and conversation to occur. And historically, what was wrong with the evaluation is that those two things didn’t occur. The administrator came in, did all the thinking, and issued a report. And so the teacher didn’t grow because the teacher wasn’t engaged in conversation or reflection.Matt: 10:16 Yeah, I was there. I was coming in and checking all the boxes in my initial part of my principalship. And I was thinking back, I’m astonished at how often I was wrong because I didn’t ask and I wasn’t curious. I was trying to get certainty. I wanted to get it right. I can’t tell you how many calibration activities I’ve gone through with rubrics.Matt: 10:44 And they really train you to not deviate from, are you curious because you want it to be accurate and I agree with that, but without having conversations and reflections with the teacher, you’re only getting a limited perspective.Steve: 10:56 And that’s where the growth comes. So even if you get a perfect, accurate evaluation, you didn’t cause any growth to happen.Matt: 11:04 Right.Steve: 11:04 If you weren’t able to move it into a coaching environment.Matt: 11:09 Yeah. What’s driving this process.Steve: 11:13 Well Matt, I see that you laid your book out in five key practices and I thought it would be valuable if we just kind of bounced through each of those as an outline for folks. So the first one that you laid out was to create confidence through trust. Could you take a moment or two and talk about that?Matt: 11:37 We’ve heard a lot about trust and how it’s important, and even writing this book, I was writing this chapter and being able to count on someone and be able to know they’re not going to immediately jump to conclusions or only looked at the negative pieces, felt like that was kind of already said. And so what’s different about this? And that’s where the confidence piece comes in. When I trust that teacher I was just mentioning and instead of quickly naming it, or, I asked a question, right? And so I trusted them that they could articulate the practices they were doing. And I wasn’t, like you said, I wasn’t giving advice. I wasn’t telling them what I necessarily thought or didn’t think. And I think through those repeated experiences, then we’re creating confidence. They’re confident in themselves, I’m confident coming in the classroom and we can really start to have pretty authentic conversations. I don’t want to say honest because sometimes people right away conflate that with –Steve: 12:41 Good word.Matt: 12:42 Overly critical, right? But really naming and noticing those practices that they’re doing. So yeah, I wanted to start with trust though, and to make sure that that was in place before we start getting into the coaching side of things.Steve: 12:57 So when I talk about trust, I usually connect it to the word vulnerability. Do you see a way that plays into that – in effect, you as the coaching administrator are vulnerable as well as the teachers are vulnerable?Matt: 13:14 That’s huge. And in my initial work as a principal, I was reluctant to be open and honest about my own challenges and mistakes. And the pandemic certainly forced me even more so to be vulnerable. I remember we were preparing for the last school year and I had a few teachers just saying, I’m not feeling supported. And I could have come back and said, oh, remember all these trainings we did and all the technology we bought. And instead, I just said, I’m sorry you were feeling unsupported. My apologies for that. Please let me know what I can do to better support you. Here’s my phone number at home, give me a call over the weekend. And this was before the first day of the 2021 school year. No one called me, but I think just having that out there, I mean, they appreciated that. And it didn’t decrease my – I don’t think, their perception of my credibility or capacity. And I think they felt like we were in it together.Steve: 14:24 That’s the key. Great. The second element that you laid out is organize around a priority.Matt: 14:33 Yeah. And not to date this podcast, I’m gonna tell another pandemic experience. The past couple of years it’s been tough to operate like more like a coach, primarily because we’ve been in survival mode. And how do you support that other than getting rid of obstacles and increasing resources, but with the priority it’s, what are you aiming for as a school and where do you need to grow? And I always start with what we’re doing well. I think that’s important, but then what’s that next step? So in my school, for example, it’s literacy, it’s particularly reading. And so that gives me a lens in which I can come into classrooms now, and hopefully we’ve got professional learning happening so that they’ve seen good practice, and now they’re trying to apply it.Matt: 15:26 And then I can come in and really have a, not a laserlike focus, but have a framework in which to operate around common language. For example, what level of discussion are kids at with their book clubs, and what kind of questions are being posed? Is it open-ended or closed-ended? And within that framework for literacy instruction, whatever that may be, whatever the school chooses, it really helps me as a principal or whatever kind of leader you are, to then engage in that conversation. So, yeah, frameworks can be – I mean I don’t know what a favorite one of yours is, but we use the gradual release of responsibility or optimal learning model, it’s kind of an adaptation of that.Steve: 16:12 The whole concept of identifying a priority is critical in coaching for the one-on-one