EPISODE #294

How to Turn Walkthroughs into True Gamechangers

You're listening to the school leadership reimagined podcast episode 294. 

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I'm on LinkedIn. Obinjackson. Let's connect, and let's keep the conversation going. Now onto the show. You're listening to the School Leadership reimagine podcast, episode 294. 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 is 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 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 we are going to talk about walkthroughs. Now, I know, I know if you are required to do walkthroughs, they probably are part of the bane of your existence. I mean, it's nice to get into classrooms.

We all believe that's important. But walkthroughs have become so regimented and mandated that it's kind of hard to understand why we even do it. Once we grab all this data, what do we do with the data? It just feels like one more thing. But today, my hope is that by the time you finish listening to this episode, you will see walkthroughs very, very differently. The problem with walkthroughs now is, first of all, it's hard to find time to do it. Some of us are required to do it. Others of you, if you're not required to do it, you think ought to do it.

You know, there's this guilt about, you know, I need to get more classrooms that we constantly struggle with. And finding the time to do walkthroughs is really, really hard, especially with everything else you've got going on right now. It just feels like one more thing on your plate. The next thing is that it's hard to do walkthroughs because when you show up in a teacher's classroom, especially if you're showing up and it's not a formal observation. You know, there are all these expectations. Teachers can be really suspicious, like, why are you here? You just checking up on me? We feel this, this burden, this guilt about, well, if I show up in a classroom, I have to give them feedback.

And that's not the point of walkthroughs. You're not supposed to be giving teachers individual feedbacks in walkthroughs. And yet we feel like if we show up, we have to give them feedback. Teachers get really nervous and tense. They don't want us or other people in their classrooms. So building trust, creating a culture where people welcome other people in their classrooms and welcome the insight that comes from that, really hard to establish. And if you don't have that kind of culture, then getting into classrooms feels. I mean, it's just awful.

So that's the second burden. The third thing is that after you've done walkthroughs and you have this data, then what? Right. A lot of times I remember when I first did walkthroughs, you know, I'm collecting all this data. It was so depressing because, you know, it showed me just how bad instruction was in some classrooms. And, you know, I started seeing things that really bothered me because usually when you go in for an observation, people are giving you their best lesson. But when you just show up for a walkthrough, you're seeing what's really happening, and some of that isn't great. And then even if you get all this data, what are you supposed to do with it?

And so not only is the data depressing, but it's not even actionable. And so all those things make walkthroughs kind of just a bear to do. And, you know, although we all do them, we all kind of believe what the research says is important about walkthroughs. It's really hard, and a lot of us are finding it hard to make walkthroughs work. But here is the good news. I want you to know that walkthroughs can be an incredible part of your practice. They don't have to feel like a chore. In fact, you can there.

There are ways that you can use walkthroughs that actually save you time because you can bundle walkthroughs with some of the other things that you're doing so that you actually can more productive in your work when you do walkthroughs the right way. And it's not so hard to Find time when you use some of the things that I'm gonna be talking about today. And walkthroughs can open up your school culture.

If you do them right, people will actually welcome your walkthroughs. 

People will just go on teaching, and they won't feel threatened and suspicious. And, you know, you can use walkthroughs to actually build more trust in your school. And finally, if you do walkthroughs the right way, the data that you get is so rich, can save you time. It can kind of cut through all the noise and help you realize what's really important and help you set priorities for your school and help you serve your teachers and your students better.

So that's my goal today, is to help you to understand and rethink walkthroughs so that you can make them a tool that is a powerful tool that you can use for your school. So let's go ahead and jump in. So the first thing is we need to talk about what a walkthrough is and what a walkthrough isn't. Because over the years, people are calling everything walkthroughs. And your district may be one of the main culprits, right, because districts mandate. A lot of districts mandate principles. You know, you need to do walkthroughs, and you have to set it up, and then you have to create a checklist and a spreadsheet with all this data. That's not what walkthroughs were originally.

Walkthroughs were a tool originally to help you get a really good grasp on what was happening in your school. It was a way for you to collect feedback, not give feedback. Right now, most of the way that people use walkthroughs right now is they using it completely opposite of that, and in my opinion, completely wrong. They're using walkthroughs as a way to give feedback. We already have feedback tools to do that. We have informal observations. We have formal observations. We don't need another feedback back tool.

And so if you are using walkthroughs and you're leaving glows and grows, or you are, you know, writing notes to teachers when you come into the classroom, you're using it wrong. And it's. And it's one of the reasons why teachers don't like you coming into their classrooms and don't like walkthroughs, because it's just another gotcha moment. The purpose of walkthroughs was intentionally not to give feedback to teachers. You're Going in the classrooms, it's not about the individual teacher. You are trying to get the gestalt of what's happening in the school. So if you're giving individual teachers feedback, then the purpose becomes another feedback tool versus getting a bigger picture of what's happening in the school. So if you're using walkthroughs for feedback, that's absolutely wrong.

