Instructional Leadership in Action

What does transformative teacher professional learning look and sound like? This case example — which was written by my colleague Renee Gallagher and published in the May/June 2019 issue of NAESP's Principal magazine — illustrates how a shift in beliefs is key to advancing access and equity for students.

As Renee shows, classroom experiences that are truly transformative for students require adults to work and learn differently than they typically do. Yet, adult beliefs about student capabilities often stand in the way of getting better with teaching practice.

The University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership is looking for up to two partners who are eager to collaborate intensively as they engage in the transformative work of leading for teacher professional learning.

To that end, we encourage you to consider becoming a Leading for Teacher Professional Learning Collaborator. As a collaborator, you will be engaged in a discounted 3-year partnership with CEL in which you will develop new skills and competencies as a Leader for Professional Learning. In exchange, you will agree to:

• Try out and potentially adapt our new tools and processes.
• Provide CEL with regular written or verbal feedback on these tools and processes.
• Engage in at least monthly communication including phone or video conferences with CEL staff.
• Share what you are learning along the way including unexpected breakthroughs and barriers.
• Share artifacts of your work along the way.
• Provide CEL with access to leaders in your system for observations, interviews, photographs and/or video for the purpose of our mutual learning and for CEL publication.

The University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership is pleased to announce the launch of a new line of service, Leading for Teacher Professional Learning.

Unlike traditional investments in teacher professional development that have not consistently yielded results for students, our approach to professional learning develops teacher collective efficacy — a long-term, sustainable approach to addressing persistent challenges of student learning.

Our partnership methodology ensures that your investment will be aligned with ESSA’s requirement for professional learning activities that are sustained, intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven and classroom-focused.

As we at the University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership continue to visit classrooms this year and celebrate the  gains we are seeing, we encourage educators to also celebrate and then think about their next steps for improving outcomes for students. 

In this spirit, we are pleased to announce a new resource we have developed, the Leadership Guide for K-12 Teacher Professional Learning.

We know that our field's traditional investments in teacher professional development have not consistently yielded results for students. Creating  transformative schools and classrooms where all students develop agency and efficacy requires a new approach to how teachers help them learn and engage.

The Leadership Guide for K-12 Teacher Professional Learning is for leaders in classrooms, schools and school systems who want coherent, authentic, sustainable, and effective teacher learning aimed at improving outcomes for students.

For the Summer Leadership Institute, we have lined up a dynamic panel of speakers who will share professional learning success stories from their school districts. Rebekah Kim, Paula Montgomery, and Jose Rivera are instructional leaders who inspire us, and we think each will inspire you with stories of how their districts solved challenging professional learning problems we can all relate to.

Teachers learn all the time: from students, from trial and error, and from each other. We know that as teachers strive to create powerful learning experiences for all the students in front of them, they are constantly questioning and experimenting with their teaching practices.

I recently visited two elementary school instructional coaches in a district where we are providing support to all K-12 coaches. Rebecca used to be a teacher at the school and is now in her first year as a full-time coach. Cheryl is in her second year as a district-based coach and spends a week a month at the school.

"I work here all the time and I know these teachers so well, I think I am overly casual sometimes," Rebecca described her main challenge. "I don’t want to be too pushy but I do want to do more coaching. How do I strike that balance?"

For teachers and principals, the run-up to the winter break can seem like a mad dash to a (first) finish line. Time is short and instructional improvement goals slip down the priority list.

What to do? Mark your calendar for January. The time after the winter break is perfect for everyone to take stock of progress toward the instructional goals set in the fall. It’s a great opportunity to step back and reflect on how students have been growing and what teachers and principals can do to continue to support them.

Principals often ask us how to talk with teachers about their professional growth since the start of the year. Typical questions include How can I help teachers reflect honestly on their instruction in light of student learning and our school’s goals? and How can I best prepare for conversations about goals with teachers?

It’s a familiar professional development experience for many educators: Seven middle school math teachers gather around student work and content area standards in preparation to observe an experienced consultant teach a group of eighth graders how to talk about their own learning, which today includes how to graph on a coordinate plane.

The teachers are eager to hear their students talk about their learning in the classroom. They are also eager to try out some different instructional strategies to support math discourse. By the end of the day, they leave the session excited to take their learning back to their classrooms.

As a teacher leader in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Monica Wehrheim wanted the teachers she worked with to be inspired by her feedback, to mature as instructors and to improve their practice. But initially, some teachers didn’t understand Wehrheim’s newly created role and weren’t as receptive to her suggestions as she’d anticipated.

So at the start of this past school year, Wehrheim turned to her coach from the University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) for advice on introducing herself to the handful of teachers she would mentor that year.