relationship. And I would say equal – I do a lot of work with professional learning communities and I’ve actually been voicing a phrase for the last couple of years of goals before norms. That there’s a tendency when you bring this group together, you’re gonna put together a set of norms for everyone to operate with. Norms are important but it’s a whole lot easier to agree on norms if we got some common reason for being there.Steve: 17:04 And I was doing a coaching call with a new instructional coach earlier today and she’s talking about an experienced teacher who’s just kind of like stuck where he is at. He’s at an okay spot and not moving on. And my conversation with her is, you’ve gotta be able to move the conversation to where there’s something important for him to make happen for kids that isn’t happening. And if you can get him to voice what that is, then now you and he can work together because you got something to make happen. So that spot that we’re moving towards is critical in coaching.Matt: 17:35 And that’s what’s nice about a framework too, is there can be opportunities within that for a teacher to, I wanna work on this, and everyone’s working on something and I think that’s really important. And I wrote down the goals before the norms. I think that that’s a good point of making sure form follows function.Steve: 17:56 Yep. The third one you mentioned was affirm promising practices.Matt: 18:02 Yeah. There was just an article I read on Twitter – it’s more of a business journal I think and they just basically said, when you give critical feedback, people either do one of two things. They forget it, or they remember it and they don’t do anything about it. And I just think of some of the critical feedback I’ve received and like, I remember being resistant and because I have this belief and I am very good at what I do and that’s what we want in teachers. We want them to be confident but how do you get there? And so that’s where affirming promising practices is to start with what are they doing well, and it’s validated. It’s not – if you remember the Saturday Night Live clip, Stuart Smalley, you know, good enough, I’m smart enough…Matt: 18:51 Where’s the evidence on that? It’s not just a pat on the back it’s, here’s what you did, and here’s the impact that it had on kids. And that’s objective reality, right? That’s not something I’m just sugar coating. And so, again, with that teacher, when you allow that student to identify the title for their book, you empower them as a writer and that’s gonna carry forward the rest of the way. When I visit classrooms, 95% of the time, I’m writing notes. You can see on the cover of my book, in the book, you have some examples of instructional walks. They’re not walkthroughs, I’m not checking boxes. I’m not looking for certain things. I’m just documenting what happened. And then near the end, I’m affirming what they did well, and the impact that it had on kids. And that for me is the entry point to those coaching conversations and which we can talk about practices, that may be worth pursuing for improvement.Steve: 19:59 So I’m guessing that ties closely then to the fourth element, which was communicate feedback. So those two kind of get paired together?Matt: 20:09 Yeah. Communicate is a key word. And that’ll certainly help create that coach acronym, but it’s not giving feedback. It’s not delivering feedback. Like you said before, principals might come in and just say, here’s, what’s going well, here’s what you need to improve on. It really is communicating it in a sense that I want teachers to hear it. And often that feedback isn’t coming from me, it’s coming from their own sources of knowledge, it’s their own experiences and things that they have forgotten about, maybe they got in a rut and then we start talking and they’re like, “oh yeah, I did that unit five years ago and I did that practice and I wonder why I stopped doing that.” And so when we say communicate feedback, it’s through that conversation that we have, and it’s often through questions, right?Matt: 21:02 I have a new teacher whose classroom library was very – it looked like a public library. All the spines were out, and none of the books were facing out. So I withheld my assumption and just said, “Hey, how’s your classroom library going? What are you liking about it? What what’s challenging you?” And she’s like, “oh, it’s been great because the kids wanted it this way. They are the ones that said, well, I want all the series books together and we didn’t have enough room to face them all out, but the kids are reading more and taking care of the classroom library.” I’m like, “that’s great.” And then I realized she needs, maybe she needs more shelving. So that led into that conversation of what do you need from me then? But through that conversation, she was able to reflect on her process and her decision-making. And I think the point there too is it’s not just communicating feedback to the teacher, it’s the teacher communicating feedback to me.Steve: 22:03 I was just gonna say, as I was listening to you, you’re describing she was reflecting, but I think I’m hearing you were reflecting too.Matt: 22:10 Oh yeah. I’m learning as much, if not more than the teachers because I’m not in their classroom. I’m in there 1%, 2% of the actual time. It would be very pompous of me to say I can come in and a matter of couple hours, here’s all the things you need to work on. It’s just not possible. So I’m coming in there trying to do these conversations around once every two to three weeks. It’s