The purpose of walkthroughs are for you to get feedback, not for you to give feedback. 

So that's number one. The other thing that walkthroughs help you do is it the walkthroughs help you to understand better what's happening in your school instructionally. Whenever you turn walkthroughs into an individual feedback exercise, where you have a checklist and you're looking for things on the checklist for each individual teacher, you get so focused on the individual teacher that you don't pay attention to the bigger picture. And that's the power of walkthroughs. They give you the bigger picture. They round out the data. They help you to examine some of the bigger ideas around why your school is either working or not working.

If you start focusing on so narrowly on the checklist, oh, I'm seeing these behaviors. Oh, I went into 10 classrooms this week, and seven of them have these behaviors and three didn't have these behaviors, then you are getting. You're missing the point. Right. Walkthroughs are great for helping you understand why things are happening the way that they are. So you're not just. I mean, that data. You can collect it if you want.

Great. You know, it can help you say, okay, these. We're seeing progress. The training's being implemented, you know, but for the most part, if you're so focused on individual performance or even, you know, taking that individual performance and saying, of the 10 classrooms we visited, seven were doing this. You're missing a point because the walkthroughs should be answering a bigger question. And that's, to me, the biggest misconception about walkthroughs is that people go do walkthroughs, they just jump in and do it. And they don't start with a question they're trying to answer. You see, walkthroughs really help you figure out what's happening in your school, why it's happening, and what you need to do about it.

If you use them right, most of the time, walkthroughs are just like, oh, you know, okay, depressing. I went to 10 classrooms, only four of them were doing it. So it's not working, and it's just more depressing news. Nobody needs that. What you really want is to help walkthroughs, not create more questions or create more drama, but to answer questions and solve and resolve drama. And if you use walkthroughs that way, they can be such a powerful, powerful tool for you. And it's a tool that is that it covers what other tools in your toolbox aren't covering. It gives you insight that no other tool that you currently have can give you if you use them right.

So let's talk about the right way to use walkthroughs. And I've already said, walkthroughs are about giving you feedback. So the first thing that needs to happen when you're doing a walkthrough is you need to have. You need to have a question. The question may be in general, hey, what's happening instructionally in my school? Or it could be very specific. Is the training that we provided on checking for understanding making a difference in the classroom, is it being implemented correctly? You may do a walkthrough that says, hey, I've been looking at some data and I noticed that reading scores are down.

So are we using the reading time the way that we should?

If you don't go into walkthroughs with a specific question that you are trying to answer, then, and you're just kind of wandering around and hoping that some insight will emerge, then you're using walkthroughs wrong, and it's going to feel like a waste of time and a chore. When you go through walkthroughs with a question in your mind from the very beginning, all of a sudden, the walkthroughs feel more purposeful. Okay? So that's the first thing. The second way that you can kind of reinvent walkthroughs and make them serve you is that when you go in and do a walkthrough, a lot of times we're doing them by ourselves. But I think walkthroughs are more powerful when you take people with you. Right?

So this is something that I hardly see anybody do anymore unless you know somebody from the district office is coming in. Walkthroughs. The power of walkthroughs is in having more than one set of eyes look at the same thing and come up with insights together. The real power for a walkthrough is not getting in the classrooms. It's the conversation you have about what you saw afterwards. It's really hard to do that by yourself. Now you can do walkthroughs by yourself, but when you take other people, walkthroughs become more powerful. So who should you take?

Well, it depends on what your question is. Right. So if your question is looking at the state of instruction for school wide, then you need to take people who are, are who have a direct impact on instruction. So that might be your instructional coach or your staff development leader, or it could be some team leaders or it could be anyone who has an instructional, an instructional leadership role in your school. Take them with you in a walkthrough. Let's say you're trying to figure out if the training is being, that you provide is being implemented. Well, who should you take with you? The people who designed and conducted the training.

Right. Let's say that you are trying to figure out why students reading scores are down. Why wouldn't you take the people, you know, team leaders or teachers who are reading teachers so that they can go look at other teachers classrooms and then the other teachers can go look at their classrooms and you're doing several walkthroughs where you're looking at reading instruction school wide to understand what's missing and what can be done. That insight, that conversation that teachers have about, well, this is what I saw in the classrooms and this is that conversation is so powerful. And it's not just powerful to help you understand why reading instruction isn't working. It's powerful to help teachers see reading instruction from a global perspective versus just what's happening in their individual classroom. They can understand reading instruction school wide and the role that they play in it. Let's say that the question is not specific to a data point, but maybe the question is I'm not sure what's happening in the school and I need to go in and look at instruction to see what I may be missing.

