EPISODE #273

You're listening to School Leadership Reimagined, episode number 273.

Hey, builders, before we begin, I have a quick question for you. Are We Connected on social media? The reason I'm asking is because, as much as I love giving you the podcast episode every single week, I'd love to take our relationship deeper. So if we're not connected on on social media, let's connect. I'm on LinkedIn at Robyn. Underscore mind steps, I'm on Twitter at Robyn. Underscore, mind step, someone's on Facebook at Robyn. Jackson, please, let's connect so we can keep the conversation going. Now on with the show you're listening to the school leadership reimagine podcast episode 273, you How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face, how do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies or lack of time, money or resources if you're facing those challenges right now, here's where you'll find the answers, strategies and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started.

Hey, builders, welcome to another episode of the school leadership reimagined podcast.

I'm your host, Robyn Jackson, and today I thought I would address a question that's been coming up a lot lately. I've been talking to a lot of people and people, and they are raising questions about the way that builders do feedback. You see builders give teachers feedback differently than other people, and so I thought I would address some of the leadership myths that we've been taught around giving teachers feedback and clear them up and share with you how builders do things differently, and how builders get results as a result. So let's dive in. Shall we? So it started with, I was doing a speech somewhere, and after so I was doing a breakout session, and I was talking about how builders are moving teachers at least one level, in one critical area or domain every single year, and sometimes doing it in less than a year. And how do you do that? And it involves giving teachers the right kind of feedback. And so someone raised his hand and he said, but you know, the way he had a concern, because I was saying that I don't believe in the term, you must inspect what you expect, at least not the way that we were taught to use it. And he wanted to ask me questions about why. And it gets at a bigger mythology that we have around feedback in education. You see, we were taught that we have to inspect what we expect, so we need to get into three, five classrooms a day. We need to show up in classrooms. We need to be in classrooms and be present so we can see the instruction that's going on and inspect what we expect. 

Here's the challenge of that advice. 

Just because you show up in a classroom doesn't mean that your presence being there, it's actually going to change practice. A lot of times. When you show up, people turn things on. People perform just because you're there. When you show up, it's annoying to some teachers, because, like, why are you here? And you don't really have a good reason for being there, other than you feel like this is the job. Or you show up with a checklist and and you check things off and leave it for the teacher, or you show up with a stack of sticky notes and you leave a nice little smiley face and a happy note for the teacher. Great. Those things are nice. The question is, is it really moving instruction? On top of that, the next day on Facebook, someone saw something I'd written and took issue with something I said around this idea of just kind of showing up into classrooms. And he was like, but you gotta do walk throughs, that's what in you know, you if you don't do walk throughs, then, then you don't, you're not monitoring instruction. And again, my question is, what's the point? Why? Why are you walking through Why are you monitoring instruction if you're not doing it to help teachers grow if you're not doing it to help teachers improve instruction in their classroom, if you're just doing it because it's required, or somebody told you walk throughs were a good idea, then you might as well not even do them, because it's not changing things In a classroom. So we've been taught a lot about, you know, the fact that we need to be present. People need to see us. And it's not entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right either, because what it means then is that we feel this pressure to be out in the hallways. We feel this pressure to show up in people's classrooms, regardless of whether or not we have something to say. A we feel this pressure to give teachers, quote, unquote feedback, which is just, you know, in many cases, you know, a checklist of behaviors, without helping them make meaning of that checklist in order to change their practice. At the service of kids, we've been taught that those are the things we have to do, that that is leadership, and it is leadership, but it's not changing instruction. 