been a little bit slower with the pandemic, but these conversations accelerate my learning. So when it comes time for evaluation cycles, observations that are more formal, nothing’s really a surprise. And for the teacher too, and it’s really a lot less stressful when we have to engage in that work and a lot more accurate when I’m actually adding evidence into those systems.Steve: 23:06 It’s interesting that when I flagged you to can communicate feedback, one of the first words you went to was questions. And it’s probably not what would jump out at people when they first consider the word communicate.Matt: 23:22 Yeah.Steve: 23:22 But it really is what makes it communication. Because it creates the conversation.Matt: 23:27 Yeah. And the cognitive coaching work training I’ve done, I remember an activity, “What are the five forms of feedback and which do you think are most effective?”, and the number one is mediative questions. Not to say that there isn’t a time where I just need to say something, you know, because there is something that’s going on that’s just either really great or I do have concerns about. But even then, I can approach it with a thoughtful question.Steve: 23:55 It comes out of the conversation.Matt: 23:59 Yes.Steve: 23:59 It in effect emerges out of the conversation so it feels normal.Steve: 24:05 Whereas when you’re in that evaluation process, it was kind of like, where did that come from?Matt: 24:09 Yeah. It feels like you’re talking about the weather and it’s a lot less stress-inducing. And I remember one activity in a classroom, it was probably culturally insensitive, it wasn’t terrible, but I remember talking to them about it. I recognize that they’re bringing in diverse texts and they are facilitating conversations and the kids are doing research and this and this and all these affirming things. And then I finally said, and this was actually a question that my coach, my executive coach, my leadership coach helped me craft because I knew I was gonna ask this coming in, “how might a person of color come in and view this activity you’re doing today?” And it wasn’t accusatory, it wasn’t affirming, it was truly curious because I wanted to know what they were thinking when they went into this activity. And then they explained it and then I did finally leave with, here’s kind of a next step is just continue to ask yourself that question whenever you’re designing any of these activities. And I appreciate your efforts here to diversify our curriculum and I think that’s important. And it did improve. So it’s a much more respectful, I think, way to engage in these types of things.Steve: 25:29 Alright. And the last one that you had was to help teachers become leaders and learners.Matt: 25:34 And this is kind of a meta-strategy, I guess. It’s incorporating all of these things. The note-taking, the paraphrasing, the pausing, questions. And I think this really comes to some advice I was given, which I think is for principals in particular to hear, is to stick around in your schools, to not hop around. To really commit to five to seven years at a minimum of being in that school. Because that seems to me, and I don’t know your experience, Steve, but that seems to be how long it takes to really kind of right the ship or get it going into the direction we all wanted to go.Steve: 26:13 Build a team.Matt: 26:14 Yeah, as a team.Steve: 26:16 How do you build a team in a year and move on?Matt: 26:19 Absolutely. Yeah. There’s it really isn’t any way. But that’s what I’ve noticed. In my previous school where I was there for five years, in my current school where I’m at for six years now, really starting to see teachers stepping up and becoming the leaders. And right now we’re looking to go through a curriculum renewal process for literacy and my coach is setting up site visits and I probably had a dozen teachers giving their opinions on one of the resources we looked at and everyone felt fairly safe speaking out, but I don’t think that would’ve happened five years ago. So in that chapter, it’s a shorter chapter, but it highlights one school and one district that through their commitment over the long term, really saw some profound change. And so it can happen, but there are no overnight successes in education.Steve: 27:15 Well, Matt, I appreciate you taking the time to lay this out here for us. I’m wondering if you could tell the listeners the best way that they might communicate and follow up with you.Matt: 27:26 I am on Twitter. I enjoy puns and wordplay. So it’s @ReadByExample. I have a particular focus on literacy and leadership. I can also be found at my newsletter blog, readbyexample.substack.com, and the book can be found at Corwin or Amazon or wherever else they sell these books. But I’ve appreciated meeting you. I’ve heard your name before and just getting to know a little bit more about your work, it’s something I might pursue more as well. So thank you.Steve: 28:04 You’re very welcome. We’ll be sure to put the sites that you just mentioned into the lead into this podcast so folks will be able to find you good luck to you.Matt: 28:13 Thank you, Steve.Steve: 28:14 Take care.Steve [Outro]: 28:16 Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com. 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

It is no secret that some traditional teacher evaluation systems are less than effective in supporting professional growth. Faculty want feedback, and yet tired policies and lack of imagination can prevent leaders from seeing what is possible.Consider a different approach to this area of instructional leadership. Matt Cormier, an elementary principal in Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado, takes more of a coaching stance to his work, including:feedback that is focused on the future and on teacher growth,how documentation can show alignment between teachers’ beliefs and their practices plus current research, andengaging in more conversation and less judgment around instruction.Enjoyed this episode? Share it with your colleagues and your PLN. If you post this podcast on Twitter and include my handle (@ReadByExample), you could win a one year subscription to Choice Literacy.Related ResourcesTranscript + AudioMatt’s District Webpage, BioMatt’s Recommended Sources for Research: The Marshall Memo, The Main IdeaMatt’s Coach, Samantha Bennett (Linkedin)Literacy Walks e-course (Choice Literacy)Full TranscriptMatt Renwick:It is no secret that teacher evaluation systems are less than effective in supporting professional growth. Faculty want feedback, and yet tired policies and lack of imagination can prevent leaders from seeing what's possible.Matt Renwick:In this episode of Read by Example, I talk with Matt Cormier, a principal in Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado about his unique approach to teachers who provision. It is teacher driven, aligned with mutual goals, and focused on improvement instead of only evaluation.Matt Renwick:Hey, Matt, thanks for joining me today. And we spoke before about just this unique approach you have to staff supervision and evaluation. And so I asked if we could connect again and just kind of lay it out and just think about how this might work for teachers and you. Anyway, it's quite different, but can you just explain just your staff supervision and evaluation approach and what is it and why did you move toward it?Matt Cormier:So I would definitely say the theme of the approach is that my feedback to teachers is not about the lesson I just watched. It's not about today. The focus is really about tomorrow. You've got to go in with that mindset that it isn't about what you just saw. It's about what the teacher will do with feedback and what tomorrow might look like.Matt Cormier:The other thing too, I think foundationally, I have to say, I would never use this process with somebody I didn't know, or somebody that I was concerned about their performance. I don't believe that that's the right direction to go. With folks that you don't know, I think that it's important to have to utilize the formal process that's been approved by the school district and by the association. And I think that's key. And for somebody who you're concerned about their performance, I think that you have to follow that as well.Matt Cormier:Now, my situation, like many others I have a stable staff. Some of the folks that I'm working with, I've worked with the entire time I've been here. So this is my seventh year. And as I kind of reflected last year about their performance, I could go down the list of my staff and say, at the end of the year, my guess is this staff member will end up as effective. This staff member will end up as highly effective. Just I know them, I've worked with them long enough to know that would be the case. And so it kind of felt like that the structure that we had in place was going to lead to that ending, that maybe there was an opportunity for a different structure, something that felt different to everybody.Matt Cormier:So I guess I would say that one of the pieces of this process is that I still need to do what the school district says that I have to do, which is have a formal observation of every teacher by the end of semester one. And for people who are probationary, I have to have two formal observations by the end of the year. And so the way that I do that is they self-evaluate their work against the 23 indicators in the school district. And they submit their self-evaluation to me of those 23 indicators. And generally, I ask for that to be done by Labor Day.Matt Cormier:And then between Labor Day and the end of September, I take their ratings from their self-evaluation. I put them in the formal observation document. I take a look and I compare how they rated themselves against their most recent evaluation that I did using those 23 indicators. And I say, does this align with what I know about this person? Does this make sense? And if it does, I send them back their formal document. I say, "This looks good to me. Does it look good to you? Let's have a meeting."Matt Cormier:So in that meeting, it could be a long meeting, but not about the formal, the fall observation. The conversation about the fall formal goes like this. "Hey, do you agree with all these ratings in here? Yeah, you do? All right. That sounds good. Would you sign the document for me? Okay. Send the document. Now let's talk about what do you want to get better at?"Matt Renwick:Right.Matt Cormier:Because if I'm going to come into your room, say I'm going into come in your room six times, seven times this year, and I can look for whatever you want and I'm going to then look for research that backs up what you're doing. What do you want me to look for? What is it you want me to pay attention to? And that's where the length of the conversation happens for folks in the fall.Matt Cormier:So basically one of the things I love about this is I'm done with everybody's fall formal document by the end of September. There's no problem, nobody worrying about whether I've got my documents done at the school district. They're done. I probably