What am I missing? 

That's great instructor, that's a great question too. And the people you need to take are the people who are going to be thought partners to say, here's what I was thinking that was happening. Here's what we're actually seeing. What am I missing? Where, where is the disconnect? So when you start your walkthrough with a primary question that you're trying to answer and only one question for a walkthrough, by the way, and then you take the right people with you and then you, then, then you, you can sit down afterwards, you can have a conversation that gives you real insight that helps you to have the conversations you really should be having in school and to make a difference. Hey, Robyn here.

And I just want to break in real quick to ask you a huge favor. You see, I want to get the word out to everybody about buildership, and I could use your help. If you're really enjoying this episode, would you mind just going to your podcast platform and leaving a quick review? You see the reviews, get the word out. They tell other people this is a great show. Other people who have never heard of school leadership reimagined before can hear about it. And you'd be sharing the word about buildership. So would you mind just leaving a quick review?

It would mean the world to me. Okay, now back to the show. Now, the third piece is picking what classrooms? A lot of people just randomly pick classrooms, but you need to pick classrooms that are going to give you the best answer to the question. So if you have a question about reading instruction, you need to go to classrooms during reading instructional time. If you're having a question about training, then you need to go in a classroom when you would expect to see whatever they were trained on being implemented. Let's say you have a. You have a question about what's the gap?

Something's happening between sixth grade and seventh grade, where the sixth graders come in, they make a lot of gains, but they lose them in seventh grade. Well, you know what you should be doing? You should be looking at 6th and 7th grade classrooms only. So you need to, not just a lot of people use walkthroughs to kind of just randomly wander into classrooms. That is a waste of time. Right. What you need to be doing is being very intentional about what classrooms you visit. And the classrooms you're going to visit are the ones that can best help you answer the question that the walkthrough is that the walkthrough is you're using the walkthrough to answer.

And so you're picking those classrooms. Now, it doesn't mean you're picking teachers. It means you're picking classrooms. It's really important. Now, here's another example of a question. What's really working?

Where are the bright spots in our school? 

And so taking people who have different perspectives and points of view so that they can see different bright spots, really important. And then you're going to go those classrooms, you're going to be going into some of the most successful classrooms in the school to try to understand what are they doing. And you might look at those classrooms and then go do another walkthrough to the Classrooms who are not as successful, and then compare the two. What's happening in the most successful classrooms that's not happening in the least successful classrooms, and then coming to some conclusions about these are the bright spots. This is the difference, and this is where we need to focus. Do you see the difference between those walkthroughs and the ones that we typically do, where we just wander into classrooms, usually by ourselves or with some important team of important people, all with checklists, and we're just going around and seeing if everything is being checked off the checklist? That is not going to help you. That's a parade.

It's not a walkthrough. Real walkthroughs. Walkthroughs that are gonna make a difference are the ones that answer a question, bring the right people to kind of explore that question with you, and then visit the classrooms that are going to best answer that question. Okay, now, the third thing I want to say about walkthroughs is that once you get those established and people understand how to do those walkthroughs, then people will begin to welcome you into the classroom because they know it's not about me as an individual. There's a bigger question that we're trying to answer. Then once you answer that question, you're sharing that information devoid of names or identifying information, you're sharing that information with your staff. So your staff gets insight from the walkthroughs as well. If your walkthrough doesn't yield any insight, you might as well not do it.

You'd be better off just going in, doing individual feedback to teachers. So at least the teachers are getting some insight. But if your walkthroughs are not yielding insight, if you're just doing glows and grows, by the way, Glows and Grows don't really give anybody any insight. I'm just gonna go on record and say that. Fight me on that if you want. But I don't believe Glows and Grows give insight. They get pats on the back and there's a time and a space for that. So I'm not mad at Glows and Grows, but if you're trying to use Glows and Grows to give insight, that's not feedback.

That's another podcast. I'll get back on the subject. Walkthroughs. If your walkthroughs are not giving you insight into your school, if you're. What if you don't leave the walkthrough conversation knowing something more, having a better direction for where you're going to head as a school, you're wasting time. You might as well not even do it it now.

One of the big challenges for walkthroughs is how do you even get started? 

