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Welcome to the Instructional Leadership Challenge! I’m Justin Baeder, author of Now We’re Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership, and in this program, it’s my goal to help you confidently get into classrooms every day, have feedback conversations that change teacher practice, and identify your best opportunities for school improvement.
More than 10,000 administrators in 50 countries around the world have participated in earlier versions of this Challenge, and I’m delighted to bring you my latest research-based and field-tested strategies for instructional leadership.
Over the past decade, as I’ve talked with thousands of leaders about getting into classrooms, I’ve found near-universal support for the idea that administrators should spend time where the core work of teaching and learning takes place: in the classroom.
But I’ve also discovered that there’s widespread confusion about what exactly administrators should be doing when they get into classrooms. Collect data on clipboards? Leave handwritten notes, or fill out forms in an electronic app?
And ultimately, what’s our role as leaders in improving teaching and learning? It’s this fundamental question that I believe many of the most common approaches to classroom visits get wrong.
What most administrators have told me is that they’re expected to do some form of data collection or rating and feedback and constructive criticism of what they’re seeing as they visit teachers. And often there’s not a lot of thought put into how all of this is supposed to actually result in improvement.
Now, I know that, like all administrators, you’re extremely busy, so the reality is, if you don’t see results from the effort you’re putting into classroom visits, you’re not going to make time for them on a consistent basis.
You’re a smart person, and you know how to prioritize. So that means if you aren’t spending time in classrooms, it’s not because you can’t. It’s not because you don’t have what it takes, or because you don’t think it matters. It’s because you’ve weighed the alternatives and decided that the typical approaches to classroom visits just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
So in the Instructional Leadership Challenge, I’m going to share with you a better model – a model that’s based on extensive research and feedback from principals around the world. This approach, which I call High-Performance Instructional Leadership, has helped countless leaders make a habit of visiting three classrooms a day, every day, for a total of around 500 visits a year. That may seem like a big number, but I’m here to tell you, it’s possible, and all I ask is that when you hit that milestone, and make your 500th classroom visit in a single school year, that you let me know, so I can celebrate with you.
Fair enough? Let’s get started. In the next section of our introduction, I’ll give you an overview of the Roadmap to High-Performance Instructional Leadership.
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