In his book Leverage Leadership, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo notes, “Exceptional school leaders succeed because of how they use their time: what they do, and how and when they do it.” Summer is a great time to take a step back to reflect on your successes from the past school year and plan with intention for the next year. Here are some points and resources for leaders to ponder over the summer.
1. Consider your vision for what great teaching (and learning) looks like.
As a school leader, it is absolutely critical to have a clearly articulated vision that identifies, in simple terms, what excellent instruction looks like. Naming the ideal state of teaching and learning for your school gives students, staff, and parents clarity about what everyone is working toward. It also helps focus your team’s time, talent, and tenacity on the things that matter most to achieving your vision – great teaching and a strong culture.
Questions to Consider:
- Does your school have a vision for great teaching (and learning)? Is that vision still relevant?
- Have students and staff embraced it as their vision? How do you know?
- Does your school’s vision guide your work?
Resources to help your thinking:
2. Support your team to gather the right data.
Enabling data-driven instruction is the single most effective use of a school leader’s time. In this inquiry approach to improvement, teachers and leaders assess, analyze, and act their way to improved outcomes for students – toward the school’s vision. This process is dependent on the data we collect to inform our thinking.
Questions to Consider:
- Do you have mechanisms in place to collect reliable data regarding student performance, instruction, and student, staff, and parent perception?
- Do you collect, analyze, and act on your data regularly enough to improve continuously throughout the school year?
- How do you give your staff opportunities to lead in this process?
Resources to help your thinking:
- http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol5/508-fenton.aspx
- School Culture Rubric: Assess teacher and student impact on learning environment (Uncommon)
3. Support your team to help set their instructional and professional development priorities.
If you engage in data-driven instruction, your instructional and professional development priorities will evolve throughout the year. Do yourself and your staff a favor and go into the next school year with a well-developed plan. Work with your grade-level teams to identify the key standards measured by the end-of-year assessment as well as the data you have gathered to demonstrate students’ beginning-of-year knowledge of the relevant content. Ask your staff to create a high-level outline of the learning for the school year, making note of the key standards to be taught and, if necessary, retaught. Reflect with your team about their professional development and instructional material needs. And, have a structure in place to check-in on progress throughout the year.
Questions to Consider:
- What do we need students to know and be able to do by the end of the year?
- What strengths and problems of learning exist for this incoming group of students relative to the question above?
- How do we get them where they need to be?
- What professional development and instructional material needs might teachers have specific to the student problems of learning that exist?
Resources to help your thinking:
4. Create time and space for your team to engage in continuous improvement.
As leaders, we know to say that planning is important, and yet for many of us it’s the first chunk of time we offer up when we need more time. One of the most important things leaders can do to support students and staff to realize the school’s vision is to carve out time for educators to engage in short cycles of inquiry to learn and fail fast, and improve quickly. As has been said by others: “That failures may occur is not the problem; that we fail to learn from them is.”
Questions to Consider:
- Do teachers have regular opportunities to assess, analyze, and plan next steps for student learning?
- Are there structures in place to support teachers to do this effectively?
- Are there structures in place for teachers and leaders to check in on student problems of learning and teacher problems of practice?
Resources to help your thinking: