How important is it to have an effective principal?

Much has been said lately about the importance of having an effective teacher at the helm of every classroom.  However, an often overlooked piece of research around effectiveness is how important it is for every school to have an effective principal.

After all, what good is it to have a building filled with effective and dedicated teachers if the person in charge of designing and managing the school’s systems actually impairs the degree to which his/her teachers can be effective?

It’s already an impressive task to get an effective teacher in front of every student.  The additional challenge of finding effective principals to lead these effective teachers can begin to feel like we’re waiting for a rare alignment of stars.  However, the expectation that each of our classrooms be in the hands of an effective teacher and that each of our schools be in the hands of an effective principal is a crucial one to which we must hold firm.

There are some school models that address this challenge by empowering the teachers within a school to take on the decision-making responsibilities usually held by principals in more traditional models.  However, every school needs someone managing the school-wide logistics because they greatly impact the degree to which a teacher can be effective.

In most traditional school models, it is imperative that the principal also be an effective and inspiring leader.  Teachers must see him/her as an expert worthy of respect and a leader worthy of trust.  There will be times, and many of them, when teachers don’t fully understand all of the variables that impact decisions made.  There will be other times when a principal must push and motivate teachers to grow as professionals. It’s in these times where the respect and trust teachers have in an effective principal become the lifeblood of a school.

How should a principal’s effectiveness be evaluated?

While many districts and states debate about how teachers should be evaluated, it is imperative that we also discuss how principals should be evaluated.  While student outcomes around student achievement and graduation rates seem like obvious data points to include in such an evaluation, equally important are the observation and teacher interview tools that must be designed to extrapolate the extent to which teachers respect and trust their principal.  When creating these observation and teacher interview tools, there are a few questions to consider.

How could interview and/or survey questions be designed for teachers to describe, among other effective practices:

• what their principals do to build trusting relationships with staff
  
• what their principals do to earn respect and faith in their expertise
  
• what their principals do to maintain a staff’s trust and respect even after making decisions that teachers don’t immediately understand
  

How could evaluative observation rubrics be designed to capture, among other effective practices:

• how clearly a principal communicates his/her expectations to staff
  
• how inspiring  a principal is when addressing his/her staff
  
• how much rigor a principal promotes in the professional development at his/her school
  

It is my hope that policymakers, along with state and district officials, will pass legislation and design evaluation systems which pay tribute to the crucial role principals play in any effort to improve the effectiveness of our classrooms and schools.  If not, legions of effective teachers in our nation will remain at the mercy of ineffective principals until more and more evaluation systems ensure otherwise.

In this high-stakes culture in which we operate, why should teachers strive to build solid relationships with their students?

I have taught in segregated special education schools.  My students had been removed from their feeder schools, usually due to behavioral issues.  The urban high school students I taught as the English teacher, were often more concerned with survival than they were with dangling participles.  Many of them were in gang-related relationships outside of schools and these rival gang issues sometimes clashed within school walls.

My students came to me with HUGE chips on their shoulders.  One menacingly stated upon meeting me, “I threw books at my last English teacher.”  I replied, “Thank you for telling me.”  What else could I say?

By the end of the year, the students were warning me about bad areas in the city and were sharing stories of their lives with me.  I was not their friend, but I had become a mentor.  We had gained a mutual respect.  I cared about these students and the interesting part was that they had learned to care about paying attention in class, answering my questions, and completing reading assignments.

Teachers feel pressured every day to teach material that will/may be taught on high-stakes assessments in order to ensure successful AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) reporting that affects not just their classroom but their entire school and even their district ratings.  There is pressure to coldly look at data to make determinations about placements and programs for students.  Unfortunately, the tendency is that our students become numbers (i.e. their test scores) likewise the teachers also become numbers (i.e. their passing student percentage).

Although data is an important contributing factor to the instructional decisions made and although the state standards (and national common core standards) are essential to designing an instructional program for a student, I argue that remembering the individual who stands before a teacher is paramount in all of these decisions.

Published in Educational Leadership, Marzano states in "Relating to Students: It’s What You Do That Counts" that “positive relationships between teachers and students are among the most commonly cited variable associated with effective instruction.” Interestingly enough these positive relationships are based upon student perceptions of teachers’ behaviors.  According to Marzano, this is a good sign for teachers.  Teachers do not have to love every student, but they must interact positively with every student.

In the book Educator's Guide to Preventing and Solving Discipline Problems by Mark Boynton and Christine Boynton, Kerman is cited saying “Demonstrating caring is one of the most powerful ways to build positive relationships with your students (Kerman et al., 1980).  I have combined strategies for demonstrating caring with suggestions from Marzano for developing positive perceptions in students.

