Building a Shared, Sustainable Instructional System Aligned to a School's Vision

As is the case with every system on a school’s campus, for a system to gain buy-in and gain the momentum required to become sustainable, instructional systems need to be developed and grown collaboratively and in alignment with a school’s vision and mission. Systems of instructional planning, delivery, and the instructional coaching must reflect a true, non-evaluative partnership between teachers and administration to result in instructional growth. 

In my current principalship at Yearling Middle School (YMS), one of the first actions I took in 2018 was to include input from all stakeholders in revising our school’s mission and vision statements. After forming a vision/mission committee that included staff, parents, students, and community members and working through lengthy discussion and analysis of what we wanted Yearling to become, we settled on this for our vision statement: “Yearling Middle School will prepare ALL students for success in college, career, and life.” 

To support pursuit of our vision, our committee developed a mission statement designed to describe our daily work to help evolve Yearling Middle School into a school that achieves our vision: “Yearling Middle School will support ALL students’ academic and social emotional growth through student-centered, standards-aligned instruction, authentic and collaborative learning, differentiated instruction, and positive, supportive relationships.”  

When reflecting on our newly defined direction, our Guiding Coalition (GC), or our teacher leadership team, worked with our administration to identify key instructional elements that if uniformed across our campus would result in an arrival at our vision for YMS. As a team, our GC worked with our administration to analyze evidence-based instructional elements that student data has shown to make the most positive impacts on student learning. After agreeing on what we labeled as the four most vital elements to support our vision and mission, we designed a walk-thru tool that would serve as a non-evaluative mechanism with which to collect data from our classrooms and to provide teachers with actionable coaching feedback with the goal of unifying and growing our teachers’ instruction in a way that would guide YMS toward the goals in our vision and mission. Before making it official, we shared the instrument with all teachers and welcomed feedback from any and all before our GC and administration made final revisions. These are the four elements and descriptors on which we landed with the 1-5 continuum meaning that we want to move away from the description at level 1 and toward the characteristics described at level 5:

Conditions for Learning

The teacher spends the time disseminating information to students through direct instruction or lecture. All students receive the same instruction. Feedback is not specific to learning target and/or unit goals.

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Teacher acts as facilitator, coaching students as they engage in active learning. High expectations are communicated. Instruction is differentiated based on individual student needs. Teacher provides feedback to students regarding their formative and summative progress as it relates to learning targets and/or unit goals. Progress is celebrated. Effective relationships are evident and teacher behaviors foster a sense of classroom community.

 Authentic Learning

Students are involved in strictly academic endeavors (note taking, listening to lectures, etc.)

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Teacher devises authentic projects that features real-world context, tasks, tools, or impact - or speak to students' personal concerns, interests, and issues in their lives.

Standards-Based Instruction

The teacher covers content and moves at a pace to ensure all material is presented. A progression of standards-based learning targets are not evident. Students are not presented opportunities to give, receive, and use feedback to improve their learning process.

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Teachers use progression of standards-based learning targets (embedded within a performance scale) to identify critical content during the lesson. Teacher uses increasingly complex questions that require students to critically think about content. Teacher elicits evidence of student learning that is clearly aligned to standards. Students give, receive, and use feedback to improve their learning process and products. Students and teachers reflect on learning, the quality of student work, obstacles, and how to overcome them. Intervention is done for students not meeting standards.

 Collaborative Learning

Students are only encouraged to work individually or the collaboration does not promote positive intradependence, equal participation, and individual accountability.

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Students working together to achieve a common goal. Students are responsible for their teamates' learning as well as their own; equal participation and individual accountability are present.

Time to Share the Work as a Team to Transform Instruction and Pursue the Instructional Vision

After elements of research-based, evidence-based instructional elements are agreed upon, it’s time to share the implementation and coaching. Every element needs to be carefully modeled for teachers. We used both discussion and reflections of how our teachers were implementing these elements with success and also held professional learning sessions in which our teachers watched video of one of our teachers’ lessons and analyzed and evaluated the lesson using our walk-thru tool. This process leads to rich discussions and eventually contributes toward calibration of a common vision of effective instruction, based on our four elements of instruction. 

It is important to empower teachers in the walk-thru, data collection process. This works to form the partnership between school leaders and classroom teachers rather than the more traditional system of administrators visiting classrooms to simply evaluate teachers. Transforming instruction only happens when it is a shared labor of passion for ALL students and includes a collaborative commitment to growth. 

 Using our walk-thru tool, we arranged coverage for teachers on our GC to visit classrooms and work on full calibration when using our walk-thru tool. When moving forward, it is important to involve all teachers in this process. Once use of the walk-thru tool is fully calibrated among all teachers, a schedule can be created that ensures that all teachers are visited at least twice per week. This achieves two critical feats: campus-wide data in terms of mastery of our four most critical instructional elements becomes robust and highly meaningful and all teachers are provided consistent feedback and coaching to drive improved instruction. This process needs to remain non-evaluative as this is 100% about instructional growth. 

 Differentiated Professional Development

Using the plentiful data collected from every teacher’s classroom, school leaders can treat teachers equitably, giving every teacher what they need rather than all receiving the same support. We use our walk-thru data collected from our twice-per-week classrooms visits to create small-group professional development for our teachers. When we notice that the data suggest that a particular teacher consistently scores among the highest on our staff in a specific element on our walk-thru tool, such as standards-based instruction or collaborative learning, we ask that master teacher to lead a small-group lesson to further model implementation of that element to a handful of teachers who need or simply desire support in that element. This leads to a collective responsibility to guide ALL teachers to mastery of our instructional elements and fosters a culture of learning among our staff. 

 Shared Work Results in Sustainability

I have noticed a number of highly successful principals in my 22 years in public education. The successful ones all seem to share common characteristics of being strategic thinkers and planners, data-driven, student-centered, and passionate about guiding all students to success. I’ve also noticed that some schools decline when a successful leader retires or leaves his/her position. 

To combat this scenario, it becomes essential to build systems to support a school’s vision that are shared. Leadership capacity must be built across a campus. A school’s long-term success can’t be about one or a small group of leaders; it must be a collective effort so that there is leadership capacity enough to endure loss of any individuals. Sustainable success is dependent on an administration’s ability to cultivate other leaders and to involve many in the work that aligns all of a school’s systems to its vision and mission. When it comes to a school’s instructional system, sustainability is key to long-term permanent service to a school’s students and community. To make this work, principals must build leadership capacity in as many as possible so that his/her good work is built to last.