School Leader

October issue of Educational Leadership dedicated to coaching

I've previously blogged about my interest in coaching as a method for promoting improvements in the instructional practices of educators in general and principals in particular.  The entire October issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership is dedicated to "Coaching: the New Leadership Skill."  Many of the articles are now available online in full text here, though some require ASCD membership (which I highly recommend for all practicing and aspiring school leaders).

I especially recommend articles by Jim Knight on "What Good Coaches Do," Gabrielle Nudis and Maya Sadder on "The Principal as Formative Coach," and Elena Aguilar, Davina Goldwasser, and Kristina Tank-Crestetto, "Support Principals, Transform Schools."  There's also a great article on instructional rounds by rounds guru Elizabeth City.

At the heart of both coaching in general and instructional rounds in particular, writes EL editor Marge Scherer in her issue introduction, is reflective practice:

The aim of coaching is to get educators to reflect and improve on their theory and practice—to ponder, as [Richard] Elmore's [new] book title suggests, what they used to do and think, and to be open to changing their minds. By helping educators learn for themselves and from one another, our authors argue, coaching can boost teacher effectiveness, enhance student learning, deepen subject area expertise, and improve staff relationships.

And as I frequently argue in classes (quoting York-Barr and colleagues) such reflective practices also build our capacity for the much-needed professional values of wisdom, curiosity, presence, and open-minded/open-hearted-ness.

 

New regulations may bring more transparency, accountability to alternative programs

The Frankfort State Journal reports this week about a new statewide regulation that will take affect next year concerning alternative schools and programs.  The new rules are multi-layered and require more reporting of achievement and demographic data  on students served in alternative settings, more consistent financial accounting for such programs, and better in-school monitoring of student goals and progress.

I'm not normally an advocate for more regulations of schools or anything else, but these new rules may codify what the best alternative programs are already doing, assist districts with providing better oversight, improve the transparency of how alternative schools work, build a database that might reveal important trends in alternative education, and foster more public dialogue and discussion about the quality of alternative schools in general.

Read the whole story here.

Paper on Academy Schools Movement in England

I've previously blogged here and here about my visit to England last summer, where I joined colleagues from WKU and Georgia Southern University in touring academy schools and learning about the sweeping educational changes happening there.  This topic came up in one of my classes this week and I thought I would share a paper we've recently written on our experiences and insights from the trip.  Dr. Keaster will deliver this paper for us at next month's Southern Regional Council for Educational Administration conference in St. Louis, and the paper is also posted in full-text on the website for the Foundation, Aided Schools and Academies National Association, a consortium of academy schools pushing for greater autonomy.  Click here to read.

Senator Paul halts rammed-though proposals to reauthorize NCLB

After months of non-activity on the part of the U.S. Congress to reauthorize the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, this week the Democrat-controlled Senate introduced an 868-page bill with only 48 hours for lawmakers to review its contents before voting.  Kentucky Senator Rand Paul used an obscure legislative measure to stop the bill from moving forward, arguing that more input is needed from teachers and school leaders and that Senators need more time to study the bill.

Read Senator Paul's floor speech here.

Senate leaders, including Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, dismissed Sen. Paul's concerns, claiming that previous legislative hearings allowed for stakeholder input.  But the hearings were for what stakeholders wanted to see in a reauthorization, not feedback on what Sen. Harkin and others are proposing. 

Besides this leadership failure on the part of the Senate, the media continues to fail the public in providing a meaningful discussion on education and the role of the federal government.  News reports about this week's events have focused almost exclusively on this legislative quarrel, and not on the contents of Harkin's proposal or on the entire question of whether the federal government should have such an intrusive, expansive role in local education.

Formative assessment and standards-based grading training with Eric Twadell

Formative assessment and its logical outcome - standards-based grading - are vitally important topics for school leaders today.  On November 31 and December 1, the PIMSER Math and Science Outreach Unit at the University of Kentucky will sponsor a workshop with Dr. Eric Twadell, superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School (and successor of PLC guru Rick DuFour).  More details here.

The workshop is geared toward administrative teams, ideally superintendents, central office leaders, and at least one principal.  I'm making inquiries about whether pre-service principals (and university people) may attend.  Will update when I know more.

UPDATE: I confirmed with PIMSER that all educators are welcome to this event.  Hope to see some of you there.

Hear from the principals who are "getting it done"

Last month I blogged about the recent visit of Karin Chenoweth and Christina Theokas to WKU, where they shared information from their past research and forthcoming book, Getting it Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools.  Karin and Christina are writers for Education Trust, and their work focuses on profiling high-poverty schools that are nevertheless beating the odds and producing extremely high levels of student proficiency.  Their latest book offers profiles of the principals from some of these schools.

Now you have the chance to hear directly from these principals, listen to their personal stories and strategies.  Education Trusts' Leadership Webinar series will begin next Thursday, October 20, the first of a six-part series of webinars with leaders from successful schools serving as the guest:

Are the leaders of successful high-poverty and high-minority schools superheroes? If so, we can safely ignore them — after all, who really aspires to be Superman or Wonder Woman? Instead, maybe these principals know some things and do some things that the rest of us need to understand and emulate.

