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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fink, Stephen L.

Leading for instructional improvement : how successful leaders develop teaching and learning expertise / Stephen Fink, Anneke Markolt; foreword by John Bransford.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-54275-0 (pbk.); 978-1-118-03174-2 (ebk.); 978-1-118-03175-9 (ebk.); 978-1-118-03176-6 (ebk.)

1. Educational leadership–United States. 2. School administrators–United States.

3. School management and organization–United States. 4. Teacher effectiveness–United States.

5. Effective teaching–United States. 6. Educational change–United States.

I. Markolt, Anneke. II. Title.

LB2805.F456 2011

371.2–dc22

2010049430

Foreword

Reading this book activated a range of emotions—from exhilaration to frustration. The exhilaration comes from reading the critical assumptions and insights about teaching and learning that the authors discuss based on many hours spent in classrooms and districts. I've seen CEL's work in action and I know that they truly “walk their talk.” Especially noteworthy is the respect they show for teachers and schools that are working mightily to help all students succeed. They understand the complexity of learning to teach and to lead well and understand that the development of expertise is necessary and doable. As learners, we are always on the edge of our own expertise. The authors illustrate how instructional leaders lead while in the midst of learning and developing adaptive expertise.

My frustration stems from two things: (1) wishing I had seen a book like this twenty or so years ago as I was beginning my career as a learning scientist and (2) wishing our current policy makers, documentary filmmakers, and talk show hosts, who in their effort to bring more attention to the current state of public education continue to promote a national discourse that is troublingly superficial in terms of what is needed to ensure quality learning for all students. First in terms of my own practice, I had the great privilege of being one of the first students to attend the Center for the Study of Human Learning, directed by James Jenkins at the University of Minnesota. It was a fabulous experience and one that I appreciate more and more as I continue to study processes of human learning. Our work in Minnesota started at the cusp of what has been called The Cognitive Revolution. We did laboratory experiments on processes that affected attention, memory, retrieval, problem solving, transfer, and other important phenomena but almost all of this work was in laboratories that used college sophomores as participants and experimenters as the ones leading the “intervention” or instruction. We constantly discussed and worried about the “ecological validity” of our research but the prevailing paradigms for most of us were still one-to-one sessions (one experimenter and one participant) that could be easily managed and controlled in order to ensure “treatment fidelity.”

Many of my cognitive friends were trained in a similar way in labs across the country, and eventually a number of us decided to move at least some of our work from pristine laboratory settings to actual classrooms. We were in for a shock. Teachers were dealing with twenty or more students simultaneously and that was a far cry from our one-on-one laboratory experiences. Teachers also had to be accountable to a number of different people including each of their individual students, along with other teachers, principals, superintendents, parents, school boards, state tests, and so forth.

As we worked in schools, we saw many of our laboratory-based research projects crash and burn because of the complexity and other priorities that teachers and schools had to meet. In looking back on this era of our early school-based research, I realize that work in the schools involved experimenters teaching some small lesson while teachers took on the role of saving us from our lack of classroom management skills, but they never had to learn to change their own instruction. Helping teachers improve their instruction never appeared on our to-do list. Discussions in this book advance many of the findings from laboratory research on learning and I am still an extremely strong advocate for laboratory experiments that allow people to carefully study important phenomena, but more is needed, and this is where the wisdom from this book kicks in.

The authors clearly respect the deep expertise needed for effective teaching and learning. Perhaps more important, the authors are fully aware that simply asking teachers and educational leaders to learn to change their practices by attending a professional development session or reading a book or article is not sufficient to support a trajectory of improvement. Schools need to create communities of learners that continually help one another improve. The authors not only cite important general principles for teacher and organizational change, they also give many specific examples—including tools and procedures for self-assessments of teaching and leadership proficiency.

It is precisely because of the authors’ deep and insightful treatment of teaching and learning that my frustration continues when I see those who are quick to offer the next most-important fix to public education, all the while remaining ignorant to the core issue facing public education in America, which is the issue of expertise—an argument the authors advance with eloquence.

Just recently, I was asked to suggest a team to work with a school district that is doing well but wants to do much better. My first step was to call Stephen Fink and Anneke Markholt and ask if they would join the team. The insights they provided in just a short amount of telephone time were invaluable and the insights in this book are even more impressive. I'm going to make sure that my learning science students read this book so that, unlike me and my early graduate school colleagues, my students will get a clearer picture of the complexities of initiating and sustaining successful organizational change that enhances learning for educational leaders and teachers (including parents) so that they can better help their students learn.