could do everybody at this point. I could do everybody's spring formal if I needed to do that for the probationary folks. And honestly, I could start to work on the finals evaluations right now, too, because I'm just literally going to take the fall formal ratings and put it into a final document and have a very similar conversation in April. "Hey, do you agree with all these ratings? You do? All right. Now, let's talk about the other things. You told me you wanted to get better at this. Let's talk about that."Matt Renwick:Yeah.Matt Cormier:That's why I say, part of it is understanding that what I do is get what is required of me by the school district done very soon, very quickly so that I can engage in this process of writing letters of reflection after doing observations, which leads me to my next key piece here, which is when I write a letter of reflection, I am making sure that there is alignment between a teacher's philosophical beliefs about education and who they are as a teacher. So there's alignment between their beliefs with actually what they're doing. The teacher moves that I notice in class, and then I match that with research. So those three pieces.Matt Cormier:So we got to take one step back because in August, when all teachers come back, I asked teachers to write me a context letter. And the context letter is filled with their beliefs about what it means to be a teacher, their beliefs about good teaching and what gets them out of bed in the morning? Why do they choose to do this job? And so everybody is asked to write that and submit that to me before Labor Day so I have that. And then as I go into.. I reread everybody's context letter. Every time that I go, every single time I read the context letter, I talk and say, "These are the teacher moves that I noticed. And here's the research that backs you up. This is what the researchers say." And generally I look for opportunities to look for the things that they asked me to look for.Matt Renwick:There's a real shift in the power dynamic when you have teachers self-assessing and telling you what they want you to look for. Did you have any initial concerns as you shifted to this approach? You're releasing some of that, I wouldn't say authority, but you're just sharing it, I guess more than anything.Matt Cormier:Yeah. I mean, I think there were concerns, both from teachers and for me. The biggest concern for teachers was sitting down and writing a context letter. It's almost like, I would say to them like, literally, "Wake up before the house wakes up. Get a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. Sit down and write your beliefs about being a teacher. When you're done, you will say that was the greatest time you spent, because nobody's asked you to do that in a long time. And it feels good to try to reflect on who you are, why this matters to you." But teachers were nervous. They were nervous about it. And they said, "Are you going to check my spelling and grammar?" I said, "No, I just want your thoughts."Matt Renwick:Right.Matt Cormier:So in hindsight, I think I probably should give a devoted time and say, "I'm serving you the tea and coffee. Now we're going to sit and you're going to do this incredible thing."Matt Renwick:There you go.Matt Cormier:For me, I think the toughest thing was the idea that everybody delivers a train wreck of a lesson. And there are times where I've gone in to go through this new process and write a letter of reflection. And it's a train wreck. And I know it, and I'm hoping to God, the teacher knows it too, because if the teacher knows it, the teacher looks at me and says, "Oh my Lord," then I feel great. Then I feel great. Like yeah, nothing went the way you wanted it to go, or the moves felt awkward today. And if the teacher could just say to me, "Oh Lord, do overplays," then I would feel so much better because a lot of times I have this piece of where I'm actually wondering, do they know it was a train wreck because in the process that I undergo, I don't sit there and go," Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. That was a train wreck." Instead, I look at the positive pieces.Matt Cormier:And so it does become hard when you want to say like, "Hey, I think that was in your blind spot. You missed a great opportunity there to create a letter that might give that feedback," but it also makes the teacher want to get up the next day and do this again because teachers pour so much of who they are personally into their work that sometimes feedback about their work feels like feedback about them. [crosstalk 00:11:30].Matt Renwick:Yeah. In the traditional approach, they're not asking for feedback. It's just something you have to do. And when they write that context letter and then say, "This is what I want you to look for," the early shifts and the feedback becomes something that they want, versus something they're going to get. I liked reading your context letter, and I'm very interested in history. And you're very open about your history and your philosophy and approaching that. Being vulnerable with them, I'm sure helped them craft their own letters and feel okay about it. And you mentioned that you read their contexts letters. How else do you use that when you go into classrooms and give them the reflection letter itself?Matt Cormier:I often will think through, because the idea is to try to match their beliefs with the teaching moves. And so sometimes I've read the context letter before I go in and I think I know I'm going to pull out these beliefs, but then I'll actually