How many of you have shown up in classrooms? You know, three classrooms a day, killed yourself to do that, and you do it over and over and over again, and yet, the quality of instruction doesn't change. How many of you have created a new walk through instrument every single year, or tried to use the one the district requires of you? And you show up and you check things off, and instead of seeing a change in practice, you just see more resentment among your teachers because you're just showing up and checking things off of a list, and it feels like you they're being inspected. How many of you have conducted walkthroughs, sat down, done everything you were taught to do, about giving feedback and felt the frustration because you do not see a change in practice. How many of you have given teachers feedback and you've encountered you know all of the signs of disdain, you know the eye rolling, the teeth sucking the the or you've experienced tears or blank stares, and it hasn't moved practice. And then we think that if we just keep doing it, if we we get into maybe if we got into four classrooms instead of three classrooms a day, maybe if we found another walk through instrument, maybe if we found the right conversational protocol, we wouldn't experience the teacher's disdain. And we keep trying to look for something to make that process better, when we should be questioning the process to begin with. Do we really need to do that? And so today, I want to just challenge some of the conventional wisdom around specifically walkthroughs and the feedback that people give from walkthroughs, because just, I'm just, I'm tired of seeing people frustrated killing themselves to do all of these walkthroughs, but not seeing the results. So first of all, what is the purpose of a walkthrough? Now, when I first learned walkthroughs, you know, a million years ago, the purpose was a bigger purpose. It wasn't about individual teacher feedback. When I learned walk throughs. Walk throughs were a way to kind of get a pulse check of what instruction looked like in your school, so that you could better design fee, better design professional development, so that you could look and see how things are being implemented, so you could check on certain initiatives that you had going on and see what's going on in the classroom. 

They were not about giving teachers individual feedback. 

It was more about, you know, kind of spot checking around the school to get a general sense of where your school was instructionally. And so the way that I was trained to do walk throughs was that you you visited, you know, several classrooms, and you aggregated the data that you collected from that classroom, and it helped you make some decisions about what kind of follow up support your teachers needed, what kind of generic, general feedback your staff needed around a specific issue. When I first started using walkthroughs again, I was looking at a specific issue. So for instance, if we had a initiative around checking for understanding, then I would use walkthroughs as a way to see how checking for understanding was being implemented school wide, and that gave me information about what kind of follow up I needed to provide it provide for the staff, what additional training needed to happen. What was getting lost in translation between the training and the implementation in the classroom. That was the purpose, the original purpose, as far as I understand it, of walkthroughs, over the years, we've used walkthroughs as a way to jump in and give teachers, you know, show up in classrooms and give teachers individual feedback. And so we use all kinds of walk through instruments and listen, I've been guilty of this. I made the checklist to end all checklists when I was an assistant principal. So good, other people were using my checklist, until my teachers sat me down and said, We hate your checklist. Now. Other administrators loved it because the checklist was aligned to the observation instrument. You know, I can, I can make a checklist. But the other my teachers pulled me aside and said, I absolutely hate this checklist. And they started talking to me about what it felt like to have the checklist applied to them. To be honest, I had never even considered that they would have felt that way. I was excited about a checklist so that I could, you know, it made me feel like a leader to have this, really, this Cadillac of checklists that I was going into classrooms using, but the feedback that I was giving to teachers, they resented it. They weren't using it. It wasn't changing practice. So the checklist made me feel good, but it did nothing to improve the experience of the students in my. School, or the experience of my staff under my quote, unquote leadership. So when my staff sat me down and said, We don't like the checklist, and after I got over my ego and being offended about it, they I said, Okay, so tell me why. And they talked about it, and it made sense, because I could still remember what it was like being a teacher, and I could see how the checklist felt like they were being inspected. 

The Checklist felt like they had to, like jump through hoops and perform instruction that the checklist didn't get didn't take into account the context that just checking things off the checklist didn't give them enough context about those behaviors to make intelligent decisions about how they needed to change their practice. They had a point, and it was the first time that I realized that a lot of the walk through tools and the observation tools that I was trained to use as a leader, I never thought to consider what impact it was having on teachers, and if the purpose of those tools was to give teachers feedback that they could use to grow their practice, then the tools were woefully failing. So I did something crazy. I said, what kind of feedback would be most useful to you? And I sat down with the teachers, and they started talking about it, and I went back, and the first thing I did is I turned the checklist into a kind of a fillable form so that I could, you know, freehand comments. And then we tried that for a while, and then they said, you know, okay, so should I leave it in the classroom? And then there were challenges around that, because when I left it in the classroom, teachers, as soon as I left, when, like, stop instruction, whatever they were doing to go read what I said and then it would impact them for the rest of the class period. So if it was something that they disagreed with or something that they didn't understand, they could they couldn't even focus on teaching anymore, because they were still busy trying to decipher what my written comments meant. If I made them wait till later and then, you know, sent them something later, in the in an email and allow them to respond in an email, again, it without the context, without the conversation. They really struggled with the feedback. It felt hurtful, it felt judgmental, it felt critical when I was trying to be supportive. So that didn't work. So then we tried to do something where later on, I would just stop by the classroom, and she like go through the checklist with them. That helped a little bit more. 

