The Assistant Principal Podcast

Episode X: Tracking Teacher Development

Why does it always feel like improving teacher quality is an uphill battle? One big reason is that our schools are not structured to facilitate consistent teacher growth. Focusing on helping teachers to grow requires us to focus on the structures that can support growth first. In this episode we look at on important structure, the teacher tracking document. The teacher tracking document helps us to develop and document a coherent and consistent approach to helping individual and groups of teachers grow.

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today, I will walk us through how to use a teacher tracking document as part of a systems approach to teacher development.

After listening to this podcast, you might want to head over to my website, frederickbuskey.com/appodcast, to watch the video. There are several key graphics that go along with today’s show that should help you. I will also include images in the show notes.

Back in episode one I talked about the six dimensions of organizations. If we think about a three-sided pyramid representing an organization, the pinnacle is the organizational purpose. The three points along the pyramid’s base are people, structures, and resources. In the perfect organization, which doesn’t exist, the people, structures, and resources are perfectly aligned with the organization’s purpose.

In the simplest terms, the work of leadership is improving alignment between the purpose, the people, the structures and the resources.

Structures include buildings, the arrangement of space within those buildings, but also the rules, policies, expectations, and practices that shape our actions. A block schedule is a structure that is fundamentally different than an 8-period day. They exist for different purposes and if we try and teach during a block the way we did when we had 8 periods, it doesn’t work. 

Our skills need to align with our structures, and both need to be aligned to our purpose. When we ask people to work towards a specific purpose, yet we have structures that aren’t aligned with that purpose, it creates a situation in which people feel like they are constantly swimming up stream. Teachers experience this misalignment often:

• Teachers are expected to plan rich and powerful lessons, yet they have 30-minutes a day to plan.
• Teachers are expected to use formative assessments to inform their focus, yet we have pacing guides and benchmark tests.
• Teachers are expected to become masters of pedagogy, yet they work under pressure and expectations that make risk-taking difficult and reflection almost impossible.

This misalignment makes it harder for teachers to excel at their core job and it increases pressure and frustration.

As assistant principals, you are experiencing a congruent set of circumstances.

The purpose of schools is to help young people develop agency over their lives and to become responsible democratic citizens. Or something like that.

The roles of the principal and assistant principal are integral structures. School administrators have tow primary functions that are core to the purpose of the school: 

1. Keep everyone safe
2. Create better outcomes for kids

However, we don’t teach kids and the #1 Influence on student achievement is the classroom teacher. So, the formula is simple:

Better teachers = better student learning.

Logically then, once we make sure that everyone is safe, our next priority is to focus on teacher development. If better teachers = better student learning then, outside of safety, the most important things we do are the things that help our teacher to continually grow.

The challenge is that there is all kinds of stuff that gets in the way.

Why does this happen? Because our structures are not aligned to our purpose.

What has happened in many schools, is that while the stated purpose of the assistant principal is to contribute to the quality of instruction in the building, the unstated purpose has become to deal with all the issues that come up in day-to-day operations. Our school structures have followed suit:

• We communicate via email, which demands our constant attention.
• We carry walkie talkies so we can always be reached.
• We accept that interrupting what we are working on is part of the job.
• We use a narrow set of observation practices that are more aligned to accountability than to teacher development.

The cumulative impact of these mis-aligned structures and purpose has a profound impact on how we lead:

• We mistake urgency for purpose in our day-to-day behaviors, so the important purposeful work of teacher development gets displaced by urgent tasks. There are tasks that are both urgent and important- especially those dealing with safety. However, there are many urgent tasks that are less-important or not important. For example, the parent newsletter, school social media posts, or the report to the school board. I can hear you saying “wait, these things are important!” Yes and no. None of these things will improve student learning as much as helping a teacher to get better.
• The problem is that all these things are urgent, so they feel important, even though – compared to safety and teacher growth, they are not.

• The tool that has helped me with this concept is the Eisenhower Matrix. The EM as I affectionately call it has four quadrants. The two upper quadrants are important, and the two lower quadrants are un-important, or less important. The two left quadrants are urgent, and the two right quadrants are not urgent.
• What tends to happen is that school leaders focus on the two left quadrants – the urgent work, instead of the two upper quadrants – the important work.
• Teacher development is quadrant 2 work. Quadrant 2 is important but not urgent.
• This focus on urgency ...