It is a great privilege and honor to know the authors of this book, work with them, and see the key ideas from their work that this book communicates with such clarity. There are a lot of pieces to the educational puzzle and this book represents a huge advance in identifying and providing tools to manage the inherent complexity of instructional improvement. I read it and wept a bit because this book was not around when I started my career. I hope you can read it and enjoy.

John Bransford

Shauna C. Larson Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle

Acknowledgments

This book has been years in the making. Since our beginning at the Center for Educational Leadership, we have been honored and humbled to work and learn alongside many educators. The ideas and tools found in this book are the result of our collective efforts and learning with our colleagues and district partners. We have been fortunate to work and learn with people who are willing to put towering ideas, scholarly research, and theory into practice. They pushed our thinking and allowed us to push theirs. We are indebted and grateful for their willingness to partner with us to bushwhack through uncharted terrain until we arrived at plans, strategies, and qualities of professional learning that worked in their unique district context.

Our colleagues at CEL have been our thought partners and have taught us much about the development of instructional leadership. The Five Dimensions (5D) of Teaching and Learning is the brainchild of Dina Blum and we are fortunate that for over a year she spearheaded our meetings where we hunkered down with the 5D framework, deliberated, argued, and wordsmithed. Dina and Mike Copland took our collective thinking and created a tool that has helped us and our partners get smarter about the definition of high-quality teaching and learning and understand just how sophisticated teaching can be. Our colleagues who spend their time in our partnership districts work hard to put compelling theory into practice and we have been privileged to work alongside them since 2003. Wilma Kozai, who had just retired from San Diego Unified School District before joining CEL, has taught us how to teach instructional leadership. Wilma is a consummate learner and her passion for equity fuels a fire deep within her that is contagious. The intellect and energy that Sandy Austin brings to CEL and to the partnerships with which she works is inspiring. A number of the tools and protocols throughout this book are Sandy's brainchild. Sandy is the epitome of one who practices a work ethic with pizzazz. Max Silverman recently joined CEL, although we worked with him in one of our district partnerships beginning in 2003. We are fortunate to have his smarts and sensibilities and you will see examples of his work throughout this book in the form of instructional letters and other tools. Lara Lyons has performed multiple roles at CEL, always providing a keen eye to ensure that our materials speak to our audience. You will see examples of Lara's thinking in several chapters. Since 2007 Rita Lowy has been CEL's lead project director for the 5D assessment. Her thinking and the rest of our CEL directors’ thoughts can be seen in the latest edition of the 5D framework (Version 3.0). We also appreciate her thorough review of Chapter Three, where the 5D framework is applied to classroom practice.

We want to acknowledge the superintendents, executive directors, principals, coaches, and teacher leaders from our district partnerships who have allowed us to learn with and from them. These district leaders have been courageous enough to invest in the long-term proposition of developing teaching and leadership expertise. In the face of pressure for quick test score gains, these districts recognize that although they need to address the urgency of adequate yearly progress (AYP) demands, they also need to invest in building their district's capacity.

We have also been fortunate to have several consultants who have worked steadily with us since 2004. Jenn McDermott’s brilliant thinking is exemplified in Chapter Seven on coaching and in the discussions and examples of separating observation from interpretation. She has taught many of us about how to avoid conflating our observations with our interpretations and how to coach in ways that honor the extant knowledge of our learners while pushing their practice. Since the beginning of our school district partnership work in 2003 Katherine Casey has taught us how to study instruction while understanding the strengths and needs of teachers. Early in our work, Lesley Gordon reminded us that we should help our district partners learn to be “hard on the work, gentle with one another.” Her wisdom has become part of the bedrock of our efforts and you will see Lesley’s words repeated throughout this book.

The fact is, each time we have the opportunity for a conversation, a classroom visit, a study session, a think-tank gathering, or the privilege to be invited into a school to coach, we learn something from the experience and from our peers. The nature of constant learning, of still trying to “get it right” urges us to continuously learn and to continue to grow our own expertise. We are indebted to the many people who continue to work alongside us and help us figure it out along the way!