But logistically, it was a nightmare, because I was in the classroom, then I'd have to find time to follow up with all the teachers I visited that day, and that made it tough. And then I started kind of working and coaching other administrators and and experimenting with a lot of different ways to give teachers feedback and a cap in conversation with teachers, and we stumbled across a process that works significantly better, and that's micro slicing, and that's where we go in we're still in five to seven minutes, we're looking for the teachers one thing, and then the follow up conversation. And yes, you do need an initial follow up conversation. The follow up conversation was around that one thing, helping teachers see that one thing for themselves, and then providing support and follow up feedback around the one thing. So let me kind of lay out the stark contrast between the way we're trained to do walk throughs and the way that builders use walk throughs. Okay, so we're trained show up three classrooms a day. There are all kinds of systems to figure out what classrooms you're showing up into, but a lot of those systems still mean that you're showing up in ways that are random. So some people suggest you walk a hall. Some people suggest you go through a grade level. Some people suggest you go through your teacher roster, and just, you know, cycle through your teacher roster. All of those are random. So you're showing up on a day checking randomly, you know, instruction. A lot of times you show up, they're taking a test, or they're doing something where you don't really see anything, but you can check it off. You did show up. And so you show up randomly into teachers classrooms. You then either leave a note or use a checklist or email them some feedback later on, and it's all feedback light, right? It's Hey, saw you did this great job, or hey, I didn't, you missed an opportunity for checking, for understanding. Maybe there's even a follow up conversation with it, but it's about the random thing you saw that day. There is no through line in their practice. The next time you show up, you give them a different piece of feedback that may be completely unrelated to the first piece of feedback you gave. 

It's so easy to ignore that kind of feedback. 

It's so easy to be offended by that kind of feedback because it's random, because it's not it's not an ongoing conversation, because every time you show up in a classroom as a teacher, the teacher is thinking, Okay, what now? What are they going to see now? Or they put on a dog and pony show, hoping to appease you, rather than focusing on what we really all should be focusing on, which is serving our students. That's the way we were trained to do it. Here's the way builders do it. The. First thing we do is we do a series of walk throughs. I hate to even call them walk throughs. We do a series of micro slicing visits, five to seven minutes in the classroom, specifically focused on looking at what is the one thing the teacher needs to work on that will have the most significant impact on their practice. We teach a whole process for doing that. It's not a checklist, it's not a, you know, walk through tool. It's a process that helps you really understand and study a teacher's practice and do it very quickly and get to the heart of the teacher's practice, you follow up that micro slicing visit with a conversation with the teacher, five to 10 minutes, you're sharing the one thing with them. You're showing them how you arrived at the one thing. You're checking to make sure they understand and agree with the one thing. And then you and the teacher develop a plan. From there, you create a teacher dashboard. Your Teacher Dashboard very, very simple. You got a teacher's name. You've got their grade level, or their team, or whatever it is, however it is, you're sorting teachers. You've got their one thing, you've got what they need to do next with regard to that one thing, that's it. And then you will you have another column that just determine, helps you determine whether or not you're seeing movement. Once you've done that for your staff, the next time you go into their classroom, you're going in looking specifically for that one thing. 

So when you show up, they already know what you're looking for, because you've had the conversation. They're not wondering, oh goodness, they're not all nervous. They already know what you're looking for. You've already agreed about when you're going to show up again, sometime in the next two weeks, a month from now, after you do this, whatever it is. So when you show up, it doesn't feel random. It feels like the continuation of the conversation you already had. When you're looking for that one thing, you're giving them feedback specifically around that one thing, until they grow in that one thing. And this is how you can see tangible growth, because you're focusing on one thing, you're giving them support outside of the classroom to help them with that one thing. When you show back up, you're checking to see how they're doing around that one thing, so the feedback doesn't feel punitive. It doesn't feel like I gotcha. Doesn't feel like I've got to perform as a teacher to appease your instrument. Instead, it's really about focusing on helping me grow and serving my students so that we can help our students achieve the vision that we have as a school. So it makes so much more sense. It's so much more fluid. It's not an inspection of what you expect. I hate that language. I hate Why am I inspecting people their practice versus working together as a school in order to achieve the bigger vision, mission and core values in the lives of our students, I don't have to inspect that I'm supporting, that I'm growing, that I'm helping the teacher grow, that I'm not and I'm not walking around with a checklist checking things off and rating people. Instead, I am helping people give in. I'm giving them insight about their practice that they can then use to grow their practice so they get better at serving kids.