Demonstrating caring and developing perceptions, especially with disenfranchised students, can go a long way to building teacher-student relationships and therefore developing learners’ abilities to function in the classroom.

What does this mean for policy makers and administrators?

Students come to school with individual sets of struggles and backgrounds. Some no longer come to school with an inherent respect for the educational system.  Teachers need to seek to understand every student and to develop, enhance, and nurture relationships with them. As they do so, research has shown they will see an increase in their students’ learning.

With Race to the Top we are seeing a revision of teacher evaluation systems.  These systems include a strong focus on student growth measurements. I would suggest that while we are revising the current evaluation systems, we ensure that classroom climate is included as a part of determining a teacher’s effectiveness. Measures to assess teacher-student relationships could be included in teacher observations. This would allow teachers to be provided with feedback for how to improve their relationships with students.  Then teachers could reflect on their practice and better develop their skills in this crucial area.

How do effective teachers use pedagogical content knowledge?

Thanks to Lee Shulman, an effective teacher’s intimate knowledge of how to formulate, represent, and manipulate his/her subject for the purposes of teaching has been recognized and discussed since 1986. Shulman named this capacity pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and since its conception, many have grappled with how to develop and refine it as part of teacher preparation or professional development.  With the most recent push for teacher evaluation reform, I’d like to hear more conversation about how to measure a teacher’s existence of and ability to effectively employ PCK.

I can think of few tools in an effective teacher’s toolbox that, when leveraged well, play as important of a role in high quality teaching as PCK.

Take a recent experience I had collaborating with two seventh grade teachers as we spent a summer morning planning curriculum for the upcoming school year on my patio.  Among several other learning objectives pulled from our state standards to address in their unit, these teachers aim to teach students how to effectively employ the reading strategies of visualization and making connections in order to improve students’ reading comprehension.

However, as we began to contemplate which instructional experiences and assessment formats  are best suited for teaching these objectives, it became clear that we needed to deconstruct each objective into the parts that each student need master in order to accomplish proficiency. (See figure below).

This deconstruction required us to think back as both teachers and readers about the less than obvious steps successful readers go through in order to improve their comprehension using visualizations and connections.   Each of these steps can become a potential hurdle, standing between a student and his/her ability to use these strategies for greater comprehension.  Therefore, it was imperative that we unpack and name these smaller, embedded skills that might elude a struggling student if not explicitly taught, practiced, and assessed.  Additionally, a natural outcome of this unpacking process was to think about how we might recognize when students hit these proactively identified, potential hurdles.  Finally, we needed to think about how we would respond instructionally in differentiated ways to students struggling with different sub-objectives.

I revered these teachers as they flexed their PCK muscles, and I couldn’t help but wonder, “When these teachers are evaluated later this year, how might their capacity to effectively leverage their PCK in the planning stages of their teaching be recognized?”

How might reformed teacher evaluation systems assess a teacher’s use of pedagogical content knowledge?

Teachers, when observed for evaluation, are most often observed during a class when he/she is with students.  However, there is a lot of effective teaching that happens behind the scenes before the students ever arrive to class.  If a teacher evaluator wants to appraise the existence of a teacher’s PCK and/or their ability to leverage PCK to make effective instructional decisions, the best time to observe and interview them is during planning time.

In our school, administrators engage teachers in a pre-brief meeting prior to the evaluative observation, and I hope this is a common practice.  I’m wondering if this pre-brief is an appropriate format conducive for revealing a teacher’s existence of and capacity to effectively employ their PCK.  Is it possible for administrators to observe a teacher’s planning session (when not happening on a Sunday afternoon or at 9pm, right?)

Within the discourse of teacher evaluation reform, I’ve heard mention of including periodic exam-like assessments. One potential function of these exams could be to determine the status of a teacher’s PCK.  However, I wonder what it would look like to test for this.  Would test-makers offer scenarios and ask for teachers’ written responses?  Is this assessment format idea, based within a hypothetical exam scenario, the best way to evaluate a teacher’s PCK?

After some reflection on this, it seems reasonable to propose an evaluation system where one annual evaluative observation (formal and/or informal) occurs during the planning phases of a teacher’s practice.  These planning observations should be enhanced with questions such as, “What are you hoping students can do by the end of class?  What specifically will you be looking for to decide if each student has met this objective or not?”

As an instructional coach, I find I learn so much about a teacher’s strengths and misconceptions when co-planning a lesson or unit with them, particularly as those strengths and misconceptions relate to pedagogical content knowledge.