A fascinating series of six one-hour webinars, starting October 20 and continuing through March 2012, will focus on the crucial role that school leaders play in making sure our most vulnerable children learn and excel. Each webinar will explore a tough question: How do you create a culture of high expectations? What does it really mean to be an instructional leader? How can you manage a building to ensure academic achievement? Over the course of these six webinars, attendees will hear ideas and strategies to become better leaders, not superheroes.

The first webinar will be held at 4 p.m. EST on Thursday, October 20th... Just a week away.

Learn more and register now!

This series is based on a new book by Karin Chenoweth and Christina Theokas that studies the beliefs and practices of principals of high-poverty and high-minority schools that are rapidly improving or high achieving. The book, Getting It Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2011), builds on the highly regarded work of Karin Chenoweth in It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (voted one of the top education books of the decade by Education Next) and How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools. Each of the participating principals has led a school recognized by The Education Trust with its Dispelling the Myth award, which is given to high-achieving schools with large percentages of children of color or children who live in poverty.

The generous support of The Wallace Foundation means that The Education Trust is able to offer these webinars free of charge.

I encourage all practicing and aspiring administrators to register and participate in as many of these sessions as possible.

Recommended reading: Tony Wagner's "Global Achievement Gap"

WKU's College of Education and Behavioral Sciences kicked off our Fall 2011 academic term back in August with a Skyped-in  presentation and Q&A with Tony Wagner, former director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group.  I've just finished Wagner's book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need - and What We Can Do About It.  The book includes some well-worn admonitions about the United States' slipping status in global educational rankings, but also features some compelling suggestions for what American schools can do about it that transcend our traditional emphasis on testing and accountability.

Wagner echoes the now-familiar refrain that our schools are failing to educate today's students with the 21st-century skills they need for competing in a rapidly-changing, technology-driven global economy.  Based on interviews with American CEO's of cutting-edge, international businesses, Wagner concludes schools should be equipping students with what he calls  "Seven Survival Skills:"

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepeneurialism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analyzing information
• Curiosity and imagination

Fair enough, and familiar enough.  But what distinguishes the rest of Wagner's book is his fairing scathing indictment that today's test-driven educational culture works against all these higher-ordered skills, emphasizing instead rote memorization of facts or processes and a thoroughly disengaging, demotivating classroom culture for students, especially at the high school level.  Interestingly, Wagner does not suggest we can or should simply throw out testing and accountability, though.  Instead, he argues that schools should intentionally shift their focus to more intentional definitions and expectations of rigor; rich, cross-disciplinary student tasks that emphasize the Seven Survival Skills; and comprehensive, engaging classroom and school-level performance assessments that measure student progress toward real critical thinking.  In doing so, Wagner believes that students will still do well on accountability tests, but will be far better equipped for today's world.

 Wagner profiles three cutting-edge high schools that exemplify his model.  Two are charter schools and all three operate with vastly different structures, instructional techniques, and professional work cultures than do traditional high schools.  He suggests these schools, and others, may serve as models not of what others should necessarily imitate, but of what's possible when schools dramatically raise their expectations for student performance.

On first reading of The Global Achievement Gap, I think Wagner makes a compelling case.  Having visited classrooms  thousands of times as an administrator, I immediately recognize the low-rigor instruction he describes as far too typical for many high schools.  What Wagner is proposing is a much-needed antidote to this problem and does not contradict our recent focus on curricula driven by learning targets or instruction informed by frequent formative assessment.  It also requires highly-function professional learning communities and a teaching culture based on continuously-improving practice and collaborative dialogue.

My only point of concern is that Wagner neglects one key element in traditional high schools' failure to emphasize more rigorous learning expectations: the large number of students who get to high school with key skills deficits in reading, math, communication, and other areas.  Wagner acknowledges that critical thinking depends upon core knowledge and basic skills competencies, but doesn't discuss how this inhibits high schools from enacting his vision. 

My own hope is that as interventions improve at the elementary and middle school level, high schools will face fewer of these problems, and that ultimately high schools will make their own intervention efforts supports to rigorous, high expectations for regular classroom learning, rather than the curriculum itself.  Core knowledge and competencies should be the gateway to high school learning rather than the goal.

I highly recommend The Global Achievement Gap for practicing and aspiring school leaders, who might use it as a starting point for thoughtful, collaborative dialogue with teachers about the rigor of learning in their own schools and as a possible vision of where they might go in the future.

Program review update: world languages to be delayed

Can't keep up?  Me either...

Evidently the Kentucky Board of Education has received some pretty vigorous push-back from schools over the recent decision to include world languages in the program review process beginning next year.  The Board voted 7-2 on Wednesday to delay implementation of the world languages program review 2014-2015, with accountability beginning in 2015-2016.

