Evaluating Instructional Leadership: Recognized Practices for Success

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program, Dr. Raymond Smith. Dr. Smith speaks, writes, and consults about leadership development with Visible Learning and Corwin Press. And he has worked in K-12 leadership, administrator preparation, and higher education for many years. And he's the author with John Hattie of the new book, 10 Mind Frames for Leaders, The Visible Learning Approach to School Success.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Smith, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:44] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin. Appreciate the invite.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's great to reconnect and speak with you again about the new book. And I know we've spoken before about some of your previous books. What did you see happening in the profession that prompted you and John to write 10 Mind Frames for Leaders? What problems in the field did you set out to address here?

[01:05] SPEAKER_00:

There really are two strategies or two goals we were looking to accomplish. First and foremost, we were trying to follow up and do some work from John Hattie's work with Klaus Zier and his 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning, which really looked at mindframes from a teacher's perspective. And so with this book, we wanted to... Do the same kind, take the same kind of approach that he and Klaus did, but from the leader's standpoint.

[01:37]

How do leaders think? How do highly successful leaders think? That was one purpose. The second is that when we did a search about books that really talked about how leaders think, we came up with very, very few examples. Most of the books on leadership are about the way leaders ought to, the type of leadership they ought to be, or the kinds of skills that leaders, highly successful leaders, ought to have. be exhibiting, you really have to go back to the work of Chris Arges and Donald Schoen and their notions that as individuals interact with one another, they design their behavior and maintain theories for doing so.

[02:30]

For Peter Senge's early work in the 1990s, about their mental models, uh, uh, that are active in helping to shape how leaders act. Uh, and then more recently, uh, Vivian Robinson out of the university of Auckland in New Zealand, uh, she and her colleagues wrote about theories of action and making, uh, both leaders theories and the teachers theories explicit so that, uh, um, the participants in the process, the educational process can examine their relative merits, uh, and agree whether change is desirable. So with that notion, uh, the primary aim of our book is similar to the writing of Argus and Schoen and Senge and Robinson is to support, um, leaders thinking and underscore the idea that for leaders to make a significant, um,

[03:33]

impact on the learning lives of students, they must go beyond their own external behaviors and get at the values that really produce those behaviors. So toward that end, we present 10 Mind Frames for School Leaders. It's our claim that school leaders who develop these ways of thinking are more likely to have major impacts on learning.

[03:57] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I appreciate the metacognitive angle there that as leaders, it's not enough to simply do, it's not enough to simply support and supervise the work, but we actually have to be thinkers about our own practice. And I think about the fifth discipline work that you referenced from Peter Senge and others. What is a mind frame? Just to orient us a little bit, you say there are 10 mind frames. What does a mind frame mean to you and John?

[04:25] SPEAKER_00:

Well, John wanted to coin a term that set his work apart from the work of Carol Dweck and mindsets. So mind frames are ways of thinking about your role as a leader. You could also, I guess they're synonymous with the values, the core deep beliefs we have about who who we are and what we're attempting to fulfill as leaders.

[04:59] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Dr. Smith, one of the things I appreciate about the mind frames that you share in the book is that they're stated as propositions, as basically arguments that are laid out by some of the leading thinkers in our field, not only yourself and Dr. Hattie, but Dylan William and Michael Follin and Zaretta Hammond, Peter DeWitt. Fisher and Fry and others, what was kind of the guiding criterion for the scope of those beliefs? Because obviously there's an infinite number of beliefs or ways of thinking that we could bring to the table that we could use to guide our work. What were some of the decisions that went into selecting these particular propositions for inclusion in the book?

[05:39] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a great question. These mind frames end up being a summary of Professor Hattie's research that he's been conducting over the past 30 plus years. And so, Each of the mind frames kind of summarizes themes that he called from the research that he was doing. The first mind frame that Janet Clinton writes about is the idea of leaders becoming evaluators of their own work, of their impact. That really is the essence of all the other mind frames. In fact, When I was introducing John one time to an audience in Florida, one of the audience members asked John, well, why do you have 10 mind frames?

[06:31]

And he kind of smiled and said, well, he says, there's really only one. That is, I'm an evaluator of my impact on teacher and student learning. And I just happened to repeat it 10 different times, 10 different ways. So this notion of leaders becoming evaluators of their own impact on teacher and student learning is is so critical. And so Janet kicks us off on that with her thinking. And of course, Janet Clinton is She's a professor at the University of Melbourne.