observe something and be able to go back and say, "Wait a second. I remember seeing that," and then pull out another component there where you're just...Matt Cormier:And I'll write sometimes in the section where I write about teacher moves, instead of saying, "Hey, I'm going to match your move to research. I'm not going to tell you which researcher has got your back, but I'm going to tell you that your belief system has your back. When you say you want to do right by all kids and then I noticed that you made an adjustment in the lesson at the moment, because you were clearly teaching to one group of kids and you noticed it. And in the moment you said, 'Wait a second, I got to adjust something right here,' that's a point where when I write about that teaching move, I will say in your book that that is so aligned with your belief system."Matt Cormier:The other thing I love about the context letter is it says, I see you, I see who you are as a person. I see who you are as an educator because often teachers will share with me personal stories in their contexts letter. What gets them out of bed in the morning might be an experience that they had as a young person. Think of the, Thank You, Mr. Falker, Patricia Polacco book, right? A lot of teachers have that book, their own book written, and they might share something with me. And then you can see them treat another kid in the way that they were treated. And to say, "Look at how you believe and look at what you did for that kid," there is alignment.Matt Cormier:And I think a lot of times what I'm saying is I see you, I see you and I hear you. And I know you as an individual and as a professional. I think there's a lot of... My teachers have given me a lot of feedback that this process, they don't put on a dog and pony, they're not trying to hit all 23 indicators and be like, "I know if I say this, I've hit an indicator to see." Instead, it feels very different for them.Matt Renwick:Yeah. They're showing you the real deal. And again, I think it comes back to what you did with your own context letter of revealing your own experience as a teacher. And it wasn't always perfect. That's got to be huge. So I think you started with one teacher, right, Matt, to try it with, and it sounds like it's expanded, more teachers are electing for this more authentic approach. Is that all your teachers now are on it, or how many?Matt Cormier:Everybody's on it. Last year, it was opt in. You had to say yes. And I had almost all teachers opt in. And when I asked some teachers, "Why didn't you do it?" They said, "I'm nervous about writing the context letter."Matt Renwick:Writing. I gotcha.Matt Cormier:But I thought to myself, but you wanted the 23 indicators where I rate you, you wanted that. Who wants that? So this year it was opt out. This year it was, this is what I want to do. You can opt out. Nobody opted out.Matt Renwick:Yeah.Matt Cormier:Nobody at all.Matt Renwick:Kind of a passive permission in a sense, maybe that little nudge for those people who are still unsure. That's a cool way to think about that. You mentioned your teachers give you feedback. What do they say about this process now that you've got it now a couple of years?Matt Cormier:I think mostly what they would say is that it doesn't feel stressful. That it feels safe. And so that's probably the most powerful thing that I've gotten out of this period of time. Because I think that if we can create a very safe environment... Probably a lot of us as principals say the same kind of thing, right? It's that idea that why don't we learn through failure and success? Why don't we learn by trying? And we say all those things, but there are all these immense pressures on teachers to take those risks. That can be a big step for a lot of people because there's way too many other pressures.Matt Cormier:And so, if really what I've gotten out of this period of time, just a little over a year with the pandemic lockdown down in the middle of that, is that everybody feels safer about when I come into the classroom, then I'll take that without a doubt. I do get some really good back and forth conversations because when I write a letter of reflection, it always ends with, "Now, tell me what you're thinking. Tell me what you're thinking about, what I said or the research that I shared." Sometimes where I quote research, I'll actually make a copy of that article, put it in their box. "And what do you think?" And we can end up with a back and forth conversation.Matt Cormier:Some of my favorites are honestly, where I might have a question that does challenge. I recently observed a teacher who wasn't posting learning targets and freely admitted it. "I haven't posted a learning target in a while." And it was a great opportunity for me to say, "Tell me why. Why is it that you didn't do that? Philosophically, what is it that stopped you from doing that?" Because to me, a learning target is foundational to a good lesson or a bad lesson. To any lesson at all kids need to know what they're working towards.Matt Cormier:So this was a great moment for me to say like, "This is not a gotcha moment. I actually really want to know what is getting in the way." And obviously the feedback could actually be time, but my response on time is my son called me today and said, "Dad, I need you. I've just been in a car accident." I would get out of this building and go. He is that important to me. To me, in lesson planning, the learning target is that important. I would never, ever not create a lesson plan that didn't have a learning