Comments from Education Commissioner Terry Holliday indicate that districts are protesting to the unrealistic rate of implementation, especially considering some these recently-added program reviews were not even mentioned under Senate Bill 1.

Read the full story here.  No word on what this means for the K-3 program reviews, if anything.

More details emerging on program reviews: world languages, K-3 education, and audits

Today the Kentucky School Boards Association New Service released the first of a two-part look at the program review process that will ultimately make up 20 percent of the accountability formula for Kentucky schools.  Read the article by Madelynn Coldiron here.

In addition to raising questions about how authentic the self-review process will really be, the article mentions new details about other subject areas that will eventually be included in reviews, and how the state will monitor them.  (At least, this was news to me; perhaps people in the field knew this already, but I've been following developments on the new accountability model as closely as I can and had never heard these details before).  Specifically:

• The article notes that in 2012-2013, world languages and K-3 educational programs will also be included in the program review process, ostensibly because these areas are not subject to any testing (though third graders will be tested in reading and math, so I can't explain the rationale for including grade 3 here).
• According to Rae McEntyre, head of program reviews at the Kentucky Department of Education, about 14 schools per year will be subject to an external audit by KDE officials. 

The article does not mention how KDE determined that 14 schools would be audited or what that audit process might look like.  Nor is there any mention of evaluation rubrics for world languages and K-3 education, though the current rubrics for arts/humanities, practical living/career studies, and writing all follow a standard pattern.

Management Matters

Various administrative disciplines, including education administration, have long debated whether there is a difference between "leadership" and "management."  Conventional wisdom seems to hold that what organizations need are more leaders and fewer administrators with an exclusively management focus.  In education especially, this has led to a major emphasis on instructional leadership as the defining capacity of an effective school administrator.

A number of important authors have pointed out that this is a false dichotomy, however.  Large organizations require some degree of effective bureaucratic management to be successful, but when the organizations in question are schools, effective management must always be in the service of supporting high levels of student learning (for a vivid example of this perspective, see Deal and Peterson, The Leadership Paradox: Balancing Logic and Artistry in Schools).

Still, our emphasis of late has been on instructional leadership rather than organizational management for good reasons.  There is a recognition that in the past some principals may not have been effective instructional leaders, but in today's accountability-driven educational environments, they must understand effective instruction and build capacity for improved teaching and learning.  This perspective has been so prevalent that some have dismissed organizational management as being relatively unimportant in today's schools, or at least a capacity that can be delegated to others.

But a new study published in the American Educational Research Journal suggests that principals who effectively carry out tasks associated with organizational management may also be building the best environment for high-levels of student achievement.  (Full text unavailable; an earlier version of the study, conducted by Jason Grissom and Susanna Loeb, is available here).

Grissom and Loeb's study, which examined principals in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is important for a number of reasons.  First, it is built around a survey of principal tasks (rather than just behaviors, as  in many previous studies) by which principals rate their effectiveness (so the focus is not merely on whether the principal does the task, but how well he or she does them).  Using factor analysis, the authors were able to group these tasks into four major categories: instruction management, internal relations, organizational management, administration, and external relations, and use regression analysis techniques to determine which tasks, done effectively, best predicted higher levels of student achievement.

The organizational management tasks were the only category that, for this sample, significantly predicted positive student learning outcomes.  Organizational management tasks included the following:

• Developing a safe school environment
• Dealing with concerns from the staff
• Managing budgets and resources
• Hiring personnel
• Managing personal, school-related schedule
• Maintaining campus facilities
• Managing non-instructional staff
• Interacting/networking with other principals

The authors also found that these tasks predicted teacher satisfication and parents' ratings of school performance.  In an additional effort to triangulate results, the authors found that assistant principals' ratings of their principals performance on these tasks followed the same pattern.  Interestingly, effectiveness in instructional management tasks was not related to any of these variables in this particular study.

Grissom and Loeb are careful to emphasize that their findings do not suggest another pendulum swing is in order, whereby we might now focus on organizational management instead of instructional leadership.  Rather, they believe their study indicates how both instructional and organizational management support each other in a natural and necessary sort of way:

Rather, we might conceive of effective instructional leadership as combining an understanding of the instructional needs of the school with an ability to target resources where they are needed, hire the best available teachers, and keep the school running smoothly.  At the margins, principal efficacy in these latter functions may be more important for school effectiveness than previous work has articualted.  Principals devoting significant energy to becoming instructional leaders--in the narrow sense--are unlikely to see school improvement unless they increase their capacity for Oragnizational Management as well.

These findings emphasize a key point: no matter how important instructional leadership is for today's principals, if the key tasks of organizational management are done ineffectively, school culture and climate, parent perceptions, and ultimately student learning will suffer as a result.

Grissom, J. A., & Loeb, S. (2011). Triangulating principal effectiveness: How perspectives of parents, teachers, and assistant principals identify the central importance of managerial skills.  American Educational Research Journal 48(5), 1091-1123.