The Instructional Leadership Cycle
A School Leaders Guide to Instructional Transformation
A Leadership Learning Session
Daniel Allen – Fall 2022
Session Agenda (75 min.)
Welcome & Check-in
Share with a neighbor - What motivated you to select this session?
Key Milestones of the Annual Cycle
“the summer is a time to engage in deep reflection on both the performance of the organization, and on your own performance as a leader.”
Key Data
Key Documents
“The view from the Summit captures your vision for your school, and lays out your strategic improvement plan to address the focus areas outlined in your Key Performance Indicators. It is your opportunity to practice and refine how you talk about your school and your focused efforts to improve. The summit is a high level overview – what you are working on, why you are working on it, and what you are planning to do.”
The Principal Summit
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Professional Learning Map
“The KPI visit itself, along with the data review and planning leading up to the visit, are key strategic moments in your instructional improvement agenda for the school year. It is the KPI visit that divides up the long annual cycle of improvement into smaller cycles that allow you and your team to systematically monitor progress, address implementation challenges, and more nimbly experiment with change ideas.”
Gather Your Data
Reflection & Problem of Practice
KPI Visit Protocol
“Ending strong means sustaining your focus to the very end of the school year, and then pushing just a litte further. It means gathering end of year data, documenting processes and improvement practices, and celebrating successes.”
Data Summary & Analysis
Memorialize Learning
End of Year Leadership Retreat
“Our primary focus as school leaders is to foster powerful learning environments in every classroom so that all students can thrive. We seek to support the emotional, intellectual, and physical development of every student. We want our schools to be ‘game changers’ for students, dramatically accelerating learning outcomes.”
“In essence, the application of the Instructional Leadership Cycle is predicated on the belief that the educational institutions that we lead are not doing a good enough job preparing students for success after high school. That is especially the case for socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color.”
Leading for Equity
Staying Connected to your Purpose
Daily Instructional Leadership involves consistent application of 4 key practices
Communicate the Vision
Effective Time Management
Leveraging Teacher Leadership
Build Trust & Learn Together
Developing a school-based instructional problem of practice (POP)
Step 1: Brainstorm POP options | What have you been working on as a school/organization to improve student learning?
What do you believe to be the biggest challenges/struggles that you are facing as a school that are hindering increased student learning?
What do you believe to be the highest leverage changes that will result in improved student learning in your school/organization? |
Step 2: Identify key stakeholders | Identify key stakeholders in your school/organization who can contribute their perspective - especially teacher leaders who will ultimately do much of the work to address the POP.
Share your POP brainstorm ideas. What resonates? What seems highest leverage? What is important to people doing the work?
The result should be a short list of potential POPs |
Step 3: Gather data | For each potential POP, consider these questions:
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Step 4: Narrow your POP | Once you have a short list of potential Problems of Practice, and have gathered evidence to support your choices, you (together with other stakeholders) must narrow to one area of focus.
State the chosen POP as succinctly and clearly as you can. |
Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned to your POP
Step 1: Start with your POP | Student literacy growth is highly variable from classroom to classroom within grade levels. |
Step 2: What is your theory of action? | If teachers use high quality literacy strategies consistently in their classrooms, then students’ literacy growth will increase. (quickwrites, journaling, sustained silent reading, writer’s workshop, etc.) |
Step 3: Develop KPIs that embed your theory of action | What instructional ”look fors” would you consider evidence that your theory of action is being implemented? (How often are these strategies used?, how well are they used?, etc.) Scale those out for analysis at each cycle close By November….all teachers will demonstrate mastery of one of the shared literacy strategies in the classroom. By February…all teachers will use one of the shared literacy strategies they have mastered each day. By end of May…all students will demonstrate 1 year of RIT growth in Reading |
Step 4: Revise as you learn | You may need to make adjustments to your KPIs as you learn about the context of classroom instruction. For example, you may discover that your teachers already have a mastery level with multiple literacy strategies in the classroom. You will have to potentially revise your theory of action since you had highly variable outcomes before even when teachers used high quality literacy strategies. |
Document & Share Your Improvement Journey
Each year, you likely invest energy and resources into different improvement initiatives. What did you end up doing? How well did it work and how do you know? How do you share, celebrate, and revise based on your learning?
Research posters & exhibitions | individual teachers, teams of teachers, and leadership teams, can all prepare research posters that outline their learning during the course of the year, including an overview of targeted instructional shifts, methods of gathering data, and analysis of results. These posters can be shared in an exhibition format. They also make a great wall-hanging in conference rooms, hallways, and other public spaces as evidence of ongoing improvement efforts. |
Instructional guides | shared instructional practices can be memorialized in instructional guides and overview documents. These guides can be a powerful tool in quickly familiarizing new staff in future years with the shared practices and instructional philosophy of the school. |
Demo videos | demo videos can be a powerful companion to instructional guides in visually demonstrating instructional practices in action that are practiced by the professional community of teachers at the school. Over time, the school can develop a library of videos that captures the practices and strategies that are shared amongst staff. |
Historical overviews | school improvement efforts of previous years are too often easily forgotten. Leadership teams can memorialize past efforts, growth, and improvements in historical overview documents and posters that capture past efforts. Timelines and other visuals can help staff, students, and community members alike recognize quickly how the school has been improving. |
Frameworks | site-developed frameworks and conceptual overviews for areas of improvement focus can be a powerful tool in building ownership and year to year momentum. The development of such frameworks can help stakeholders deepen their understanding of the improvement work happening at the school. |
Closing & Feedback
Share with a neighbor – What is one thing that resonated with you in this session? What is one lingering question or concern?