How schools are clarifying instructional roles and responsibilities

Roundtable highlights

Note: The questions and responses below have been edited for brevity and clarity. 

The panelists: 

• Dr. Dana Arreola was recently appointed superintendent of Gonzales ISD, a small, rural district in Texas. She was previously the superintendent of Bessemer City Schools in Alabama, where she led the district to achieve its highest academic performance since the introduction of the state report card.
• Jasmin Tow is the director of early literacy at Education for Change, a TK–12 charter network serving six schools in Oakland, California, where she has led system-wide improvements in early literacy and significantly narrowed proficiency gaps between schools.
• Clint Satterfield is the superintendent of Trousdale County Schools, a small, rural district in Tennessee that has twice won the state’s SCORE prize (State Collaborative on Reforming Education) for dramatically raising student achievement.

What conditions make it easier for principals to develop instructional leadership capacity on their school teams?

Dr. Dana Arreola:
Clear roles and responsibilities are key, along with protected time for instructional leadership tasks. Without these two conditions in place, it will be difficult for school leaders to focus on teaching and learning.

In one midsize urban district that I served in, we conducted a comprehensive review of how leaders were spending their time each week, and what we found was eye opening. Many of the tasks they were handling did not require their level of expertise or their credentials. Specialists were spending most of their time on operational duties rather than coaching teachers, and principals were spending time managing the technical work rather than setting the instructional vision and the strategy.

As a result of this review, we created a task force at the district level to identify the current duties of our campus leaders and redistribute non-instructional tasks to other team members. This shift was gradual and required some additional support and training to help principals to focus on what matters most: instructional leadership and improving student outcomes. In the end, our teachers felt more supported because their leaders were able to spend more time with them—not just driving by their professional learning communities, but actually doing the work side-by-side with them.

How do you distribute responsibilities for supporting early literacy instruction across your system, and what have you learned about how to make that model effective?

Jasmin Tow:
I inherited a staffing model in which each school has an early literacy coach whom I supervise but don’t directly manage. I spent the first year really looking at what the data told us about what was working and what wasn’t. What quickly surfaced was a disparity in outcomes between schools, most of which are within a four-mile radius. The disparity in student outcomes clearly correlated with a lack of role alignment across sites. My charge was to make the coaching model more effective across our schools.

I was empowered by my network leaders to tell school coaches, “This is an instructional leadership role, so the majority of your time should be spent on observations, feedback, and coaching.” Setting expectations helped clarify both what to prioritize and what to step away from. For example, I can now say to a coach, “You’re running this advisory, but it conflicts with when your newest teacher is teaching ELA. It’s not that advisory isn’t valuable, but it keeps you from meeting a key expectation of your role—supporting that teacher with the curriculum.”

As a result of better role alignment, we’ve seen a significant narrowing in proficiency gaps—from a 36-point difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools down to 17. We’re working to close the gap even further.

How does a lack of role clarity for instructional leaders hinder teacher development?

Jasmin Tow:
If the admin team is not clear on who’s doing what, that makes it really hard to effectively monitor and follow up on high-leverage action steps.

For example, we made a deliberate decision for our curriculum that every question is not a turn and talk in this reading comprehension lesson—some questions are higher-leverage than others. In our system, there is an expectation that our early literacy coaches read the unit and lesson plan before observing a classroom. However, that level of preparation is not expected of the principal. So you can imagine what happens when a principal who doesn’t know the sequence of the lesson observes a classroom and says, “I was in there for five minutes, and the teacher just called on kids without any turn and talk time.” They don’t know that the next question is the meaty one, and the questions they observed were just a quick check to set them up for inference. If the principal gives feedback that contradicts the early literacy coach, that will shut some teachers down. It breaks trust. The message teachers get is, “the people above me don’t know what they’re talking about.” The other message they may get is, “I can’t do anything right.”

I’m not saying other instructional leaders shouldn’t be in classrooms. I’m saying that the streamlining of feedback is really important. Be very clear on who the point person is for each teacher’s development, and then find space for the instructional leadership team to come together and collaborate on the trends and feedback.

How do you distribute responsibilities for supporting instruction across your district? And, given what you expect your school instructional leaders to focus on, what does the district leadership team need to excel at?

Clint Satterfield:
Our principal is in charge of the total operation of the school. But we also have an assistant principal—called the “school instructional coordinator” at every school, and they don’t handle any operations. They are focused on curriculum and instruction, and this model gives them the time to do that work.

We also have district instructional leaders who work hand-in-glove with the school instructional coordinators. The district leadership team needs to be the curriculum and instructional specialists. I’ve served as superintendent for 16 years, but prior to that, I was the head football coach for 20. The board’s idea was that I’d been really successful as a football coach, so I could do the same with the school district. One of the first things that I did in this role was go on the state website and see which districts had good test scores, and then call and visit their schools to learn from them. I went back and got my doctorate and worked day and night at being a curriculum and instructional specialist. If we had teacher training or a principal training, I sat in the room and was right there doing the work with them. When your principals and your teachers see the leader of the district doing the work, it carries a lot of clout. They know that we’re doing the heavy lifting together.

The other key for district leadership is setting high expectations for ourselves and our students—and then holding people accountable. Most teachers want to be really good at the craft. High-performing teachers will leave schools and districts where they don’t have high expectations—they get discouraged when everybody is not doing their share of the work. And you don’t just get what you expect, you get what you inspect. You’ve got to get in classrooms, and you’ve got to have feedback conversations with your people and then develop your professional development around the needs that are identified through those observation and feedback cycles.

Tell us about how you use observation and feedback cycles in your district. Who does those observations? How did you set expectations for feedback?

Clint Satterfield:
The instructional coordinators do a lot of 20-minute classroom observations. We put teachers in stages—with less experienced or lower performing teachers in “stage one,” getting more observations. That’s the only way we can do it, because we’re a small team with limited resources. We use the IPG [Instructional Practice Guide] to focus our observations and feedback.

There’s an expectation to deliver feedback to teachers within five days of observation. This is a cooperative conversation, and the coach and the leader agree on one thing the teacher can try to do differently that will have the most impact on student learning. We focus on one thing at a time because if you try to change too many things at once, you’ll get nothing done.

In our research, we found a lot of variation in the level of clarity around instructional leadership activities like PLCs. What exactly are your expectations for what happens during collaborative planning time, and how did you make those expectations known to principals?

Dr. Dana Arreola:
We try to create coherence across all of our schools. Some of our key expectations are: 

• PLC time has to be held sacred and protected.
• PLCs should be led by someone with strong content knowledge. That’s not always going to be the same person, because the goal is to continue to develop team members’ capacity.
• PLCs should be purposeful. They should be content-driven and directly connect to improving instructional delivery (including how to deliver the instructional materials).
• The learning should connect with both school-wide priorities and our teachers’ individual goals that have been identified to improve their craft.
• When our teachers leave each PLC, they should know what materials are going to be implemented. There are sometimes opportunities to use resources outside of our curricula—but our experts need to vet those resources. We want to make sure that we’re putting high-quality instructional materials in front of our students at all times.

The expectations for PLCs were developed by our curriculum and instructional team with support of some campus leaders and teachers. There are written guidelines as well as ongoing coaching support for principals to help ensure that all these things are happening during PLCs—and then actually executed in the classrooms.