target and success criteria that everybody moved towards. So it was fantastic for me to ask, "What stopped you from doing that? What is your belief system?" And I think that is rich to have it be a place where teachers don't feel scared to engage in that. It's not a gotcha.Matt Renwick:And you're feeling safe too, it sounds like to share your own belief system about learning targets, but in a way that's not confrontational, just here's where I'm at. Here's where I understand you're at. And we're just trying to engage in a conversation versus a battle of wills.Matt Cormier:Because here's the truth. This teachers' evaluation around learning targets has already been written, right? It's already been written. Whatever rating that we agreed upon, she's gotten. And if somebody were to say, "Well, Matt, but what if she doesn't do learning targets?" Well, here's the thing. If I were to do a scheduled observation and rate her 23 indicators, do you think she'd have her learning targets up on that day? She'd have her learning targets up on that day. So the fact that she did it on that day, that I came in out of compliance around a 23 indicator rubric, that is not as rich and meaty as the conversation I get to have with her, when she admits I haven't posted them in a while. And I get to say, "Why?"Matt Renwick:Yeah, you have established trust and relationships. And you're clear about what you're working on. And yeah, no, that's powerful. The clear distinction between the traditional approach and you're more learning-centered structure, what skills did you need to development, Matt, in order to make this process successful?Matt Cormier:There's so many. I laugh because I am just struggling every day in this and it feels great. It's the best part of my day is to engage in this struggle, which is writing a good reflection letter. At first, when I thought about, I have to see if there's alignment between beliefs, actions, and research, I thought, how on earth am I going to do the research? I spend most of my evenings watching woodworking videos. I don't just peruse educational publications or read articles for fun. I don't do that.Matt Renwick:I was going to ask, when do you read the research? But you mentioned the Marshall Memo was one way you can kind of stay on top of current studies.Matt Cormier:Yeah, that was probably one of the biggest benefits, was somebody who was saying, "Get access to the Marshall Memo." That's an incredible resource because you just, you know you want to give somebody feedback about shifting of the cognitive load or you know you want to give somebody some feedback about their feedback. And you can only quote John Hattie's effect size on feedback so many times. You're like, "Somebody give me an article that quoted John Hattie. There we go." And so the Marshall Memo has been incredible. And then, now the gifts that I've received. My boss gave me a gift of access to Jenn David-Lang's summaries of books. That was a great gift.Matt Cormier:The other thing that I would say that I really benefited from is every time my boss walks into the building, I look and I say, "Hey, no chitchat. Let's get in classrooms." And then we go into a classroom and she helps me write that letter of reflection. And that has been one of the best gifts because to have two people writing a letter of reflection and me getting to benefit from when she looks for articles. Now I've got that article in my repository that I can pick. And actually she's doing that for a lot of people. So that was the hardest part was to write a really good letter of reflection and find some good research for folks.Matt Cormier:And then I came across this idea that my school district had put out these look-fors for when teaching moves were effective. And each of the 23 indicators, they've got quite a few bullets of look-fors underneath those. And I just thought there's some language. I don't know that I have to... When I write about the teacher moves that I noticed, and I want to write something that feels like it's worth people's time of reading and it really kind of matches what we want to say in an educational world and a professional world, well, there it is. I was able to say, "When you're adapting, okay, let me look at the look-fors. I'm seeing those things. Why don't I just pull that right in to my document of feedback?" And that's been a nice way to marry the old process of rating 23 indicators with this new process of saying these are the teacher moves that I noticed and using some of that language.Matt Renwick:It gives you the language to make it evidence-based and it's aligned and it takes a little bit of the thinking work and try to be creative, which I struggle with sometimes. What do I want to say exactly here? And just having those terms up is helpful. So I assume you would never go back to your former model.Matt Cormier:No.Matt Renwick:No. But if someone is thinking about, like me, truly kind of marrying authentic feedback and growth with an evaluation system, what would be some first steps in getting started in the process that you would recommend?Matt Cormier:I think I would ask you to reflect on this question that I was challenged with. So this, everything I'm talking about came from one of the most amazing intellects I've met in recent years, Ms. Sam Bennett, and that's who challenged me to think differently about this work. And she challenged me with this question. I would ask everybody to think it through as well. "Do you think that your current process is getting you the results and getting teachers the