Introduction

Every year we spend many hours in classrooms teaching leaders how to observe and analyze teaching and learning and how to help teachers improve their instructional practice. In fact, along with our colleagues at the Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) at the University of Washington, we spend thousands of hours in hundreds of classrooms each year. We are in schools and school districts—dozens of them each year as well. We are not at all surprised that too many of our students are still not learning at high levels and that long-standing academic achievement gaps that divide our nation's children along lines of race, class, language, and disability continue to persist. In fact, we believe that any astute observer of teaching, learning, and school leadership who spends ample time observing classroom teaching and talking with school and district leaders about their leadership strategies and actions would come to the same, inescapable, two conclusions:

1. The quality of teaching in the vast majority of our schools is inadequate to ensure quality learning for all students. By quality learning, we mean not only what is measured on a standardized test, but also learning that is reflected by students’ access and opportunity to engage deeply in the sciences, language arts, and the arts, which is manifested in ways of thinking and communicating. By all students we mean just that—each and every student, including students academically behind, students still developing the English language to make sense of their academic subjects, and students who have adapted some form of behavior to cope but not learn.
2. The prevailing leadership strategies and actions employed in many districts and schools across the country are inadequate to improve teaching practices at the scale necessary to ensure quality learning for all students.

It is important to state at the outset that the inadequacy of teaching and leadership practices we observe is not due to uncaring, unmotivated, lazy teachers and school leaders who weren't smart enough to be doctors and lawyers. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. We stand in awe and admiration of just how hard teachers and leaders work every day on behalf of the students in their care. The problem—as we will illuminate further during the course of this book—is that the art and science of teaching is far more complex and sophisticated than our lay public and policy makers realize. As such, the requisite school leadership to improve teaching practice is also far more complex and sophisticated than most people realize. In addition, as we discuss teaching and learning throughout this book, we are setting a very high bar for what we mean by quality teaching practices designed to promote quality learning for all students.

Again, quality learning is much more than what is measured on the typical annual state achievement test, the usual marker for our pernicious achievement gap. As long as tests serve as any kind of gatekeeping mechanism, performance judged by these tests is an equity issue—we do not advocate ignoring this fact. But when we refer to quality learning, we are talking about students using their minds well—how well they can reason, synthesize, evaluate, design, innovate, and create; how students take ownership of their own learning; how they develop agency and advocacy for themselves and others as learners; and the very premium students place on their own learning in the service of humanity. It is important to note that achieving quality learning for all is not simply an economic argument. It is the equity and social justice issue of our time. At the end of the day, a rigorous, high-level curriculum and quality teaching for every student is an equity issue. The fact that not one of the approximately fifteen thousand public school districts across the country has been able to realize the dream of quality learning for each and every student should underscore the depth of this challenge. Although this seems like an intractable problem of insurmountable proportions, in the ensuing chapters we will provide an insightful perspective, examples, and useful tools for leaders committed to a theory that the road to improved learning for all students lies in improving the quality of teaching.

This brings us to six foundational ideas that guide our theory of action and work at CEL and serve as a subtext for this book:

1. If students are not learning, they are not being afforded powerful learning opportunities.
2. Teaching is a highly complex and sophisticated endeavor.
3. Practice of sophisticated endeavors only improves when it is open for public scrutiny.
4. Improving practice in a culture of public scrutiny requires reciprocal accountability.
5. Reciprocal accountability implies a particular kind of leadership to improve teaching and learning.
6. Leaders cannot lead what they don't know.

If Students Are Not Learning, They Are Not Being Afforded Powerful Learning Opportunities.

The research on teacher quality as the primary correlate for student achievement is unequivocal—teaching matters above all else, including family income and education—reasons often cited by educators as the reason their students are not learning (Haycock, 1998; Peske & Haycock, 2006). In fact, there is a common mythology that the type or quality of schools matter most for student learning, which sends hundreds of thousands of parents scurrying every year in a quest to find the “right” school for their child. However, a closer examination of variance in student achievement across the country yields once again that differences among students, as well as schools, are but a small factor compared to differences in the quality of teaching from classroom to classroom (Rowan, Correnti, & Miller, 2002). In short, parents would be better served to ensure their child has the most highly qualified teacher rather than search for the right school. Of course this is easier said than done considering that the kind of high-quality teaching practice necessary to guarantee quality learning for all students is still in short supply in schools across the country.

Teaching Is a Highly Complex and Sophisticated Endeavor.