Because after years of abuse in the name of feedback, right? What. What a lot of people call feedback is really just beating up teachers and abusing teachers. So it. After years of that, a lot of teachers are understandably worry about you coming into the classroom. So how do you overcome that? While there's a, you know, there's a process that we teach in BU and I'll share with you some of the highlights of it here, but one of the first things you do is you need to bring everybody together and help them understand how you will be using walkthroughs and how walkthroughs will be different. And so you bring your staff together and you talk to them about what walkthroughs should be doing, what is the intent, why are you coming into the classroom?

And then here's the secret sauce. The next thing you do is you pay attention in that meeting for the people who are the most resistant to walkthroughs, and then you are going to take those people on your first walkthroughs so that they can see the process. So you're gonna. The people who are the most receptive to walkthroughs, those are the classrooms you're gonna visit first. And the people who are the most resistant, those are the people who are gonna be on the walkthrough team. So they can see what does that conversation look like, how is it set up? And once they. They see that, then the next thing is they are the next people who get visited.

So then you bring on another group of teachers to do a walkthrough with, and you visit those teachers classrooms who just completed the walkthrough. When you do that, and we have a whole process for how you do that, but when you create that kind of cycle, you overcome people's resistance to the point where they are like, hey, yes, come on in my classroom. Of course you can come. Because they understand what the conversation is going to be like. They understand the. The. The guardrails that you put in place to keep walkthroughs from being personal. And the insight that the walkthrough provides benefits everybody.

So if you are doing walkthroughs and you're doing in the way that we talked about the beginning of this episode, stop. 

They're not serving you. But my district is making me do it. Your district is maybe requiring you to do walkthroughs and maybe it's requiring you to collect data. But how you do walkthroughs, you have a lot of flexibility. And so what you need to do is reimagine walkthroughs. If you're required to do them anyway, why not make them something that actually serves you, serves your teachers, gives you insight, makes your school better, rather than just treating it as another thing, another hoop you have to jump through, another piece of compliance you have to complete? Why not make walkthroughs meaningful?

Right? So what I'm going to challenge you to do at the start of this year is to really rethink walkthroughs. This is a great time to get walkthroughs started because you've had some time under your belt. There's some stuff that's going on now and you need to get a handle on it. You really need to understand what's happening. And there are some questions that you naturally have at this point in the school year that walkthroughs can really help you answer. And so I'm going to challenge you to start doing walkthroughs differently. Now.

Those of you who are in bu, we are doing a training next week on walkthroughs and we're going to take you step by step through how to do walkthroughs. Like builders. We're also gonna show you a couple of variations on walkthroughs that are really, really cool. We're gonna give you the whole protocol so that you can get started with your staff. We're gonna show you how to overcome your staff resistance to walkthroughs so that you can get the walkthroughs going if your staff is resistant. If you have a district mandated way of doing walkthroughs, we're gonna spend some time helping you figure out how to turn that into something that actually serves your school. So it's gonna. And we're going to complete your walkthrough process during this 90 minute training.

If you are not a member of BU but you want to join that training, we have a couple of tickets available to join that training. So what you want to do is go to buildershipuniversity.com walkthroughs buildershipuniversity.com walkthros so that you can get a ticket to that training if you want to be a part of that. For those of you in bu, that's a part of Your BU membership, you don't have to do anything. We'll send you something directly. But if you're not a member of BU and you want to get that training, it's going to be good. It's hands on, so it's not. You know, today I kind of talked about the philosophical piece of walkthroughs and the big pieces you need to have during this training.

We're actually going to do it.

So we're going to help you figure out what your questions are. We're going to help you figure out who should be on the walkthrough groups and how to assemble those groups and get them together. We're going to take you step by step through what the walkthrough needs to look like and how to conduct that conversation afterwards. We're going to help you get walkthroughs scheduled and we're going to show you a couple of really cool variations on walkthroughs so that you can work with struggling teachers and use walkthroughs as PD for, for your, your new teachers and your struggling teachers and help you use walkthroughs to give some really cool PD opportunities to some of your best teachers. So we're really transforming the way that you do walkthroughs. If you want to be a part of that buildershipuniversity.com walkthroughs and if you're in BU look out and BU Commons, we'll be sending some more information to you there. The goal is this. Whether you join the training or not, I really want to challenge you to rethink walkthroughs, because if you do, they can go from being a chore to being the game changer for your school to give you insight that you haven't gotten before, to help you to get a better grip on what's happening in your school, to help you use your time more effectively and efficiently, to help you get answers to the tough questions that you're grappling with right now.

It can be a real game changer. So your challenge this week is to rethink how you do walkthroughs and start doing walkthroughs like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. 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 buildershipuniversity.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, there are gonna be a couple of questions that we ask at the beginning because we wanna 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' the conversation. Join us at the School Leadership Reimagined Facebook group and I'll talk to you next time.

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