[07:09]

She is John's wife. But she, in her own right, has done some very, very important and leading work in the area of evaluation. And so tapping her... for this exercise was so critical.

[07:29] SPEAKER_01:

I know our mutual friend Peter DeWitt contributed a chapter on feedback. And I think when it comes to not only knowing our impact, but you know, being able to gain further information about our impact and how we're being perceived and how we're relating to others. Feedback is something that leaders not only need to give, but need to be in the habit of receiving and acting on. So why is feedback so important for leaders to receive and act on? And what are some of the big takeaways from Peter's chapter?

[08:01] SPEAKER_00:

Good that you singled that out. Feedback is how we seek it and then how we use it and to change our practice is a critical influence on learning. Leaders, it's interesting, and you would probably relate to this as having been a former school leader. In many cases, when I think back to the feedback that I was giving as a school principal with teachers, a lot of it came from classroom observations I was making. And I'm talking about informal classroom observations, not the formal type that are tied with evaluation, but informal ones where, you know, my goal was to get out in classrooms and be visible and for short periods of time. And I had each of my assistant principals doing that as well.

[08:54]

And so we would go out and get into classrooms, but we would be looking for things that really were, were less important to learning. or had little to do with learning, things like, was the agenda up on the board? And in our own individual perceptions, were kids engaged? We hadn't gone through the heavy lifting of saying, well, what is it that kids would be doing specifically if they were engaged? And how do we know they would be engaged? What's the evidence we'd be looking for?

[09:33]

So we'd go in and we'd observe and give teachers feedback. The feedback rarely dealt with school improvement work that we as a faculty were working on, where we would have been very clear about the goal of the faculty development and what the success criteria would be. In other words, what we would expect to see if teachers were delivering on that goal. So what we've understood now is that that feedback was useless. I might as well have not been doing it. What's powerful about feedback is that the feedback pertains to the success criteria that you have established with teachers ahead of actually going into classrooms.

[10:30]

If the feedback doesn't give you what the teacher is doing well, based on the success criteria, and what next steps the teacher might take, then it really isn't feedback. It's suggestion, it's tips, but it isn't feedback. And so Peter underscores this notion that that leaders have to provide teachers, just like teachers are providing kids, with feedback about what part of a success criteria they're meeting, where there are gaps, and what might be potential next steps for them to take in order to be fully implementing or working towards the success criteria and therefore the goal. So oftentimes, you know, we expect teachers to do things that in many cases leaders themselves

[11:25]

And we thought that was disingenuous. And so Peter's chapter is an important one.

[11:33] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. Similarly, Chapter 8 starts with the proposition, I explicitly inform teachers and students what successful impact looks like from the outset. So that, as you said, our feedback is not random suggestions. It's not tips. It's not opinions. It is evidence-based feedback in relation to students.

[11:53]

those criteria, those desired impacts that are established in advance. And my particular term for that is an instructional framework, or we might just say expectations, but having a shared language that puts us on the same page about our vocabulary, if we're talking about whatever it is that happened during the lesson. And I think often we focus so much on what happened during the lesson, we focus on the evidence itself, that we don't take a step back and think, well, what language do we use to even describe and discuss the practice that we're seeing? So I appreciate the attention you're drawing to that issue.

[12:30] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And more powerful, Justin, when teachers and leaders co-create those success criteria because then teachers aren't wondering, well, what is he going to be giving me or what is she going to be giving me as far as feedback about?

[12:51]

The surprise is removed and everybody has a collective understanding of what the practices would look like if they're being done at a highly proficient level.

[13:06] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit more about that dialogue and that give and take, because I think one of the characteristics of frustrating and not very helpful feedback that we've probably all experienced at some point in our career as educators is the feedback conversation that's not really a conversation, that's really a one-way delivery of mostly bad news. What can happen differently? What can change when leaders view feedback as a two-way street and as a conversation?

[13:36] SPEAKER_00:

Well, what John has found out in his research, he and Shirley Clark have done some most recent work in their newest book, Visible Learning Feedback. One of the things that John found is that while Feedback itself coming from the leader to the teacher or from the teacher to the student is important. It's really second in importance to the feedback that the teacher secures from the student or the leader from the teacher. In other words, feedback is powerful for the teacher in the classroom to know which students are getting it, which students aren't.