As we will see in later chapters, teaching is a highly sophisticated endeavor—much more so than the public, policy makers, and many educational leaders understand. To underscore this point, log on to any state Department of Education Web site and take a look at the array of grade-level subject matter content standards prescribed for school districts within that particular state. Examine the sophistication and complexity of these standards. Now (hypothetically) imagine yourself as the teacher, tasked with ensuring each of the thirty students in your class meet these standards despite the fact many students are already performing far below these grade level standards, despite the fact that perhaps eight of your thirty students are newly immigrated English language learners with minimal English language proficiency, and despite the fact that a number of your students are living with daily violence—either in their homes or community. This picture is not intended as an excuse for chronically underperforming schools. However, it is intended to illustrate the complexity of the challenge, understanding that at any given point in time teachers are working to the limits of their subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skills. In testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Deborah Ball (2010) said it best:

…despite how commonplace it may seem, teaching is far from simple work. Doing it well requires detailed knowledge of the domain being taught and a great deal of skill in making it learnable. It also requires good judgment and a tremendous capacity to relate to a wide range of young people, understand culture, context, and community, and manage a classroom. It requires interpreting and using data to improve the effectiveness of instruction. And as we seek to increase the academic standards and demands that we want our young people to meet, the challenges of good teaching will only escalate. Teaching complex academic skills and knowledge, not to mention skills of collaboration, interaction, and resourcefulness in an increasingly networked world, is still more difficult than teaching more basic skills.

The good news is that with appropriate, sustained, and robust professional learning and support, teachers will improve their subject matter content knowledge and instructional craft expertise and will make the very sophisticated kinds of instructional decisions necessary to ensure high levels of student learning given these seemingly intractable challenges.

Practice on Sophisticated Endeavors Only Improves When It Is Open for Public Scrutiny.

If teacher practice is to improve to the level required for quality learning for all students, schools can no longer be places for the private practice of teaching. Teaching must move from a historic and inherently private endeavor to public practice. We know that just-in-time feedback and coaching is the way that any of us improve our practice, whatever that practice may be. However, unlike all other respected professions in which practice is indeed a public endeavor, teaching (and for that matter leading) has been a very isolated process. Can you imagine doctors, lawyers, writers, musicians, artists, and athletes improving their practice in isolation? Of course not. Yet every day in thousands of schools across this country teachers engage in what might be called a quasi-practice in the privacy of their own classroom.

Improving Practice in a Culture of Public Scrutiny Requires Reciprocal Accountability.

Although this book focuses squarely on what it will take to improve the quality of teaching and student learning, it is ultimately about leadership, which moves us to the fourth of our big ideas. That is, in order to move teaching from a private to public practice, and to create a truly professional body of practice in the first place, we must make certain that accountability is characterized by a series of reciprocal relationships from the classroom to the district office (Elmore, 2000; Resnick & Glennan, 2002). Reciprocal accountability simply means that if we are going to hold teachers or school leaders accountable for something, we have an equal and commensurate responsibility to verify that they know how to do what we are expecting them to do. In practicality it means that district leaders must ensure that they are building the capacity of their principals, and that principals must ensure they are building the capacity of their teachers. This is not some kind of hierarchical model of leadership. It is, however, a recognition that the core challenge of improving the quality of teaching is one of expertise and that leaders play a critical role in supporting the building of that expertise.

Reciprocal Accountability Implies a Particular Kind of Leadership to Improve Teaching and Learning.

If teachers are not providing powerful learning opportunities for all students, then it ultimately becomes a leadership issue—for principals and district leaders in particular. Here again there is a growing body of research evidence that leadership is only second to teaching as the highest correlate to student achievement (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). If teachers are not providing powerful learning opportunities for all students, then leaders are not doing what they need to in order to create conditions for teacher learning as a public practice and to guide, support, and nurture teachers in the improvement of their teaching practice. This expectation requires leaders to learn how to navigate and manage the complexity of the instructional improvement endeavor and to remain open to their own learning along the way.

Leaders Cannot Lead What They Don't Know.

We have a mantra at the Center for Educational Leadership that happens to be our sixth and final big idea: you cannot lead what you don't know. If one assumes, as do we, that the purpose of leadership is the improvement of instruction—period—then it naturally follows that leaders charged with the task of leading the improvement of instruction must know what good teaching actually looks like. To the layperson—and to many educational leaders as well—there is a tacit assumption that school leaders know what good teaching looks like. This makes good sense—it is their profession after all. In our work at CEL we have run the following experiment dozens of times. We take leaders on a virtual classroom walkthrough. We spend approximately ten to fifteen minutes watching a classroom lesson. We have watched elementary, middle, and high school math and reading lessons. At the end of the lesson we ask the leaders to rate the quality of the teaching on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high.) In every case, the responses vary greatly with some rating the lesson high quality and some rating it low quality. In no instance has there been agreement about the quality of the lesson. In fact, there are usually as many high ratings as low ratings. The sad reality is that even among our school and district leaders, there is not a widely shared view of what constitutes quality teaching. Without a common language and shared understanding from which to anchor improvement efforts, it's no wonder that the quality of teaching in too many instances remains inadequate.