Hey, it's Robyn here. Real quick. I just want to interrupt this episode for just a second, because if you are enjoying what you're hearing, then would you mind sharing this episode with somebody else. So all you need to do is just go to your phone, if you're listening to on your phone, or your podcast player, and then click the three dots next to this episode, and it'll give you the option to share the episode. Now, if you do that, three things are gonna happen. First, the person that you shared with is gonna think you're a hero, especially if they're struggling with what we're talking about right now, they're gonna love you. Secondly, you're gonna feel good because you're gonna get the word out about buildership and start building this buildership nation. And third, you will get my eternal gratitude, because I really want to get this out to the world, and you'd be helping me out. You'd be doing me a huge favor. So please share this episode with someone right now who's who's dealing with this same issue, someone you think would really benefit and now back to the show. 

So you know, the the way that we were trained as leaders is to treat feedback as if I'm the one who has all the answers. 

I go into your classroom, I decide what's broken or what's not broken. I give you my assessment. You take that. You jump through hoops to appease me. I come back in and check and see if you've done that's the way that that that that does not work for me. It's it's gross, it it doesn't it doesn't respect the professionalism of teachers. It doesn't create an environment where teachers are constantly growing. It takes the focus off of the kids and puts it on whether or not I'm performing in a way that your instrument says I need to perform. That is that is not a culture that where everybody can continue to grow and take a. Ownership over their growth. That is a culture where you are going in and nobody owns their growth except for you. You have all the answers on your little clipboard. I don't I don't see how that can be gratifying for you or helpful to your teachers and your students. The way the builders do it is we come in and we see ourselves not as the inspector, right? We come in and see ourselves as a, as a, as a partner with our teachers, that when we go into the classroom, we're not looking because we're the expert and the teachers somehow broken. We are another set of eyes to help the teacher see things that they may miss seeing because they're in the process of doing it, we are helping them. We're going in from the perspective of being helpful to them. When we spend time looking for the one thing, we are quickly sifting through the practice to help them get to the thing that matters most, which means that our feedback isn't just listing behaviors. We are providing them with insight that may not be available to them because they're in the middle of teaching, and we can be there and pick up on things that they may not be able to see. So we offer them insight. Our feedback is actually useful because it's helping them get to a root of where they need to focus on their practice. Once we help them find the one thing, the next thing that we do is that we figure out, okay, this is the next step for you, to help you move forward. These are the supports that I can provide you. 

And then when we come back into the classroom, where people are excited that we're coming back, they want us to see their growth. They want us to see how things are moving. They want us to see where they may still be struggling because we are considered a partner. They don't see it as punitive, that walk through, that quote, unquote, walk through, is a way to help them get insight into their practice. And so it becomes an ongoing conversation where the teacher gets the insight, they then get the support they need to address the insight they improve. We show up and see that improvement. Then we all celebrate. And then we say, Okay, now that you've done this, let's take a look at what needs to happen next, and we walk teachers, walk with teachers through the process of growing their practice. Either you can consider yourself an inspector and run around inspecting people all the time and not seeing growth and experiencing all the frustrations that come with it. Or you can choose to offer feedback in a way that helps teachers grow, in a way that that invites teachers to to be partners, in a way that makes teachers happy to see you show up in a way that helps teachers value the feedback that you have, in a way that helps your feedback have a direct impact on what happens in that classroom, and ultimately on whether or not students learn, in a way that treats teachers like professionals, in a way that doesn't walk in and treat people like they're broken, but it helps them figure out what's the next level, and helps teachers get to the next level and grow. On one hand, go ahead, keep inspecting, keep going through and doing that, and keep experiencing the same frustration, because when you treat yourself like when you see yourself as an inspector, and you walk in and you do all the things that we were taught to do around feedback, people can easily ignore you. Now I hear somebody out there right now. I hear you out there and you're saying, but my teachers don't ignore me. My teachers. My teachers like my feedback because I do this and I do that, and I use this protocol, and I do that protocol. 

