Instructional Leadership in Action

In a “normal” school year on a “normal” school day, Stacy Thomas, the executive director of teaching and learning for Blaine School District, bounces between each of the district’s schools, which are housed on one campus. Blaine is a district in rural Washington near the Canadian border, and the close-knit campus empowers Stacy to support principals and improve instruction.

Of course, this year has been anything but normal.

We spoke with Stacy about her experiences this past spring: the shift to remote learning, how it’s exacerbated extant educational inequities and how teachers and families have both stepped up during a trying time.

It’s a new year and you have made a resolution to create plans and work with teachers to improve teaching and learning. That excitement quickly turns to focused determination as you remember all of your other responsibilities as a school principal. You ask yourself, “How can I get into classrooms more and plan supports for teachers?”   

One idea you have is to form an instructional leadership team (ILT) of teacher leaders to identify teaching and learning challenges in your building and support teachers to solve these challenges. You imagine that leading a team in this sort of work will build their instructional leadership skills and expand your capacity to provide the kind of support that your teachers and students need and deserve.

Over the past few years, I have noticed something in the principals I work with. As their work has gotten more complex and intense, the question of “Why am I doing this work?“ starts to come up more often.

So, at the end of the last school year, I asked each principal to interview a student they regarded as a main reason as to why they came to work every day and entered the profession. The video clips we got back were inspiring. One principal filmed a student whose family came from Mexico, struggled with English in middle school and became an amazing leader. Another talked to a high-achieving student who was touched to tears to be one of the principal’s main motivations for their work.

As the director of teaching and learning, I had to ask myself: What story do I have to tell? What’s my “why”?

When Catherine G. Atria, the principal of P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School in Florida, observed her teachers at work this year, it was with a new lens.

Watching teachers in action, Atria carefully collected data on everything from how many students asked questions or closely read the text of a book, to the number of closed or open-ended questions a teacher asked. Atria didn’t opine on whether students were engaged or not, or note techniques a teacher could have used, but didn’t.

And when meeting with a teacher afterward, Atria didn’t list a prescription for improvement. Instead, she presented the factual data and asked careful questions about why the teacher took a particular approach. Then she asked the teacher to think about ways to make small improvements to boost existing strengths.

Strong literacy skills are a key factor for a student's educational achievement and career. But while the debate around higher academic standards has sharpened national focus on the reading of complex, discipline-specific informational texts, educators have been grappling with how to help content-area teachers support student literacy for decades.

Traditionally, content-area focused teachers, particularly in middle or high school, have not been trained to teach students how to access rigorous texts, including which disciplinary-specific strategies to use, how to break down and think about disciplinary text, or how to grapple with difficult questions while reading closely.

To address this challenge, Wyoming's Uinta County School District #1 is engaging in long-term, comprehensive literacy-focused professional learning in social studies, science, and vocational education.

One of my favorite things to read or watch is a transformation story. You know, seeing the before and after pictures of a renovated home, weight loss, or a yard.

My school, Onalaska Middle School is a transformation story. But our before and after pictures are much different than the ones you are used to seeing.

In 2011, the Washington State Board of Education and the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction identified Onalaska School District as part of a Required Action District, or RAD, because it was one of the consistently lowest performing schools in the state.

Obviously, this was not a good place to be in as a school and it was going to take a lot of work to improve.

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.

At Woodlands Elementary in Bremerton, Washington state, Cindy Larson’s kindergartners don’t just answer her questions. They explain their thinking and evaluate their classmates’ reasoning. For example, during a lesson on measurement, one of the boys asked to come to the whiteboard and explain why another student’s answer was incorrect.

"He was basically up there teaching the class," Larson said. "That would never have happened in my classroom before." Discussing content at such intellectual depth early on bodes well for students’ future growth, she added. "If we’re starting this in kindergarten, the discussions in the upper grades are going to look qualitatively different."

The Big “Aha”: CEL Brings Equitable Learning Strategies to Small District With Stark Gap

As she scans student faces during classroom discussions, Michelle Rooks constantly asks herself “Who is being left behind? Who needs support to access the conversation?” The middle school instructional coach describes these as “gut questions” – questions planted by University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) experts who, over the past three years, have brought powerful equity-driven instructional and leadership strategies to a Wyoming school district with a stark and striking achievement gap.

Working Together: School Leaders Problem-Solve in Professional Learning Communities

School principals in the Seattle Public Schools district are discovering the power of peer collaboration. They’ve opened the doors of their school buildings and classrooms, invited school leaders in to observe and give feedback, analyzed instruction in partners’ schools, and shared strategies for ensuring that every student, regardless of background, achieves academic success.

The Center for Educational Leadership has guided this collaborative work in the 91-school district for two years, helping principals and assistant principals establish themselves in professional learning communities focused on quality instruction. “This is a way for them to share their practice with each other in disciplined ways. They build on that practice together,” says Max Silverman, associate director of CEL, a nationally recognized, research-based, non-profit arm of the University of Washington’s top-ranked College of Education.