These six foundational ideas provide the context for the central focus of this book, which is that quality teaching along with quality leadership is ultimately a matter of expertise. If teachers knew how to teach more powerfully so that all students would learn at high levels, they would be doing it. If leaders knew how to design and deploy systems, structures, practices, routines, and rituals that actually support the improvement of teaching practice, they would be doing it. Teachers and leaders are doing the best they know how to do. At the end of the day it is all about expertise, not one's motivation, beliefs, and values. We are not saying that motivation, beliefs, and values do not play a critical role in professional practice, but as the reader will see throughout the ensuing chapters, entering the improvement process with a focus on building expertise is in fact the best way to simultaneously address deeper issues of beliefs and values.

With our six big ideas in mind, the following nine chapters are designed to take the reader on a journey into the more nuanced aspects of instructional leadership—all anchored to the central theme that the improvement of teaching practice and the leadership necessary to support this improvement process is an issue of expertise. We offer these chapters in four parts. Although we hope the reader finds the material compelling enough to read all four parts, we have structured the parts to stand alone for book study and discussion. At the end of each chapter we offer questions to prompt further thinking and discussion. In addition, many of the tools, protocols, and frameworks contained in this book can be accessed electronically by visiting the Center for Educational Leadership Web site at www.k-12leadership.org.

Part One: Making the Case for Instructional Expertise contains Chapter One, which focuses deeply on the leader's role in developing teacher expertise. We tap into a growing body of literature from the learning sciences to explore issues of learning and expertise. We discuss the leader's role in designing and supporting environments that nurture the development of expertise.

Part Two: Developing an Expert Instructional Eye contains Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two introduces CEL's Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning, which is a comprehensive instructional framework designed to help school leaders build a common language and shared vision for high-quality instruction. This thoroughly researched framework is a valuable tool that helps leaders learn how to analyze the quality of instruction and provide meaningful feedback to teachers in support of their professional learning. Chapter Three takes the reader into a real classroom through a case study vignette to see how the Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning can provide school leaders with a rich analysis of classroom instruction as they begin the process of growing teacher expertise.

Part Three: Leading for Instructional Improvement contains Chapters Four through Seven. Chapter Four focuses on how leaders (including teacher leaders) go about the business of observing classroom practice in the pursuit of deepening teacher expertise. This chapter provides useful information and tools for conducting learning walkthroughs and connecting classroom visits with wider school improvement goals. Chapter Five follows up with an examination of how effective instructional leaders provide constructive feedback. Readers will learn how to shape responses to their classroom observations and connect those responses with the broader educational improvement goals of their schools. Chapter Six provides concrete examples of how leaders can orchestrate and guide professional learning designed to improve teaching practice. We offer examples of how leaders draw on the extant expertise in their schools and districts and what professional supports actually look like when they are strategically placed. Chapter Seven focuses on instructional coaching. We address some of the typical coaching responsibilities in schools, typical challenges and dilemmas that coaches face in their role, and provide tools for leaders as they manage the most effective placement of coaches for developing teachers’ expertise.

Part Four: Embracing New Opportunities for Leading and Learning contains Chapters Eight and Nine. Chapter Eight reintroduces the concept of reciprocal accountability, specifically tracing how teachers and leaders from the classroom to the boardroom can go about improving the quality of teaching and learning. It also introduces the concept of leading from an inquiry stance, highlighting CEL's Habits of Thinking for Instructional Leadership framework. In the context of accountability we provide a look at the latest instructional expertise data highlighting nationwide results from CEL's Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning assessment. Chapter Nine serves as a concluding chapter and offers a new vision for improving teaching and learning. It explores some of the economic and structural issues we face in our effort to develop instructional expertise. It lays out the challenge ahead of us as we grapple with improving the quality of teaching. This is not just an academic challenge. It is a very real and frankly high-stakes challenge that has students’ lives—particularly students of color and students living in poverty—hanging in the balance. It is a challenge compelling enough to warrant yet one more book focused on leadership. We trust the following chapters will serve to provoke teachers’ and leaders’ deep thought and reflection and provide useful tools that can be applied immediately in the service of improving teaching and leadership practice.

Leading for Instructional Improvement

How Successful Leaders Develop Teaching and Learning Expertise