Let me ask you something, are you seeing across the board growth in your teacher's practice. Are you seeing across the board, tangible growth in your teacher's practice? If you're not seeing that they're ignoring you, they may perform for you, right? They may thank you for your feedback, because, well, you know, what else are they going to say? But if you're not seeing across the board, every one of your staff members showing tangible growth each year, they're ignoring you, nothing is changing in their practice. Or you can do the builder's way. You can treat people like professionals. You can see yourself not as an inspector, but as a partner who offers a different perspective, not an inspection, a perspective about their practice that may not be available to them. You can help them focus on one thing at a time and grow in the most critical areas of their practice, you can have an ongoing conversation about their growth, so that every time you show up in the classroom, you're welcomed, the feedback you give, you're given, is solicited and implemented, where the you see not only a tangible growth in teachers practice, but you see the resulting growth in. Students. It's up to you. I want to say one more thing, because I feel like a lot of the way that we do these classroom visits, whatever we want to call them, the way we're trained to do it, is so random. I've already talked about the randomness of how you even decide what classrooms to be in, versus being strategic and intentional about the classes you want to be in, but the feedback we give them is random too, right? We give them a checklist, or we find a glow and a grow, or we we do and it feels very random, and it's different from one thing one visit to the next one time it's, you know, I'm giving you a glow and grow about this, the next time I show up in a different part of instruction and I give you something else about that, and it is so easy to ignore, because your feedback becomes just noise when you focus on one thing, and every time we're having a conversation, we're talking about that one thing until that one thing improves. 

It's not noise, it's intentional. It's not random. 

You're focusing on the one thing that will make the biggest difference in a practice. I was talking to someone the other day, and they were like, well, you know, I do glows and grows. I said, we'll give an example of a glow and grows as well. I might tell the teacher that she needs to do more checking for understanding. And I'm like, How do you know that checking for understanding is the most important thing that they need to focus on right then and there? Well, I mean, it might not be, but it's something that I saw in their classroom. I said, Okay, what was the impact? What else did you see? How do you know that of the things you saw that was the most important? Usually, our feedback tracks very closely to whatever our last training was. So if the district just did a training on checking for understanding, you're checking for understanding. If the district just did a training on student engagement. You're going to be looking for student engagement. If you just read a book over the summer about rigor, you're looking for rigor. It's not It's so random. It's not about the teacher. It's about whatever your last training was, or whatever instrument you're using, or whatever research based practice you you're currently focusing on in your school. It's not intentional when you focus on one thing, feedback, it's very intentional because it's focused on the teacher's practice and the impact on kids, and because it's very intentional because it's focused on the impact of those kids in that classroom. When you give feedback and the teacher implements that feedback, it has a direct result for the kids.

So we haven't stopped this, these random classroom visits. I know we were trained to and we were told that that was the way to go. But the reality is that just showing up in three classrooms a day or five classrooms a day, or 15 or whatever. You know, the number it is just showing up is not enough to help a teacher change practice. You have to show up in the right classrooms, not just any classroom. What are the right classrooms you need to be in? What classrooms need you this week? And when you give them feedback, you're not giving them random stuff. You know, a wow and a wondering, a glow. We found all these names for but it's all random, right? Instead of doing that, what we're doing is we are giving very intentional one thing feedback. It's the most important thing. And then when you do that, you are following up with that one thing with the right kind of support, by going back into those classrooms at the right time to check and see how those things are going and to make sure that the teacher is growing and to give them more support around that. Then your feedback is welcome, then your feedback is implemented, then your feedback actually makes a difference for kids. So thank you for coming to my TED talk, and I'll see you on next time where we'll talk about another way to get out of this leadership mindset and start doing things that really matter, that really impact practice like a builder. I'll talk to you.

Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story. Right now, with the people and resources you already have inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars and monthly live office hours with me, where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle, and you're sick of tiny little, incremental gains each year. If you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join buildership University. Just go to buildership university.com and get started writing your school success story today.

Hey, it's Robyn here, and I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. Now if you have a question about today's episode or you just want to keep the conversation going, did you know that we had a school leadership reimagined Facebook group? All you need to do is go to Facebook, join the school leadership reimagined Facebook group. Now they're going to be a couple of questions that we ask at the beginning, because we want to protect this group and make sure that we don't have any trolls come in, and that it really is for people who are principals, assistant principals, district administrators, so make sure you answer those questions, or you won't get in. But then we can keep the conversation going, plus we do a lot of great bonus content. I'm in there every single weekday, so if you have a question or comment about the episode, let's continue the conversation. Join us at the school leadership reimagined Facebook group, and they'll talk to you next time you.