[14:31]

What are some common misunderstandings that need to be cleared up? In other words, when teachers see learning through the eyes of students, then the teacher is better able to know what next steps, what adjustments to make to enhance students' learning. And this is exactly the same phenomena at work. between teachers and leaders. Leaders have to be quiet and listen to teachers and their learning so that they understand what teachers, how teachers are approaching it and when there might be, let's say that you're working as a school to implement classroom discussion at a proficient or higher level and teachers would have and leaders would have already identified the success criteria that you could be listening for looking for that is evidence that classroom discussion is Meeting the expectations that they as a faculty have have identified

[15:46]

for leaders to listen to teachers talk about how they're implementing the actions they're going through to implement classroom discussion reveals tremendous, um, uh, I don't know, glimpses into their practice, um, so that leaders aren't just simply making suggestions or assumptions or, uh, or, uh, you know, uh, recommendations, they're really giving feedback as to where the teachers aligned with those practices and where they're not that have been established by the group as a whole. So listening to teachers talk about their learning is a critical aspect of that feedback.

[16:33] SPEAKER_01:

I couldn't agree more. I think there's a fabulous point that you made there that I want to paraphrase and run with a little bit. The idea that we need to get teachers talking about how they approach something. And I think often as instructional leaders, we want to get into teacher thinking and we want to know, why did you do that? What informed your decision? What was going through your mind when you did that?

[16:57]

And we don't mean that in a threatening way. We just honestly want to know what teachers are thinking. But sometimes I've found that when we ask people why they did something, often they tell us what we kind of have told them we want to hear. And often we'll get an answer like, well, it's in John Hattie's book. You know, it's in our rubric. I'm doing that because...

[17:18]

We've decided to do that as a school, and we don't get that same window into the actual thinking. But if we ask how, talk to me about how you made that decision. Take me through the process of, take me inside your thinking. That actually gets us at the why much more directly and much more effectively than if we were to ask, why did you do that more directly?

[17:42] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, absolutely. Checking people's actions against their why. really helps to make certain that you're not making some assumptions that are incorrect or invalid. And the worst thing that could happen is for principals to impose their own assumption on a teacher In order to get them to change a practice or make modifications to a practice and the teachers then You have one of two routes that they're going to go they're either going to try to Do what you you suggest but kind of half-heartedly or they'll just dismiss out of hand the Your comments and so the feedback in this case doesn't

[18:38]

Doesn't produce the desired results because it isn't having an impact on people's performance Yeah, one other Concepts that we try to underscore in the In the book is this notion that really that John has been playing with it so it's in its infancy, but the idea that that quality school leaders are to die for and And the acronym DI, D-I-I-E, stands for diagnosis, interventions, implementation, and evaluation. So the idea is that to be expert, for instance, in diagnosis requires an understanding of how students and teachers are performing from multiple evidence-based information interventions

[19:38]

such that if one does not work with the students or the teachers, the school leader can change to another. It also involves knowing the interventions that have a high probability of success.

[19:53]

And being able to switch from one to the other, so not using the blame language to explain why students or teachers aren't learning, but to actually go back to the evaluation piece, and that is to evaluate your impact. And then the other piece of I is implementation.

[20:22]

To be expert at implementation requires a commitment to such things as fidelity. In other words, the adherence to the intervention or the curriculum, quality delivery, which is the skill with which the leader or the teacher is delivering the intervention.

[20:44]

Intervention adaptation, in other words, changes are made to the intervention that are needed based on the localized setting. And then dosage, the number of intervention sessions, professional learning sessions needed to effectively and successfully implement the intervention. To be expert at evaluation requires knowing the skills of evaluating. That's what Janet talks about, having multiple methods, working collaboratively, debating with colleagues to agree on the magnitude of the effect needed for the intervention. The bottom line is if students are not learning, then it is because we as adults are not using the right teaching or leadership strategies. So it's getting...

[21:34]

Helping leaders understand that to die for strategy really is a, when you think about diagnosis, influence, implementation, evaluation, it's John's way of talking about a plan, do, study, act kind of improvement cycle that is happening not only within individuals, but within organizations. And we try to underscore that idea within the book.

[22:10] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is 10 Mind Frames for Leaders, The Visible Learning Approach to School Success. And Dr. Smith, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[22:23] SPEAKER_00:

They can go to my email, D, as in David, double R, L, smith48 at gmail.com. If they'd like to email me their questions, if they want additional resources, I'd be happy to respond to them. That's the best way to contact me.

[22:42] SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[22:46] SPEAKER_00:

Justin, thank you again. I appreciate so much on John's benefit as well as myself for the opportunity to talk about this book.

[22:56] Announcer:

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