results they want?" And I actually, honestly, I answered back very quickly. I said, "Yes, it is. Because when I rate teacher ineffective or partially effective, the next time I go in, they have absolutely made a change."Matt Cormier:But then, the question I think, came up was "Well, what happens if you go in the next time or the time after?" And I thought, no, it's compliance. Right? The current system I have is about compliance and it doesn't feel good when I hear teachers say to me is they're nervous. Even the very best of them who say, "You can come in anytime you want, Matt." Because we've all heard that. "Come in anytime you want. I don't want to change a thing." The fact is when I walk in, I notice a change either in the voice or just in some of the moves. If I've got a computer with me, there's a change.Matt Cormier:And so I recognize that the old system, wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want a compliance-based system. I didn't want to worry in November if I had gone through all the pieces the district required me to do or again in April. And how many of us have written evaluations on Saturday nights in April? I didn't want to do that anymore. I didn't want to worry about compliance. I'd worry about authentic growth, something that the teacher wanted. And so that's what I would say to everybody first to get started, ask that question of yourself. Are you getting what you want? Are your teachers getting what you want? Because if you're not, then that is the definition of insanity.Matt Renwick:Yeah.Matt Cormier:You have to think about something different. And my guess is your school district, like my school district probably offers some flexibility around how you do that.Matt Renwick:Yeah. And especially this year with observing Zooms and all kind of creative ways to get in the classroom. Well, this is very helpful, Matt. Remind me, which district are you out of? You're in Colorado.Matt Cormier:That's right. Best district in Colorado. I'm in Jefferson County, Jeffco Schools, which is on the west side of Denver. We're a good sized school district, over 80,000 kids. And I'm super proud of this district. I've been here 20 years. No, 19 years. 19 years. But I think it's forward thinking, forward looking and definitely been given some grace around thinking through the different process here. 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

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

  Matt Renwick is an 18-year public educator who began as a 5th and 6th-grade teacher in Rudolph, WI. He now serves as an elementary principal for the Mineral Point Unified School District . Matt also teaches online graduate courses in curriculum design and instructional leadership for the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He tweets @ReadByExample and writes for ASCD and Lead Literacy. Digital portfolios - started in 2012 with tiger woods golf, email and watching videos. Need to be strategic about what we are doing with the technology. How do we evaluate the digital portfolio options? You really need to look at your own school’s needs. Kidblog, freshgrade, google sites 6 C’s of digital portfolios. Collect and curate Create and Collaborate Communicate and Celebrate - gotta put something out there that is yours. Age of the student matters when it comes to type of portfolio. Elementary - Freshgrade Middle - Google Site High School - start moving to their own platform. Every on the same tool, using it the same way is really an impossible task. Lisa Snider in Oklahoma web site for journalism class. Making dog toys out of t-shirts. Investigate portfolio assessment to start. There is a need for something physical and not just digital. Plan instruction and assessment with the student in mind. How to be a transformative principal? Now is a great time to try out a tool to give kids access to an authentic audience. Biblionasium.com Kidblog account for a trip to Peru. Schedule a call with Jethro Are you feeling like you are always behind at school? Do you feel like you need about 2 more hours each day to accomplish everything? Here’s how I help principals work manageable hours: Create your ideal week, so that you can leave work at work and enjoy your life! Please take a moment to rate this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher.  Please follow me on Twitter: @jethrojones for the host and @TrnFrmPrincipal for the show. Buy Communication Cards Show notes on TransformativePrincipal.com Download Paperless Principal.   Take Control of your email Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey    

It's crystal ball time. I've invited my guests to share their best guesstimates of what school and teaching may look like in the year 2037. Follow:@larryferlazzo @ReadByExample @dlaufenberg @Bamradionetwork Matt Renwick is an elementary school principal in Mineral Point, Wisconsin and author of multiple books, including 5 Myths About Classroom Technology: How do we integrate digital tools to truly enhance learning?(ASCD, 2015). Dr. Nancy Sulla is the creator of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom and author of the books Students Taking Charge and It's Not What You Teach But How. Diana Laufenberg is a Nationally Board certified Social Studies teacher currently teaching 7th graders in Flagstaff, AZ.

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals? In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals? In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals? In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices